Artist Biography & Facts

George Huey

George Raymond Huey by Celia Lash Briggs, published in Maine Antique Digest, in 2013.

My father collects old postcards of our coastal town, Friendship, Maine. As his collection has grown, it has become increasingly difficult to find any that he doesn’t already have. For his 89th birthday, I bought a card of a summer cottage—not an important scene but a new one to him. He opened it, thanked me, turned to its message side, and grinned. He handed it back and asked me to read it to him. It had been written by George Huey, and Dad had recognized the script immediately.

George Huey (1866*-1947), widely known in decoy circles for his carvings of mergansers, was a family friend to my grandparents. My dad, Robert Lash Jr., grew up with 12 siblings, and setting another place at the table for George was a common occurrence in the Lash house. Dad tells that it seemed as though Huey came by every day for something to eat, but if he saw an onion or smelled one cooking, he would leave, claiming that “anything that makes you cry ain’t worth eating.”

Huey, a confirmed bachelor, was a man of modest means and often skipped meals. One day he was found in the road passed out from hunger. Someone hurried to get a piece of cake to help revive him. After Huey finished the cake, he responded that it was good, “but I wish it had been Mattie’s; her frosting’s an inch thick.”

Huey was in his 30’s when my father was born, but he always had time for the passel of kids that clustered around him. He was known around town as being “simple” and mischievous, yet Dad tells that he was a “good fellah,” harmless, easygoing, and a great storyteller. Each Sunday found him in his best suit of clothes and attending church, where he was known to sing gustily.

One of his “harmless” childhood pranks happened when he was in grade school. The teacher had constructed a model of Mount Vesuvius with incense in the rim to create  convincing smoke for a demonstration. Huey and a couple of other boys sneaked back to school during the lunch recess and added a little gunpowder to the cone. When the teacher lit the incense that afternoon, the result was realistically impressive.

Upon request, Huey would sing for the neighborhood youth and would dance his own little jig where he rubbed his head, raised his right leg up and down, and made a funny sound in his throat. He referred to this as “quimming.” He often demonstrated his penmanship for children with a flourish; he would brush them all back to give himself room and proceed to write in an elegant and unique left-handed calligraphy that he called “quilling.”

His handwriting was just the tip of his artistic talents, and he carved more than seabirds. One of his small folk carvings was of a woman he named Martha Cronch, and he referred to her as his companion. Another carving was of a man that bore strong resemblance to George Huey. When an observer would note the similitude, he would deny that it was a self- portrait, claiming to have modeled it after Bernarr Macfadden, a famous body builder and health promoter of that era. Other works credited to Huey include a landscape relief and humorous animal carvings.

George’s father, John, was a fisherman, often absent from the home, and was lost at sea when George was 12. His mother, Sultana, did her best to raise her son alone. Artistic in her own right, she made convincing replicas of local homes from scraps of cardboard. When George was 19 years old, Sultana died. For a while after her death, he continued to live in the house that they had shared, but when it became more than he could afford to keep, he obtained a one-room home on the road to Bradford’s Point, where he lived simply.

In addition to carving decoys, Huey made do by digging clams and hiring himself out for odd jobs. One time he carved a horse (decorated humorously) in payment for a doctor’s bill. My Great-Uncle Nelson once commissioned Huey to re-cane a set of six chairs, and when he took delivery of the chairs, only two of the seat patterns matched. George had learned to cane in five patterns and surprised Nels by displaying all five techniques in the one set.

One can still find a few of his carvings in the homes around Friendship. Two brothers who lived down the road from Huey found a clever, if somewhat destructive, way to evenly divide an odd-numbered string of tollers that George had given them. (Down East a decoy used for bringing in birds to a blind is called a toller.) They sliced the extra decoy in half from bill to tail feathers, rendering two half-hulls, so to speak. Examples of Huey’s talent fetch good prices at auction. The distinctive, racy lines of his seabirds invite a second look, as does the life of this talented town character.
 
*The author later learned from his gravestone that the correct birth date was 1886