Mexican Wood Merchant

Henry George Keller’s lithograph Mexican Wood Merchant, like John Williams Taylor’s Mexican Laborer, relates to the vogue for images featuring Mexican peasants at work. Both artists may have been inspired by Mexican Maze, a popular non-fiction book by Carleton Beals published in 1931 that claimed that “the Mexican peasant’s life is one texture. Work is pleasure; and pleasure is work. The day, for him, is woven into a unity, satisfying in its completeness.” By contrast, Beals described an American’s daily activities as “compartments of uncorrelated action.” In the late 1930s, viewers of Keller’s loosely rendered lithograph may have seen in Mexican Wood Merchant an appealing alternative approach to life.