Mississippi artist Theora Hamblett was born in 1895 on a farm just west of Paris, Mississippi, a village some fifteen miles south of Oxford. She attended college at Blue Mountain, and after graduation in 1924 taught at several of the small schools in Lafayette and Calhoun Counties before moving to Oxford in 1939 and opening a boarding house, where she began painting, and died in 1977.
The appeal of Hamblett’s work was recognized as early as 1954, when she sold a painting to a New York gallery owner, Betty Parsons. She was featured in a 1955 show of new acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art, and in the 1960s and 70s, her paintings were used for UNICEF Christmas cards and calendars. In 1972 she was part of another show at the Museum of Modern Art, this time focusing on naive art. Nelson Rockefeller and Sir Alec Guinness owned her works.
Hamblett taught at Banner School in Calhoun County from 1919 to 1921. This painting was completed in 1969 and is reproduced in Theora Hamblett Paintings (University Press of Mississippi, 1975) along with the following recollections. Hamblett did two other paintings of Banner school, which are in private collections.
My mother grew up near Banner, Mississippi, which was ten miles from our home. How we looked forward to visiting relatives there each year. When I began teaching, I longed to teach in Banner. When I did get to teach there, the school was only a “two teacher” school. I loved teaching there. When I was there in 1920, Banner School had been a good school with boarding students. Parents wanted their children to go to schools of this type. Near the beginning of the twentieth century, the small town schools began to grow smaller. Parents who could afford the price sent their children to larger boarding schools. Finally, the small boarding schools were forced to close.
The first settlers in this area built homes on the hills and cut roads up to their homesteads. Since then, a highway has been built near the foot of those hills. Our gentle horse, July, and that old top buggy went up and down those North Mississippi hills many times. When I was a young girl, we would get out of the buggy and walk up many of those rocky hills, sometimes to gather flowers, which would also give the horse a rest. When bedtime came for me, I snuggled up in bed and listened to Mama and Aunt Emma talk until ten or eleven. o clock. Many of their conversations about the community happenings are still clear in my memory.
