A Love Story

If you look closely, you can tell it's not the Great Plains. That big tree is maybe a bit too perfect; prairie trees take a mauling by incessant big winds. They almost always look akimbo. This one seems a real Joyce Kilmer, too polite for the plains. The roof tops make clear the artist was out near a farm, but the outline of that house--see it, beneath the branches of the tree?--doesn't look much like a Dakota homestead at the turn of the 20th century. Seriously, Corinthian columns out front? You could find hilly terrain like this all along the Missouri River, but eastern South Dakota, the place where Ada B. Caldwell spent most of her life, doesn't offer much akin to the scene she caught in this sweet, but ordinary oil.

No matter. Think of it as a love story anyway, because it was, maybe not in a conventional sense of the phrase--I mean, I don't think there was any hanky-panky between teacher and student. He was rough hewn, to say the least, fresh off the farm, at the college only because the place was land-grant and therefore full of offerings for boys/men like himself who were looking to learn something about the farms they'd come from. In fact, it was called, in 1901, the South Dakota Agricultural College.

Only he wasn't really one of them. This particular student was at Brookings because of his mother, who loved him and probably wasn't all that much different from the woman that graces his most widely loved painting, The Prairie is My Garden.



The mom here is not going to grace the cover of some Hollywood tabloid any time soon, but she's perfectly beautiful in a strong and determined prairie way. Her kids love her, and she loves them, takes them along when she determines to grace her place up a bit with some cone flowers. The Prairie is My Garden, by Harvey Dunn, painting is quintessential Great Plains stuff; and she, or so the docents at the Art Museum claim, is "the Mona Lisa of South Dakota."

That determination on her face--she's not smiling--is a facet of a work ethic that's not only formidable but beyond belief. The frame buildings behind her suggest that the hardscrabble days of homesteading is now history. Her place has been "improved" to homestead standards; there's some livestock and a house that's already seen an addition or two. But things are not Edenic--they never are--because creating a life around the weather on the all-too viscous plains is never really behind you. Mom needs to be wary.

Is she Dunn's mother? Yes, in spirit certainly. It was his mother who was strong enough to get his I-shall-not-be-moved father to allow son Harvey to go the agriculture school. It was his mother who had sat with him as a boy, the two of them sketching together by lamp light. It was his mother who determined her boy--no longer a boy, but a man--needed to get away from the demands of farm work and see, even if only for a year, that other people lived unimaginably other lives. It was not his father, it was his mother who believed in flowers, who saw the prairie as a garden.

Then again, this Mona Lisa is also a woman named Ada B. Caldwell, the woman who did that oil at the top of the page. Prof. Caldwell was a teacher at the agricultural college that became South Dakota State University, the only teacher who paid much attention to the big strapping farm kid from a town called Manchester, a town a tornado finally blew away a couple decades ago. She saw what he could do on a canvas for what it was--talent. Sheer, raw talent.

She's the one who sent him off to the school she attended herself, the Chicago Art Institute. She 'd taken a job at Yankton College, staying only a year, then moved on to Brookings, where she stayed in the classroom for the rest of her life, where in just her second year of teaching, she taught drawing to a hulking farm boy named Harvey Dunn. 

Ada B. Caldwell + Harvey Dunn?--it is a love story. She made it clear to him that what he was feeling in his heart wasn't illusion or fantasy. She helped him understand that he'd likely never be happy just going back to the homestead. She allowed him to love what he already did, to follow what he loved in directions he'd never imagined.

She did nothing more or less than notice what was deeply embedded there in this big, broad-shouldered farm boy who could do wonders with a brush. She saw it for what it was, talent; and she let it grow, nurtured it, and sent it on its way to gardens just as wondrous as his Mona Lisa's.

It is a love story. It's a school room love story.