Highboy c. 1939

Leonard Battee made this Highboy, we don’t know exactly when, using opaque watercolor over graphite on paper. There’s a quiet quality to this painting of a tall chest of drawers, a ‘highboy.’ I like to think of it as a portrait—Leonard Battee, a little like Fairfield Porter, finding something so dignified in domesticity. The grain of the wood is lovingly rendered, all those parallel lines, mimicking the texture and the material of the wood. The subtle shifts in tone give it form, dimension, and a warm glow, like the chest is lit from within. I wonder, was it a treasured object in his own home? Or was he commissioned to paint it? There’s something so earnest and careful in the work. You can see the hand of the artist, the slow, deliberate process of building up the image, line by line. It reminds us that paintings aren’t just images; they’re records of time, labor, and care.