ABSTRACT
Artists were often craftsmen before or at the same time that they were painters, working in fields such as shoemaking, carpentry, or saddlery that bore little generic relationship to each other except for similar processes of measuring, fitting, and combining. For the craftsman-artist the execution of a picture was, in many instances, less a question of creating than making. The craftsman who made a new pair of shoes would start with the standard form, and measure, cut, fit, and assemble the pattern to the desired proportions. The correspondences between the construction of objects by a craftsman and the composition of pictures by a self-taught primitive artist are provocative. Painting is a craft as well as an art and as such involves the handling of tools, technique, and manual dexterity in conjunction with the intellect. The craft tradition provided a viable foundation for American art because many of the same materials, tools, and procedures could be applied in different fields.
