Carl Sprinchorn Admiration Society

In 1903 at age sixteen, Carl Sprinchorn arrived in New York and two days later, speaking no English, was enrolled into the art circle of New York's Robert Henri. Although he remained a New Yorker, Sprinchorn's greatest works were those he executed in the North Woods of Maine, documenting the lives of the men who worked and played in them, first in the early 20's and then in the 40's when that wilderness life was disappearing. A 28-year friend of Maine-born Marsden Hartley, they shared both the worldly intellectual experience and the much simpler life in deep connection with nature and the people who lived there.

"Sprinchorn, is one of my two closest men friends for a period of twenty five years, but it is not because of that, that I recommend him, but because he is an important man on his own, and is in the position now of having to make a comeback, which sometimes is very good, as we see in the case of some of the movie stars, as this generation knows little or nothing of them, and so with Sprinchorn, he will have an entirely new audience, and I think that is very good.

"He has been living up in the back woods of Maine for the last three years on a small stipend through the kindness of friends, but now that is practically over, and he is up against it again, but you never know, and I do hope his comeback will be very comforting, through he desperately needs a life from somewhere, and so wish he might be fortunate enough to achieve a Guggenheim fellowship.

"Sprinchorn is a fine artists, and utterly the real thing, and so I add here my unqualified testimony of genuine importance."

Marsden Hartley, 1942

It was Carl who made it possible in 1939 for Marsden to go to Katahdin Lake to initiate his series of great Mt. Katahdin paintings, by introducing him to the Chief Game Warden of the Northeast Section of Maine, Caleb Warren Scribner.

"Carl Sprinchorn came to this region in the summer of 1937 and had a studio in a wing of my barn. Through this contact I very soon realized that here was a painter who also was a man with a warm insight into the theme of man in nature. Once he began to get about this region gathering still life material from the forests and bogs, snow-shoeing up the deadwaters, meeting the lumbermen and guides; he yearned to interpret the spirit of the North Woods of Maine in solid comprehensive works.

"It appears to me that in some certain sense, as Winslow Homer stated his great theme of the Quebec Woods and the Adirondack country, so should some painter of dynamic quality turn his powers to this task. The story or saga of the pine and spruce as a vital theme of American Life begins in Maine.

"At once one senses that Carl Sprinchorn would not interpret any scene as an illustrator. There is that about him that is of the poet, and he seeks that which is deeply universal.

"Never have I met a painter with such rugged and steadfast ideals or principles of what a painter should be and what his life and work should mean to the world. Bowing down to the golden calf is not for him. "I know the conditions and circumstances under which he has labored. At times they have been simply tough...."

Caleb Scribner, Patten Maine - 1942