Fisherman, rum runner, and legendary folk artist
Charlie Tanner led a storied life
Two works by Nova Scotia’s Charlie Tanner come to auction on February 9th at Miller & Miller.
There are certain folk artists whose work is so personalized and distinctive that once you’ve seen it, you can recognize it from across a room. Charlie Tanner (1904-1982) is such an artist, and his life story is equally as memorable.
Charlie’s small carved and painted figures of living things all come from the same ‘place’. Their world is much like ours, but more fanciful, happy, and differently proportioned. His people (or ‘bulbous figures’ as they have come to be known) have the same smiling face and football player shoulders with arms that, in most cases, hang down at their sides. His animals are bizarre. It is hard to believe that the creations from this ‘place’ came from the hands and mind of a man who spent most of his life as a humble fisherman.
Charlie focused the bulk of his production on single, stand alone figures. Two exceptional multi-figure Charlie Tanner carvings will be sold in Miller & Miller’s Feb 9, 2025, Post-War Canadian Folk Art auction. Lot 35 shows a man with his faithful dog (estimate $2,000 to $2,500CA); lot 36 is a rare portrait of a family group showing a mother with her young daughter at her side, a toddler in her arms and accompanied by their pets (estimate $3,500 to $5,000CA). Each example, carved close to his death, represents some of Charlie’s best work.
But if Charlie Tanner had not met the bombastic Nova Scotia artist, antique dealer and folk art advocate Chris Huntington, the picture of his storied life might have been lost entirely. Huntington, on the heels of a successful antiques dealing career in Maine, packed his bags for Nova Scotia for a ‘quieter’ life. But he couldn’t sit still. In around 1975, Huntington was on a search for Nova Scotia’s top folk artists. Then he worked as their agent, making many of them famous. He discovered Collins Eisenhauer, Joe Norris, Albert Lohnes and many others. Then one day he met Charlie Tanner.
Charlie Tanner in his workshop. Source.
Two years after his death, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia honoured Charlie with an exhibition. Within the accompanying retrospective, an excellent essay written by Huntington was published. In it Huntington begins by explaining Tanner’s natural habitat:
“Stonehurst is a small fishing village that located itself about 200 years ago amidst the barren, rocky, coastal out-reaches about ten miles south of Lunenburg. Stonehurst is that much closer to the inshore fishing grounds, so despite its inhospitable geology, it attracts Germanic farmer-fishermen pushing out from the hills of Lunenburg. Today every other mailbox proclaims that a Tanner is its owner. On February 15, 1904, another Tanner was born there, Charles Enos”.
Then Huntington passes the microphone to Tanner;
“We were common people them days. Everyone was”. (In his heavy Lunenburg-Dutch accent that is still often heard in those parts today). He recalled, “Children were growed up before they had any age to them. They never had a chance to go to school. You had to start work when you were so young that you never really had much chance to develop any interests other than fishing”.
Huntington’s interview revealed that Charlie’s childhood was short-lived. One of 12 children, he started cod lining as part of the family livelihood when he was, “eight, ten maybe nine” as he tried to remember. By 13, like others his age, his father took him to Lunenburg and put him on a schooner for the Grand Banks. There he earned $30 a month as a deckhand until he was 15, when he was considered a grown man. Charlie then took his place at the bow of one of the dozen dories that was put out each dawn and afternoon to set trawl for codfish. He labored under the tutelage of an older, experienced fisherman as a part of a two-man team, for which Charlie earned a share of the schooner’s take. Like other fishermen, Charlie mended gear between the long voyages to the banks, built boats, repaired houses, and farmed. He chipped out decoys, and took them gunning (as he had ever since he was big enough to carry a gun). “That was none too big either”, Charlie reflected.
Pictured above are Charlie Tanner works previously sold at Miller & Miller Auctions.
After a dozen years or so of salt banking, Charlie contributed to the bootleg industry by schoonering cases of liquor to outside the 12-mile boundary off Block Island, New York. A crew would wait for power boats, evading the Feds and to steal through the darkness to relieve the cargo. “That was good fun,” Charlie admitted.
Life was never without a struggle, but Charlie never stopped. Between rum-running trips he bought a boat and took up life as an inshore fisherman out of Mersey Point near Liverpool, Nova Scotia. As Huntington points out, “Stonehurst hadn’t been big enough for all those Tanners, so Charlie settled into a 40-year period of either fishing alone or with one partner in his 40-foot Cape Islander, jigging cod, seining herring or mackerel, the latter of which was used to bait lobster traps during those seasons”. Charlie remembered, “Them times there was no money. When you went all day out and got 2,000 pounds of fish and made $25 or $30 to feed the two of you,”. The take was one cent per pound for cod and 40 cents for lobster.
Many anglers will shutter at the thought of “handlining” (fishing by holding a line in hand versus using a fishing net) but Charlie could do it in his sleep. He recalled handlining as much as 3,000 pounds of cod by himself in one day. As Huntington puts it, “It may have been a tough haul, but it was all that Charlie knew”. Huntington observed that Charlie’s hands, after a life of such toil were proof of the life he lived; “Work was like breathing [to him]; it was second nature”. Charlie confirmed, “Fishing. It’s a damn habit, that’s all it is,”. But in that interview, Charlie’s wife Helen had the last word: “He’s just an old salt; that’s all he is.”
Concluding, Huntington made it clear that Charlie was far more than an “old salt”. He harkened to that magical ‘place’ where all the figures carved by Charlie’s hands belonged. As Huntington put it, “...that is not all that Charlie was and this exhibition celebrates the other part of his life, for which he will ultimately be remembered; that is, the roughly eight years he spent making small carved and painted figures of living things.”
His world lives on.
Story by Phillip Ross
Phillip Ross became fascinated with Canadian folk art in 1982 when he started making bi-weekly trips to Quebec to purchase folk art and antiques. He brought them to markets and exhibitions, mostly in Ontario and Quebec. With his wife Jeanine, they also had a shop named Old Church Trading in their century-old church in Norfolk County, Ontario, and later, after moving to nearby Port Dover, they ran a shop named Shadfly Antiques. Since December 2011, he has written multiple blog entries chronicling his collecting experiences on his site shadflyguy.com.
Sale Information:
Post-War Canadian Folk Art
February 9, 2025 | 9am EST
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