Born to a family of mixed parentage in Ash Grove, Missouri, Joseph Yoakum began to produce a remarkable body of work around 1962, when he was seventy-two years old. 23 During the last ten years of his life, he created as many as two thousand drawings, mostly of landscapes. Yoakum claimed to have traveled internationally, a point that some find hard to believe, given his modest financial circumstances as a pensioner living on Chicago’s South Side. He insisted that, between 1901 and 1908, he traveled the world with various circuses and as a hobo-stowaway. Today we accept some of his claims as fact, while realizing that he may have visited many places in his fertile imagination, fed in part by a world atlas and Bible he kept close at hand.

Mt Mowbullan, one of two hundred drawings by Yoakum in the Art Institute’s collection, is a prime example of his fully developed, later work. Yoakum devised a personal language of marks and shapes, repeated throughout this composition to create a density of forests, undulating rock formations, and the illusion of spatial depth. He also used whatever was available as a drawing aid; here he appears to have traced a large coin to make the sun. His inscriptions, although often misspelled, invariably refer to real places, as if he were creating a postcard view. While it is not clear whether Yoakum visited Australia, there are rock formations near Brisbane that possess an almost animistic presence, not unlike that suggested in this image. Such animism is the most distinctive quality of Yoakum’s drawings and demonstrates his ability to suggest, in delicate lines and smoothly rubbed pastel colors, the awesomeness of nature and its power to inspire poetic thought and vision. (MP)