Brick-Dust Painter

Miss Willson is at least 150 years old. If she ever died, nobody knows when or where. If she ever had a first name, nobody knows what it was. About all that remains of Miss Willson is 20 primitive paintings that Manhattan gallery-goers snatched last week (at prices from $25 to $300) from the walls of the Harry Stone Gallery.

Faddists of the primitive were fascinated. For Miss Willson's paintings (of subjects like General Washington on Horse, The Prodigal Son Receiving His Patrimony, Riotous Living, Henry and His Pet Goat, Lovers) revealed a forthright, uninhibited graphic touch as clear and gay as sunlight. Typical was General Washington, decorative, naive, fantastic. General and horse were suspended in air, unpropped by Delaware ice cakes or the neoclassic columns of Mount Vernon. The plume on the General's tricorne hat looked like a Christmas tree. Though utterly alone, the Father of His Country drew rein and fired his pistol.

Even more fanciful was Miss Willson's orange, pink, green and yellow Pelican (she probably never saw one), tattooed with conspicuous crosshatchings, line-and-dot motifs, gaudy flowers.

Farmermaid. A spinster, Miss Willson painted in a Greene County, N.Y. farm cabin sometime between 1800 and 1825. The Willson watercolors are among the earliest primitives in the history of U.S. art. Miss Willson shared her farm life with a hardy settler named Miss Brundage. A kind of 19th-Century Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the two women built their own log cabin. Then, while Miss Willson sat down to paint, Miss Brundage tilled the soil. The Willson pictures were sold to farmers and other buyers as far north as Canada, as far south as Mobile. The artist's colors were as primitive as her style: handmade concoctions of berry juices, brick dust and vegetable dyes, occasionally supplemented with "store paint."

The only known source of information about Miss Willson is an anonymous 19th-Century letter writer. Wrote he: "These two maids left their home in the East with a romantic attachment for each other and which continued until the death of the 'farmer maid.' The artist was inconsolable, and after a brief time, removed to parts unknown."

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