Featured Artist - Charles Peter Harbaugh

CHARLES PETER HARBAUGH
American painter
1878 - 1965

C. P. Harbaugh honed his passion for art at an early age and in his twenties 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 Union Railroad at East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Harbaugh, a Wreck Master for the railroad, used the experience to document with a brush (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 began painting 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 on a more patriotic theme with elaborate sketches of soldiers, ships, draped American flags and declarations such as "Support Your Uncle Sammy" and "Buy War Bonds".

A man of deep spiritual temperament, Harbaugh explained 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 mountains being his chosen subjects for most of his prolific career, which spanned the late 1890's to the early 1960's. The two oils titled "Fruit in Compote" and "Fruit in Silver Compote" are his only known existing still life paintings.

Once Charles Peter Harbaugh formally retired to his wooded estate at Hopewell, off the Chesapeake Bay, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, he continued to paint until two years before his death in 1965 at age 86, and was buried at Crisfield, Maryland. Although he is known to have produced well over one hundred works of art, he considered his most important creation to have been the nearly life size canvas titled "Jesus with Staff and Lambs", an oil painting that for a time graced the halls of the Governor's mansion.

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