Tuckered Out —The Shoeshine Boy
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
Born in Durham, England, in 1831, John George Brown moved to New York in 1853 after receiving early training as a glass cutter. He switched from painting portraits to genre scenes, was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1863 and went on to become vice president. He was able to paint full-time because to his father-in-law's financial support, and his mass-produced paintings of urban children made him one of the wealthiest American painters of his time. His breakthrough piece, "His First Cigar," from 1860 earned him the moniker "the Bootblack Raphael." "Tuckered Out — The Shoeshine Boy" is part of this iconic collection. A young bootblack is depicted in the painting sitting by himself on a stool, his shoeshine kit at his feet, his head drooping as he nods asleep in the middle of his shift, and his back leaning against a wall. A calm moment of physical exhaustion is transformed into the entire story of the image by the title's usage of historical slang for exhaustion. Brown painted against the backdrop of Gilded Age New York. Several immigrants and rural migrants flooded the city, and thousands of children- many of whom were orphaned, abandoned, or just impoverished worked the streets as bootblacks, newsboys, and vendors to support themselves or their families. In the painting, the child is clearly worn out, yet he doesn't appear to be genuinely poor, rather, he is neat, happy, and reasonably well-groomed. This is consistent with Brown's broader habit of painting bootblacks in tattered but tidy clothing so that his largely business-class patrons could overlook the real hardship such children faced. Brown was criticized in his own time for this idealism, and contemporary reformers and photographers, such as Lewis Hine, documented far grimmer conditions than Brown's cherubic street children suggest. Brown defended his strategy by portraying his empathy for these issues as personal and not merely business-related. This picture is independently linked by several institutions to Horatio Alger's 1868 novel Ragged Dick, in which a poor bootblack rises to respectability via perseverance and hard labour. While Alger's inspiration may be traced back to reformer Charles Loring Brace, this "rags-to-riches" story reflected Brown's own path from poverty to wealth. Brown painted bootblacks well into the 1890s, but when the "old bootblack" age he idealised vanished from New York's streets, his later compositions became monotonous.
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