Percy Hough was born in Philadelphia in 1861. His father William Hough (1832-1884) emigrated from England. Hough’s mother Elizabeth Margaret Marsh (1839-1923), called Eliza, was born in New York City where her father James Marsh (1810-1880) was a brewer. Eliza’s mother Margaret Stewart (1803-1883), Percy’s maternal grandmother, was also born in New York.
After their marriage in 1858, William and Eliza moved to Philadelphia where Percy and his brother Sidney (b.1863) were born. The family next moved to New York City where Percy’s brothers Lester (b. 1865 or ‘66 ) and William Stewart (b. 1867) were born.
By 1870 the family had moved to Rockaway, New Jersey where William owned and operated a bakery. William and Eliza joined the Presbyterian Church as did the boys when they came of age. The family ties with the Stewart and Marsh families in NYC, plus his years growing up in Rockaway, were pivotal to Hough’s marriage and family life, to the location of the commercial art business that supported him, and to his art.
Rockaway, NJ was an iron mining and foundry town in northern Morris County long before Percy and his family came to live there. Iron for bullets and cannonballs for Washington’s Army had been mined in the near-by Mt. Hope mine and forged in Rockaway foundries. The ironmaster’s home from that era, the Ford-Faesch House, is now a historic site and can still be visited. Businesses in Rockaway, such as the Union Foundry and Jackson Forge, kept people employed. Yet it was an attractive north Jersey town. The scenic Rockaway River ran through it as did the heavily used yet just as scenic Morris Canal.
Begun in the 1820s, the Morris Canal served as a major commercial and transportation artery across northern New Jersey designed principally to carry coal from the Pennsylvania coal mines to Jersey City. The Canal was an infrastructure marvel, overcoming a vertical change of over 1,600 feet across the New Jersey hills. It did so via a unique system of inclined planes and locks that carried the canal boats from one level to the next. The first of the inclined planes, or small boat railways, was Plane 6 East, constructed in Rockaway across from the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches on Church St., just down the road from where Percy Hough lived his married life on Halsey Ave.
By the early 1880s Percy Hough had finished his schooling and either in New Jersey or New York had learned sign painting. He moved to New York City where he still had family on his mother’s side and established a sign painting business there. Hough may have worked in some capacity with the artist Arthur Quartley, who had himself begun as an apprentice sign painter before opening his own design and art studio in New York. Hough’s painting of Quartley’s early workshop suggests that there was a connection between them.
In 1884 The Iron Era, which covered Rockaway local news, reported that Percy Hough, “home for recreation from New York City,” was repainting the sign over his father’s bakery. The Iron Era goes on to explain that “Percy is now an experienced person at that work, as he has been in New York for several years following that branch of business.” His youngest brother Willie painted the inside of the store. The Iron Era notes that while Willie’s work is very good, “it could be beaten by older and more experienced persons.”
It was in 1884 that the world of the Hough family changed. Percy’s younger brother Lester accepted a position in a store in New York, removing him from the Rockaway household. In August, just a month after Percy repainted the bakery sign, his father William died. At the end of the month, Willie left to attend school at a seminary in Kingston, PA, after which he will train as a dentist. Following her husband’s early death, Eliza moved back to New York, where the Marsh family still lived and Percy had his sign painting business.
The break with Rockaway was complete in 1892 when Eliza transferred her membership in the Rockaway Presbyterian Church to the newly organized West End Presbyterian Church on 105th St. and 10th Ave. The new church served the developing Upper West Side where Eliza lived. Percy would locate his sign painting business near-by. By then he is listed in the NYC Business Directory as a “painter” and his brother William as a dentist. Eliza, Percy and William were once again living together as a family at 112 W. 104th St., a family unit that was about to change.
In 1893 Hough married. Although his business activity remained in New York for the next few decades, his art and family life once again centered in Rockaway, and Morris County became the setting for most of his paintings.
