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progression, I think I understand why he placed such primary emphasis on the representational accuracy of his paintings. They had less to do with objective reality than with the conception which Pippin already had in mind. As he himself affirms:

"The pictures which I have already painted come to me in my mind and if to me it is a worthwhile picture I paint it. I do over the picture several times in my mind and when I am ready to paint it I have all the details I need."

On the one hand, Pippin was concerned with incidents of his childhood, historical events, and his experiences as an infantryman in World War I, but even so he developed these concerns out of the possibilities contingent with art, not out of just a description of the actual world. To the extent that he was able to realize this conception, Pippin must have felt he had achieved a favorable accuracy in his work.

When he first began to paint as a man in his forties, Pippin depicted what was then uppermost in his mind, his war experiences, the grim details of which he knew at first hand. He next did a remarkable series of works where the focus was almost entirely based on recollections of his childhood and they tell us of Pippin's early life as well as that of many Afro-American families, at the turn of the century.

Pippin's paintings of Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, and his still life paintings (that have a certain similarity to the fruit and flower chromo prints of the late 19th century) were done in approximately the same period of the early 1940s. Lincoln and John Brown were as much a part of the actuality of the Afro-American