Clementine Reuben was born in 1886 or early 1887 on Hidden Hill Plantation in Natchitoches Parish, the eldest of seven children of French-speaking Creoles of color. Her grandparents had been enslaved. She had less than a year of school and never learned to read or write. At fourteen or fifteen she went to work picking cotton at Melrose, and later she cooked, did laundry and looked after the owners' children. She had two children with Charles Dupre, married Emmanuel Hunter in 1924 and had five more.
The paint tubes
Smithsonian magazine reports that in 1939 the New Orleans painter Alberta Kinsey visited Melrose and left brushes and discarded tubes of paint. Hunter began on a window shade. Her own accounts, though, point to pictures made earlier. After Emmanuel died in 1944 she began to sell. A sign on her cabin read "Clementine Hunter, Artist. 25 cents to Look," and the plantation curator, François Mignon, had her paintings sold at the local drugstore for a dollar. In 1949 he hosted her first Cane River show in the upper room of the African House, and he kept her in paint and brushes. She painted on cardboard, bottles, buckets and an ironing board, and her subjects were what she had lived: picking cotton and pecans, wash day, church, baptisms, weddings, wakes. Curator Tuliza Fleming has noted that Hunter made women large and men small.
Nine panels
In June 1953 Look magazine gave her national notice. In 1955 she became the first Black artist given a solo show at the Delgado Museum in New Orleans, now the New Orleans Museum of Art, and Jim Crow laws kept her from attending it. That same year Mignon proposed a gallery of murals in the upper room of the African House, a Melrose building long said to be of Congolese design, though the Smithsonian says its design traces to the French. She painted from June 8 to July 21, working from her own sketches.
The first panel is a disc-shaped map of the Cane River country with its cotton, pecans and churches. The other eight, each about eight feet by three and a half, show a cotton harvest, a wedding, a river baptism, a wash day, a pecan harvest, a Saturday night at the honky-tonk and the grounds of Melrose. A minister she disliked appears as the smallest figure on the wall.
The long afterward
She painted daily into old age, and her output is put at more than 5,000 works. When President Jimmy Carter invited her to the White House she declined, because she did not like to travel outside Louisiana. Northwestern State University gave her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 1986. She died on January 1, 1988, at 101. In 2007 a New Orleans auction house sold her Cane River Baptism for $19,980, a record for her work at the time.
The murals came down in 2014 after renewed interest in her, the roof was rebuilt in 2015, and new lighting went in the next year. The African House and its murals are part of Melrose Plantation, south of Natchitoches.