Henry William Sharadin
Recently the society acquired two original works painted by Henry Sharadin. One depicts the Saucony Creek along Route 737 in Greenwich Township. Another shows an Italian scenescape. As you will see in the following article written by Lucy Kern and first published in “Along the Saucony, Vol.2, No.4, July 1979, Sharadin’s work often included local scenescapes as well as paintings from his stint in Italy. The society has several other pieces created by Sharadin on display at our museum in the 1892 Public School Building in Kutztown.
Henry William Sharadin was born in Kutztown, PA on December 22, 1872, the second of six children and the oldest son of John Daniel and Caroline Egiius (Butz) Sharadin. He attended the public schools of Kutztown and Keystone State Normal School from which he graduated in 1891. He studied for one year at the Metropolitan School of Art in New York City, then for two years at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art. He graduated from the latter with “high honors.”
In 1894 he opened his first art studio in Reading, PA at 619 Penn Street. There he gave instructions in drawing (oil, water color, china painting) and pastels. He also served as a sketch artist for the Reading Eagle during this time.
Three years later, on November 8, 1897, he was married to Louisa E. Neff, daughter of Alfred and Susanna Neff, also of Kutztown. They were wed in a simple ceremony in St. Paul’s Reformed Church at high noon and left by train from Lyons for a honeymoon in Philadelphi, Baltimore, Washington, and other cities. On their return they began housekeeping at 121 N. Sixth St in Reading where Sharadin continued giving private art lessons, making portraits, pictures, and china painting to order, and part-time sketching for the Eagle.
In 1902 Sharadin became Director of Art Department and Painting at Keystone State Normal School in Kutztown. He taught a course in drawing as well as some elective courses in water color, oil, and china painting. The course in drawing, during the early 1900s, consisted of daily lessons given for at least two weeks in one’s junior year. Chalk, pencil, ink, crayon, and charcoal were used to make perspective and geometric drawings which were to enable students to “draw correctly” and “well” the “common objects around the.” Special instructions were given in pyrography, or burnt wood work, water color, oil, and china painting. The charge for special lessons was: “One lesson per week, 50 cents; two lessons per week, 75 cents.”
In 1905 Sharadin was granted a leave of absence. He went to Rome where he became a student at the American Academy. Several paintings of this period were produced from sketches of an Italian family who regularly posed for him: “A Naples Fisher Boy” (or “An Italian Peasant Boy”); “An Italian Mother with Basket Cradle” (or “Girl with Basket”); “Head-study – Old Monk” and “Old Monk Seated.”
During this leave Sharadin also studied at the Atelier Julian in Paris. A second leave of absence in 1911 found Sharadin studying in London with Tudor-Hart.
Two years after this second leave of absence, he was commissioned by the Keystone State Normal School Class of 1913 to paint a large mural-size canvas to be hung across the stage of the chapel in Old Main. The mural “Education” was completed in 1914. IT embodied not only what education should or ought to be pictorially, but also literally, in the quotations that bordered the canvas. In the visual images on the canvas Sharadin incorporated bits of architecture and landscapes made from his European trips as well as actual people who were fellow faculty members and acquaintances. This mural, minus the border of quotations which were cut away in the 1930s with Sharadin’s permission, now hangs in the Georgian Dining Room at Kutztown University.
Sharadin left Keystone State Normal School in 1916 to teach at Allen High School in Allentown, PA, supposedly for better wages. He returned to the normal school in 1919 and assumed a position teaching drawing. In 1925, a year after the school was granted permission to institute a three-year course of study to prepare and certify art supervision, he again became director of the art department.
The following year Keystone State Normal School was raised to the rank of a State Teachers College. Under his direction the art department continued to grow professionally. In 1929 the college was allowed to grant the degree Bachelor of Science in Public School Art. By the time Sharadin retired on May 31, 1939, he had been instrumental in not only developing a department in art but also overseeing the growth oof a program in art that led to teacher certification. The two-week drawing course of 1902 had developed into an eight-semester program offering drawing and letter, modeling, design, media and techniques, industrial art, mechanical drawing, color, pottery, history and appreciation of art, interior design, composition, commercial art and reproduction, crafts, theater arts, art in the public schools, student teaching, and advance courses in crafts, oil and water color painting.
At the time of retirement, Sharadin had purchased and was living in a white stucco house across from Old Main. The house, containing a series of panels with paintings of peacocks made for the original owner, still stands.
Retirement Retirement afforded Sharadin with more time to pursue his artistic impulses. In November of 1940 he held a retrospective exhibition of over forty-five of his works at the American Legion Hall in Kutztown. Included in this exhibition, according to the catalog, were sketches of trees, characters, and ideas for the mural “Education;” charcoal drawings from living models of many of the characters represented in the mural; a portrait of Mrs. Sharadin and a portrait of the “artist – Shardin;” the “Italian Mother with Cradle;” My Neighbors Garden;” “Brooklyn Berks County;” “Copper Paw;” “A Bright Day in February;” “Harvest Time.” There were thirty-one oil paintings, seven water colors, three chalk drawings, two block prints, one paste, and one pen drawing.
During the 1940s Sharadin painted two well known church murals: “Come Unto Me” at Becker’s St. Peter’s Church between Molltown and Moselem in 1941 and “Gethsemane” at St. John’s (Gernant’s) Church in Leesport in 1944. Another mural attributed to Sharadin in St. Paul’s UCC in Kutztown is, unfortunately, not signed or dated.
In early 1950 Sharadin had a large studio constructed for him behind his home. There he spent countless hours sketching and painting. In his “Self-portrait” of 1956 he depicts himself in this studio background. Sharadin, however, had an outdoor studio as well – the Kutztown environs. He was a familiar sight sitting on his folding stool at work on paper or canvas. Often he would sketch outdoors then return to his indoor studio to transform the sketch into a painting. Many of his Impressionistic paintings are of the flowers, yards, college campus, or buildings around him, or of the view from his studio overlooking the fields that changed with the seasons. Since he did not drive, he would arrange to have a relative, friend, or neighbor take him to the more distant places to sketch and paint and ring him home again at a certain time. A painting entitled “Covered Bridge” from 1951 was one of several produced with just such an arrangement.
As Sharadin approached the age of ninety, his health began to fail. He sold his property to his niece Pauline S. Conrad and her husband who then moved in and cared for him. Most of his art works were sold at an auction at Pennypackers on October 17, 1964. As he grew worse and required special attention, arrangements were made to place him in the Hill Convalescent Center in Reading. He died there on April 23, 1966. Services were held in St. Paul’s UCC in Kutztown where he had been baptized, married, and served as an elder, deacon and Sunday School teacher. He was buried in Hope Cemetery in Kutztown beside his wife Louisa who preceded him in death by twenty years.