In 1893 Percy Hough married Susan (Sue) Mott (1866-1941) at the home of her parents Alexander (1836-1919) and Francis Morrison (1841-1922) Mott. The Mott family lived on Halsey Ave. in Rockaway.
Alexander was a machinist and a member of the Mott family that developed the mills along the Mill Brook in Randolph, today the Mott Hollow Historic District. His grandfather had owned and operated the grist mill, the one remaining mill of the former industrial village along the Mill Brook. Alexander was a Civil War veteran with close ties to the old Randolph Friends Meeting in whose cemetery he is buried.
Sue’s mother Francis was a granddaughter of David Tuttle, who established a cooperage business in Mott Hollow making the barrels for the grist, carding, fulling, tanning and other industries along the brook. That house, “The Cooperage”, like the grist mill, is also a Randolph historic site. The wedding of the daughter of these two prominent families was a highlight of the social season in Rockaway and was covered in detail in The Iron Era.
Sue Mott had an older brother Joseph (Joe) (1869-1940) and a younger brother Benjamin (Ben) (1872-1952). Like the Hough children, Sue and her brothers went to the local school and were members of the Presbyterian Church just down the street. They could probably see the Morris Canal from the front porch of their Halsey Ave. house and certainly could do so as they walked to church or into town.
For the first year, Percy and Sue made their home with Eliza and son William, now a dentist, on 104th St. in New York. This arrangement did not last long. For whatever reason, by 1895 we find Sue living in Rockaway with Alexander and Francis. Percy still had his sign painting business in New York. He may already have been traveling from Rockaway to New York during the week, returning to Rockaway on weekends, as we know he will do in the years to come. In the 1900 census we find Percy and Sue living with the Motts in Rockaway, and Percy working as a sign painter in New York.
Over the next two decades Percy endeavored to be a serious artist. Although he was undoubtedly doing commercial work in New York, the 1910 federal census and 1915 New Jersey census find him living with Sue and his in-laws on Halsey Ave. and pursuing a career as an “artist” and painting “pictures” as his trade or industry. Hough always had the hope of making a living through the sale of his art. It would appear he is trying to do so while supporting himself and Sue by doing commercial work in New York and locally in the Rockaway-Dover area.
In 1917 Hough entered two paintings in the First Annual Exhibition of The Society of Independent Artists, the largest art exhibition held in New York City until after WWI. The painting “Arthur Quartley’s First Workshop” was singled out for inclusion in the catalogue of the Exhibition. Thus, we know how different this painting was from the landscapes Hough customarily painted. The second painting, of which we have no image, was titled “Landscape.” Neither painting survives, so far as we know.
In later years Joe Mott’s family talked of their Uncle Percy’s work as an art restorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, although nothing is known of that work. One painting, not pictured in this gallery, was said to hang in the Metropolitan, a seascape. We are seeking information on this work and hope to include it in the future.
In his daily diary for 1917, Alexander Mott notes each time Percy leaves for New York Sunday night or Monday morning and returns, usually on Friday. Percy is clearly still living in New York during the week and returning home to Rockaway on the weekend, as he had done regularly since the 1890s. This would be Hough’s pattern until around 1920 when he ended his sign painting business in New York and transferred his commercial work full time to Morris County, where he had long been doing most of his artistic painting.
Though he gave up his New York office and his weekly commute when he reached 60, Hough continued to work as a sign painter during the 1920s and 1930s. He first opened an office on Dewey St. in Dover, just a few miles from his Rockaway home, with his wife Sue working as his office manager. In a 1923 business directory Hough is listed as a painter of signs on automobiles and carriages. In 1927 he is operating the same business on Morris St. in Morristown.
By 1930 Hough lists his business as Artcraft Signs Co., located at 159 South St., Morristown. His artistic ability is apparent in the commercial work he advertised: “Signs, Banners, Pictorial Work and Theatrical Stage Scenery, Expert Gold Lettering on Glass, Brass and Bronze Tablets. Tel: MO4-3567.”
