LEXINGTON, KY.- Harlan Hubbard (1900–1988), a Kentucky writer, environmentalist, and artist, spent many years trying to rediscover and revive the vanishing language of landscape in his watercolor paintings. Known for their sense of drifting movement and their depiction of the simple way of life fondly associated with Hubbard, they inexplicably remain his least studied artworks, despite presenting some of the best evidence of Hubbard’s place in the history of landscape painting.

The Watercolors of Harlan Hubbard not only argues for Hubbard’s place in the art historical canon but also highlights and analyzes the artist’s own voice. In this unique collection, more than two hundred watercolors are interspersed with anecdotes from those who knew Hubbard or drew inspiration from his work, offering a personal meditation on a deeply influential artist and serving as an invitation to those who have yet to discover him.

Bill Caddell has championed his hero, Harlan Hubbard, for more than fifty years. He has shared and exhibited Hubbard’s art nationwide. He edited and compiled The Woodcuts of Harlan Hubbard and founded the Anna and Harlan Hubbard School of Living at the Frankfort Community Public Library in Frankfort, Indiana. He is an avid gardener and crusader for the environment, aspiring to live in the spirit of Harlan’s self-sufficiency. He often quotes Hubbard’s credo, “What we need is at hand.”

Flo Caddell met the Hubbards as a student at Hanover College. She greatly admired Harlan’s art and elemental lifestyle, and she later received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to catalog more than four hundred of his paintings. She believes in Hubbard’s philosophy of making life a work of art.

“Through these lesser-known watercolors, and in entries from Hubbard’s journals, we recognize his steadfast loyalty to painting landscapes that are, in his words, ‘as real as the rain and stones.’ This great gift, newly arrived from Jessica Whitehead and Bill and Flo Caddell, is a grand collection from one of our most treasured artists.”—Ron Ellis, editor of Of Woods and Waters: A Kentucky Outdoors Reader

“Harlan Hubbard painted a world blazing with colors and charged with energy, as if the movement of his brush were powered by the soil, waters, and sky. Even human artifacts, from barns to riverboats, shimmer with vitality, as if they might burst into bloom, offering those of us who live here in the Ohio Valley a dynamic and cherishing vision of our home ground.”—Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination