We should expect to encounter a fool on April 1st, and visitors to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition could have met a striking fool hanging in the Palace of Fine Arts.

Thomas Shields Clarke’s oil painting A Fool’s Fool (1887) was on display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. [Image from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.]

A Fool’s Fool (1887) was a work by artist Thomas Shields Clarke (1860–1920) on display in Gallery 7. The 39 ½-by-83-inch oil on canvas shared wall space with works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, George W. Maynard, George Inness, and Francis Millet. Clarke’s painting was on loan to the Exposition by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the work still resides in their permanent collection and currently is on view. A Pittsburgh native, Clarke graduated from Princeton University in 1882 before studying in Italy and Paris.

Clarke painted A Fool’s Fool in February of 1887 in Florence, Italy. A 1900 biography of the artist describes it as “an able work … representing a court jester teasing a brilliantly colored macaw. It attracted much attention at the exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York, and helped the artist materially to a membership in that body …” [Hoeber, 195]

First shown at the Paris Salon of 1887, the painting received honorable mention at the Berlin International Art Exhibit in 1891 and a medal of honor at the Madrid International Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1892, before coming to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts catalog from 1897 notes that A Fool’s Fool earned Shields a medal at the Columbian Exposition, and Clarke is included (incorrectly as “Thomas S. Clark”) in the list of award recipients in the Revised Catalogue, Department of Fine Arts.

At the 1893 World’s Fair, Clarke also exhibited a bronze drinking fountain titled The Cider Press, along with four other oil paintings: Night Market, Morocco; A Gondola Girl; Portrait of Madame d’E.; and a large triptych titled Morning, Noon and Night.

Thomas Shields Clarke. [Image from Brush and Pencil Aug. 1900, p. 193.]

SOURCES

Descriptive Catalogue of the Permanent Collections of Works of Art on Exhibition in the Galleries. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1897.

Hoeber, Arthur “Thomas Shields Clarke” Brush and Pencil Aug. 1900, p. 193-99.

Revised Catalogue, Department of Fine Arts. W. B. Conkey, 1893.