One well-known and long-remembered example of Hough’s work in Morristown was a wall in a butcher shop on Morris St. that he transformed into a mural, a rural scene with barnyard animals. When asked about the mural in the 1990s, the current butcher reported that it had been painted over a number of years before because it had become badly worn from customers standing against it and rubbing off the paint.
Following the death of his father-in-law Alexander Mott in 1919 and his mother-in-law Francis in 1923, Hough was listed in the census as head of household at the Halsey Ave. address. Sue’s younger brother Ben and his wife Ada Bird (1874-1959) Mott lived there as well. Neither couple had children. Ben had a good position at the Customs House in New York. He traveled to the City on Monday and came home Friday evening, as Percy did for many years. They often went to and from the city together on the train from Dover. When Sue died in 1941, Hough left the Rockaway house, residing first in Dover and then in Morristown until his death in 1951.
In 1899 Sue’s older brother Joe married Anna Butterworth (1875-1954) of Kenvil. Joe became a partner in the Kenvil Lumber Co. located on Rt. #6 (now Rt. #46), the main road through the village of Kenvil. The Canal brought coal, lumber and building supplies to the lumber yard until the Canal ceased operation in 1924, overtaken by the railroad and better roads. Until its later years, the Morris Canal and its barge and boat traffic were an everyday presence in the lives of Joe, Anna and their children Ralph (1900-1989), Evelyn (1904-1967) and Robert (Bob), (1912-2009) who lived in the lumber yard house near the Canal.
The Mott-Hough family in Rockaway were close to Joe, Anna and their family in Kenvil. The trolley ran from Rockaway to Dover and from Dover to Kenvil, an easy and convenient ride often taken on Sunday afternoons to visit and for Percy to sketch the Canal, the farms and the rural landscape, which he always hoped would lead to a professional fine art career.
Hough’s nephew Bob remembered his Uncle Percy as a somewhat short dark-haired man who painted signs throughout the area from Morristown to Kenvil during the ‘20s and ‘30s. Percy would at times do jobs for barter. Bob gave as an example: During the pre-WWII years there was a small airport at the foot of Mine Hill in Kenvil. Percy painted a hangar for the owners in exchange for rides and a few flying lessons. As business contracted in the 1930s, he also did house painting.
Hough’s nephew Ralph often recalled with good humor the many times he was sent out on a summer Sunday afternoon with a parasol to hold over Uncle Percy as he sketched along the Morris Canal in Ledgewood and Kenvil or at one of the Butterworth or Ike farms of Anna Mott’s family. Both nephews talked of Percy executing a preliminary sketch or watercolor from which he would later execute a finished painting in his 3rd floor studio at the Rockaway house.
Over the years, many of Hough’s Morris Canal paintings as well as landscapes of local Morris County scenes and still lives were painted as gifts for his relatives and Rockaway friends, such as the Jackson Forge for the Jackson family, landscapes of the Rockaway River for the Robinsons, paintings of their ancestral or present homes for the Tuttle-McElroy family.
The painting of the lock at Ledgewood would always hang above Anna and Joe’s mantel, as it would their descendants. Paintings of Butterworth family farms were cherished. In later years Evelyn could point out the field where the cows were taken across the Canal bridge on the farm in Berkshire Valley to graze, though the Butterworth farms her Uncle Percy painted were by then long gone. Evelyn and her husband Fay T. Langdon (1906-1992) valued the still life Percy had painted for them as a wedding gift, and Bob always had the painting of the unidentified lock in his bedroom. Ralph, who had patiently held the parasol so Percy could sketch, was given the seascape that had hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Percy Hough aspired to be but was never able to earn his living as an artist. To those who did not know Hough or his artistic work, he was a sign painter. When he died in Morristown in 1951, Artcraft Sign Co. was still in business. Yet Percy Hough was always serious about his art. He painted in a style suited to his small town, the scenic Morris Canal and Rockaway River, and the rural surroundings where he lived, rather than the city where he worked. In doing so, Hough made an important artistic and historical contribution to our present understanding of the landscape and life of northern Morris County as he experienced it in the late 19th and early 20th century.
