Featured Artist - Charles Peter Harbaugh

An American Painter 1878-1965

C. P Harbaugh had a passion for art that started in his twenties, where he was an instructor at the Glassport, Pennsylvania schools. He also served as a policeman and firefighter in that city until he began his long career with the Union Railroad.

Harbaugh was a Wreck Master for the railroad, where he documented with a brush (and sometimes using parts of his beard) what he observed as he traveled across the United States and into Canada. In the early 1930’s he painted these scenes on miniature wood boards, sending them by mail, instead of letters to family and friends, thus creating his “Post Card Series”. During WWII and after, his series took an a more patriotic theme, with elaborate sketches of soldiers, ships, and draped American flags and declarations such as “Support Your Uncle Sammy” and “Buy War Bonds”

Harbaugh was a man with deep spiritual temperament, explaining to his grandchildren that he was physically unable to ignore any of the beauty God had placed around him. He was generally inclined to create woodsy scenes, with rivers and distant mountain being his chosen subjects for most of his prolific career, which spanned the late 1890’s to the early 1960’s. The two oils titles Fruit in Compote and Fruit in Silver Compote are his only known still lifes.

Once he formally retired to his wooded estate at Hopewell, Maryland, he continued to paint until two years before his death in 1965. Although he is known to have painted well over one hundred works of art, he considers his most important to have been the nearly life size canvas titles “Jesus, with staff and lambs”. This work has graced the halls of the Governor’s mansion and well as his home.

This collection is on loan to the gallery from the private collection of J H Wright.