The library murals' painter, settled: Crewes Warnacut (1900–1952)

1937–38 · the WPA remodel of the Carnegie Library

The name, settled: The banked Arts file could carry the WPA library murals' painter only in the corrupt spellings a damaged digitization left behind — "Warnacut," "Wamacut." The name settles in the National Register nomination for the Mishawaka Carnegie Library itself, whose clean text reads: "Remodeling included the addition of two murals by Crewes Warnacut (no longer in place)." The full name is Crewes Virgil Warnacut, and the painter behind the corrupt spellings has a whole career behind the two lost walls.

The remodeling he painted for: In 1937–38 the Carnegie Library was remodeled with $20,000 of WPA labor to designs by the South Bend architect Ernest W. Young, and the remodeled building was shown at an open house on 7–8 May 1938. Warnacut's two murals were part of that federal work. They did not survive the building's later life — the nomination's parenthesis, "(no longer in place)," is the whole of their fate in the record — and the Mishawaka work of a painter of two hundred portraits hangs on two walls that no longer exist.

The painter: Crewes Warnacut was born in 1900 on a farm near Urbana, Illinois, and his family moved the same year to Inwood, Indiana — a Marshall County farm town south of Plymouth — where he grew up, went to elementary school, and graduated from Lincoln High School in Plymouth in 1919. A scholarship took him to the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis (1919–1925), where he studied under William Forsyth, the senior figure of the Hoosier Group generation; a year in New York followed (1925–26) at the Academy and School of Design, under Charles Hawthorne and Charles Curran, with anatomy and education courses at Purdue besides. From 1927 to 1930 he kept a Chicago studio and painted portraits on commission — well over two hundred of them, at $500 to $1,500 a portrait, for wealthy Chicago sitters — and exhibited religious work in Chicago (the Renaissance Society's exhibition of religious art by Chicago artists carries his Altarpiece). The Depression closed the studio. He came home to Inwood, built a studio, and, in the biography his son Wendell provided, "worked for the WPA teaching art and painting murals in public buildings for them until 1939" — the Mishawaka library walls of 1937–38 are that sentence's local instance. The rest of the life runs at Indiana size: a silk-screen shop at Inwood from 1939 (the Santa Fe Railroad and Chris-Craft among its accounts) closed in 1941 under paint rationing; billboard work for the General Outdoor Sign Company in Chicago, the Dad's Root Beer sign among it; a 113-acre farm near Inwood bought in 1946; portrait commissions resumed in 1949; and a sudden death in July 1952, aged fifty-two, from the heart damage of a rheumatic fever contracted in his New York years. His papers, photographs and clippings are held by the Archives of American Art in Washington. His honors stand in the family biography: Who's Who in Art (1934), portrait prizes at the Indiana State Fair in 1925 and 1950.

And the canon question, answered at true size: Warnacut is not a hidden canon painter of Mishawaka, and this entry does not make him one. He was a Forsyth-trained Indiana portraitist of regional standing whose reputation rested on commissioned likenesses, and his Mishawaka tie is a WPA job, not a residence or a school. The city's own canon painter — a painter of the first local rank, formed here and painting this ground — does not stand in the record reached; the banked file's painters are muralists and sign-writers at record size, and the strongest brush the city ever hired came on a federal paycheck and went home to Inwood. The settled name and the full profile stand; the canon seat stays empty, printed empty.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places nomination, Mishawaka Carnegie Library (National Park Service, npgallery.nps.gov) — "two murals by Crewes Warnacut (no longer in place)"; the 1937–38 WPA remodel, $20,000 of WPA labor, architect Ernest W. Young of South Bend, open house 7–8 May 1938.
2. Fine Estate Art, artist biography of Crewes Warnacut, biography provided by his son Wendell Warnacut — birth near Urbana, Illinois, 1900; Inwood childhood; Lincoln High School, Plymouth, 1919; John Herron Art Institute 1919–1925 under William Forsyth; New York 1925–26; the Chicago portrait studio 1927–1930 and its two hundred commissions; WPA art teaching and public-building murals to 1939; the Inwood silk-screen shop 1939–1941; General Outdoor Sign Company; the 1946 farm; death July 1952; papers at the Archives of American Art; Who's Who in Art 1934; Indiana State Fair portrait prizes 1925 and 1950.
3. Renaissance Society, Religious Art by Artists of Chicago and Environs, exhibition listing — "Crewes Warnacut, Altarpiece, Oil."