From the collection of:
The Owensboro Museum of Fine Art || VAM Home

The mythical unicorn was an oft-repeated subject for Edgar Tolson, one of Kentucky’s most celebrated folk artists. The inspiration for this carving was a postcard from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art that pictured a medieval tapestry featuring the image of a unicorn.

About the Artist

Woodcarver Edgar Tolson was born into a large family in Lee City in eastern Kentucky, in 1904. He began whittling at the age of 9 or 10, starting with a table setting complete with coffeepots and other accessories. He spent the majority of his adult life in Campton, working as a farmer, cobbler, chair maker, blacksmith, and lay preacher.

Many of Tolson’s early adult carvings were decorated functional items such as hammer handles, fireplace posts, and embellishments to the stone steps of his house. Animals were frequent subjects, but he also rendered standing men and women attired in the suits and dresses of the time. Wood was his preferred medium, although he did occasionally carve stone. Tolson’s tableaux of Adam and Eve and the various events of their story were among the most popular with his collectors. (He reputedly once said, “God made the first Adam and Eve and I made the second.”) He died on September 7, 1984 in Manchester.

Tolson’s work is represented in the collections of the Kentucky Folk Art Center in Morehead; the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia; the Museum fir Volkskunde in Basel, Switzerland; the Museum of American Folk Art in New York; the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. Fred Rogers, of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame, devoted a segment of his 1980s television series, Old Friends, New Friends, to Tolson.

Classroom Ideas

Discussion: Vocabulary terms relating to this work include folk art, carving, and three-dimensional. View the tapestry Unicorn in Captivity at the Metropolitan Museum web site and compare the two works. Read and discuss the interview with author Julia Ardery about the exploitation of folk artists.

Activities: Write a story about the unicorn shown in this work. Why is it in captivity, and how did it come to be captured? Research the myths and symbolism connected to unicorns and create your own unicorn work of art.

Links

An image of Unicorn in Captivity, the tapestry that inspired Tolson’s carving, is available on the Metropolitan Museum of Art web site.
[www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/director/37.80.6.R.asp]

Read an interview with Julia S. Ardery, author of the book The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-Century Folk Art, at iBiblio.
[www.ibiblio.org/uncpress/newsbytes/march98/interview.html]