Eric Sloane, Americana Artist, Dies

Eric Sloane, an artist and author whose lifeworks celebrated America’s past, died Wednesday while walking on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. He was 80 and apparently suffered a heart attack.

Sloane was in New York City in connection with a showing of his paintings at the Hammer Galleries. His wife, Mimi, said he had spent the past three months completing 60 paintings for the show, scheduled in celebration of his 80th birthday.

A painter of signs, bridges, murals and airplanes and a collector of antique farm tools, Sloane searched the nation’s pre-industrial heritage for his subjects, once commenting that “the good things of the past were not so often articles as they were the manner in which people lived or the things that people thought.”

Son of Meat Broker

Sloane was the son of a wholesale meat broker in Forest Hills, N.Y., where a neighbor, Frederic Goudy, was a famous type designer and tutored him in lettering. A youthful pilgrimage took him to the Pennsylvania Dutch country where he painted signs in old German script to pay his way.

Later he festooned Coney Island’s Luna Park Ballroom with his creations while lettering the fuselages of planes at Floyd Bennett Field in Jamaica Bay, now a naval air station.

Such aviation pioneers as Roscoe Turner, Bill Odom and Wiley Post considered the Sloane touch a “lucky charm” for their historic trans-Atlantic flights. They took him aloft and he began to paint pictures of the sky. His first “cloudscape” was bought by Amelia Earhart.

Posters, Caricatures

Sloane painted posters for department stores and caricatures for entertainment personalities (including the thin-moustached Paul Whiteman that became the orchestra leader’s signature.)

At age 75 he was commissioned to do a six-story mural of a skyscape for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

But the thrust of his work involved the covered bridges and farm implements from a bygone era. His interests, which once involved simple sign painting, were altered one day when, he said, “I stood in the loneliness of an abandoned New England barn and felt the presence of the great American past.”

His copiously illustrated books dwelt variously on covered bridges set amid verdure fields or highly stylized illustrations of old carpentry in “A Reverence for Wood.”

‘Air Artist’

Sloane’s autobiographical “I Remember America” was set off with paintings and sketches from every stage of his career--from his painted signs to his fascinating period as an “air artist.”

He was born Everard Jean Hinrichs in New York and later studied meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and art at the Yale School of Fine Arts. He also studied under painter John Sloan and changed his name in honor of that mentor.

(He added the final “e” on a whim and chose “Eric” as a prototypal American name.)

Sloane was known for his dry-brush technique, wiping his brushes clean between strokes and then applying paint with a scrubbing motion.

Most Recent Work

By 1969 his collection of old farm tools had outgrown his homes in Warren, Conn., and Santa Fe, N.M., and he donated the lathes, chisels and scythes to the Sloane-Stanley Museum in Kent, Conn. Eventually he built a log cabin next to the museum using many of the tools he had collected.

The most recent of his 36 books, “80: An American Souvenir,” is to be released in a few days. Like the others it is a collection of his recollections and paintings but he denied that he was only interested in nostalgia.

“I think in some ways I’m a failure because people think I’m a painter of barns and a writer of nostalgia,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying. “It’s not what I’ve been trying to do. I hate nostalgia.”