Born in Virginia in 1890, Palmer Hayden moved to Washington, D.C. as a teen, working odd jobs and eventually joining the Ringling Bros. Circus.  He made his first foray into art by drawing portraits of the performers for promotional purposes. After an eight-year stint in the Army, he moved to New York City where he studied with Victor Perard, an instructor at the Cooper Union School of Art. During the summers of 1926 and 1927, he traveled to Maine to study at the Commonwealth Art Colony. The many landscapes and marine studies he painted here were shown in his first exhibition at the Civic Club in New York, and in 1926, he won the first Harmon Foundation gold medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Visual Arts for a painting of Boothbay Harbor titled The Schooners. The prize money was used towards a trip to France, where he resided for the next five years. Hayden exhibited at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1927 and was included in the Salon des Tuileries in 1930, as well as the American Legion Exhibition in 1931. He continued to paint seascapes during his stay, but also began to develop his figurative painting and signature style,.

Back in New York, his work evolved into an unpretentious representation of the Black American scene in which he used a “consciously naïve” style to represent African-American folklore and contemporary scenes of Harlem. Hayden continued to live and work in New York until his death in 1973.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral

St. Patrick’s Cathedral sits right at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 51st Street, in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. It holds the title of the largest Gothic Revival Catholic cathedral in North America. The architect behind its striking design was James Renwick, Jr., who began work on the project in 1858. Construction wrapped up in 1878, though the iconic spires weren’t finished until a decade later. For a brief moment in 1888, those spires actually made it the tallest building in New York City. Interestingly, it was Renwick himself who pushed for the cathedral to be built from white marble, giving it the luminous presence it’s known for today.

Alan M. Gordon, PhD, wrote in his essay Echoes of Our Past: The Narrative Artistry of Palmer C. Hayden (the catalog accompanied the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles, California, 1988):

Gordon believes most of Hayden’s work falls into a handful of categories, one being “The church and old time religion.”  The artist acknowledges the central role of the church and religion in Black life.  Similarly to in his painting, Trinity Church (pictured in the Echoes of Our Past: The Narrative Artistry of Palmer C. Hayden catalog, p. 37), St Patrick’s Cathedral in this work stands tall, above everything else, as a beacon and asylum. 

Hayden situates the composition so that the American flag is nearly dead center, questioning the relationship of not only the church and state, but also the relationship of people—especially Black people—with these institutions.  He challenges this country to instill the same level of trust from the people as they feel in the church.