Eldridge Bagley

by Susan Tyler Hitchcock

A third-generation tobacco farmer, Eldridge Bagley began painting in the late 1970s, at about the same time that the old country ways of Southside Virginia were beginning to fade. In his art, he recaptures those days of hand-strung tobacco, of log barns where curing fires burned day and night, of children chasing fireflies in the twilight. Bagley's art is not sentimental. It is true-to-life. It includes the grit and the hardships as well as the pleasures of farm family life. This book collects more than forty of his finest, representing eighteen years of work, with comments by the artist about each one.