A life in watercolors
MORE THAN A CENTURY after his passing, prints of Frankfort artist Paul Sawyier’s splendid water colors, primarily of central Kentucky landscapes, remain popular statewide and beyond. An original Sawyier oil sold in recent years for $100,000, and an original water color brought $45,000 at auction in November.
As appreciation for his impressionist works has grown with time, so has public interest in Sawyier’s unusual personal life: his 23-year romance with Mary “Mayme” Bull of Frankfort, who was the subject of several of his paintings; his solitary years on a small Kentucky River houseboat; and stories about his drinking.
William Donald Coffey, who left a federal government position in Washington, D.C., and returned to his native Kentucky to join state government during the early 1970s, remembers that nearly every story he heard about Sawyier seemed to include that he stayed drunk and would sell his paintings for $2, just to get by.
Given the quality and scope of Sawyier’s work, some stories didn’t ring true with Coffey, a consumer-member of Shelby Energy. So, after retirement from state government, with early assistance from Frankfort historian Russ Hatter, Coffey spent many months poring over diaries, letters, biographies, details of Sawyier’s everyday life and work beyond his art, and some new information about the family. He would later write a stage play based on his research, and a 2010 biography: Paul Sawyier, Kentucky Artist.
“I’m no art connoisseur,” says Coffey. “I was interested in the man’s human story. I was aware that he lived his life without ever becoming rich, but I didn’t know the half of it. He struggled to eat!”
Coffey’s research depicted Sawyier as courteous and well-liked, standing no more than 5 feet, 8 inches and weighing about 160 pounds; fond of boats and river life, and of Boone’s Knoll whiskey—often with country ham and soda biscuits. Although Coffey believes claims of the artist’s alcoholism while living in Frankfort have been exaggerated, he acknowledges Sawyier’s acute alcohol addiction during his last years in New York’s Catskills, where he died in 1917 at age 52. His simple grave marker in the Frankfort Cemetery, a short distance from Daniel Boone’s grave, overlooks his beloved Kentucky River.
Of Sawyier’s storied romance with Mayme Bull, who broke their 18-month engagement in June of 1910, Coffey says there’s no doubt that Sawyier’s “first love, ever and always, was his art.” The engagement dissolved after Mayme discovered Sawyier’s relationship with a young woman he’d met near High Bridge while living on the river.
Mayme died unmarried at age 49 in 1914, leaving numerous works of her poetry, a few of which Coffey included in his biography of Sawyier. Lines from one poem read:
“And I feel as I sit here thinking/ That the hand of a dead old June/ Has reached out hold of my heart’s loose strings/ And is drawing them up in tune/ I am tired tonight, and I miss you/ And long for you love, through tears…”
