In either 1891 or 1892 Farny painted a picture showing two men navigating a river in canoes, with a man in a primitive shelter watching from the shore. Of note is the name on the front canoe, “Lily”. This could well be a nod to his first wife, Lily, or Lillian (Bain) Farny, to whom he would have been married about four years by the time this painting was completed.
Here’s the painting:
I’m calling this water color painting May and June — Two Canoes. It was commissioned by an Eastern Publishing House, presumably the Werner Printing and Lithographing Company out of Akron, Ohio. According to the October 16, 1893, issue of The Cincinnati Tribune, Werner had “contracted with an art publishing firm for a large order of water-color paintings which they intended to bind in a book from, twelve of them, constituting a set. The order was filled, and just as the beautiful paintings were about to be delivered, the [art] publishing house announced that owing to the depressed financial situation they would be obliged to discontinue business and could not take the pictures“
According to the Tribune, the pictures sat at a warehouse until they came to the attention of the Tribune. Negotiations were opened and the Tribune managed to strike a deal with the publisher for the benefit of its readers, to whom the Tribune planned a give-away of the pictures. Ads for the give-appeared daily for a short time in late 1893:
Included in the ads were the artists who painted for the book: H.F. Farny, T. de Thulstrup, Frank Russell Green, W. L. Lathrop, I. T. Wiles, Henry B. Snell, V. Benhajo, and Mat Daly.
At some juncture, while The Tribune took a share of the prints, there were still enough left that Werner began selling the prints as books (or these had already been completed before the deal was cancelled). Here are photos of all the pages from one such book, though the photos aren’t great as they came from ebay.
