Just about everyone in Millbury is familiar with the mural in our post office. It was painted in 1940 by Joe Lasker, and he returned to refurbish it in 1998. Joe recently passed away, and here is his obituary recently published in the NY Times:

Joe Lasker was the last living member of the 48 prominent realists - including Edward Hopper, John Sloan and Raphael Soyer--who wrote for Reality, the mid-Fifties polemical journal that argued against non-representational art.

He died December 3, 2015 at age 96 of congestive heart failure in Norwalk, CT.

"I feel that much of American art of the last 60 years has something missing, namely narrative," Lasker said in an interview. "Without narrative there would be little left of the art of the Old Masters, of 20th-century expressionism and surrealism. There would be no Guernica by Picasso."

Joseph Leon Lasker was born in New York in 1919 to Romanian immigrants. In high school, he entered the painting competition of the Treasury Department's Fine Art Section and won commissions for still-extant murals in the Calumet, MI, and Millbury, MA, post offices.
At night, he studied at, and graduated from, Cooper Union art school. In WWII he served in the 1147th Engineer Combat Group.


 

Joe Lasker's Subject Matter for Our Post Office

If Indians sometimes faded into the past, at other times they were violently overcome. An Indian-related subject that proved popular with audiences and unpopular with the Section of Fine Arts was conflict. The Section repeatedly expressed reservations about depicting Indian-White conflicts and stated that the Department of the Interior objected to these and other representations of “general unfriendly relations”. Edward Rowan was even more direct in a letter to artist Louis Bouche, stating categorically that “massacres are out” and claiming that the Section had no interest “in taking part in continuing or abetting any racial prejudices” (Melosh 1991, 41).

For his mural “An Incident in King Philip’s War, 1670 in Millbury, Massachusetts” (Fig. 7), artist Joe Lasker
preemptively assured Rowan that he had no plans for a “bloody, unsightly picture” but that he intended to treat his chosen subject “in a decorative muralesque manner” (1940).

He first submitted mural designs for the Social Security Building and St. Louis post office mural competitions, but only received honorable mentions. On the strength of these submissions, he was offered the commission for the mural in the Millbury, Massachusetts post office for the amount of $800 

In order to come up with appropriate subject matter for the mural, Lasker conducted research in the New York Public Library and chose a scene from the 1675-6 King Philip’s War in Massachusetts because it was dramatic and offered numerous pictorial possibilities. As expressed in a letter to scholars Marlene Park and Gerald Markowitz, he “just couldn’t get excited about onion farming for Millbury” 
King Philip was the English name for Metacomet, the son of Massasoit and brother of Wamsutta, who became Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag after Wamsutta’s death in 1662. Originally, the Wampanoag and the English Colonists coexisted in uneasy peace. However, increasing colonial expansion led to escalating tensions. In 1675 the situation boiled over upon the murder of the Christianized or “Praying” Indian John Sassamon, a translator and advisor to Metacomet.

After he reportedly informed Plymouth Colony officials that Metacomet was arranging Indian attacks on colonial settlements, he was allegedly murdered by three Wampanoag. The three were arrested and hanged. In retaliation, a band of Pokanoket attacked several homesteads in Plymouth Colony on June 20, 1675. The war spread quickly and eventually the Nipmuc, Podunc, Narragansett and Nashaway were all involved, fighting the New England Confederation and their allies, the Mohegan and Pequot.

By the spring of 1676, after many victories on both sides, the conflict became a war of attrition. Metacomet was shot and killed in August, 1676, leading to the surrender of the Indian forces. He was beheaded, and his head was displayed on spike in Plymouth for over 20 years 
For his mural design, Joe Lasker chose a particular incident that happened in the vicinity of Millbury.
In 1675, at the start of King Phillip’s (the Indian Sachem) war against the early settlers, a band of mounted
English Colonists under the command of Captains Hutchins and Wheeler, were ambushed and attacked by about two hundred Nipmuc Indians, the aboriginal inhabitants of what is now Worcester County and surrounding vicinity. As a result, eight of the white soldiers were killed. This clash took place in the neighborhood of where Millbury now stands.

Lasker refers Rowan to the historical volumes he referenced for this material, including one containing thepersonal report of the Captains Hutchins and Wheeler. Rowan expressed his approval and his relief that Lasker intended to portray the scene tastefully, and urged him to consult local authorities on Indian attire (1940).
In his response, Lasker notes that the Millbury Postmaster had not been able to offer any advice or refer him to anyone in town qualified to provide input on the mural and its subjects, costumes and other details. However, he assures Rowan that the mural “will be accurate in its technical aspects, more so than the color sketch” (1941).

While his commitment to textual research for historical accuracy is commendable, Joe Lasker never actually visited Millbury until he installed the mural in 1941. Instead, he painted it on canvas in his Manhattan studio, rolled it up and shipped it to Millbury. He then made his first visit to the town and installed the mural in one day with the assistance of the post office janitor. Additionally, no explanation is given for the mural’s titular reference to an incident in 1670 when the war did not start until 1675, a fact clearly known by the artist and referenced in his December 1940 letter to Edward Rowan.

The resulting mural shows five Indians in battle with three colonists, and a fourth is implied by a riderless horse. Lasker used vivid colors of yellow in clothing, blue in a colonist’s flowing cape, and red in saddle blankets, Indians’ roach hairpieces, and what appears to be blood on the ground under a fallen Indian. The colors are striking and the energy of the mural is frenetic, with horses and people moving in all directions. In fact, Lasker consulted the New York libraries and researched as many examples as he could find of battles on horseback by artists including Leonardo, Rubens, Delacroix, and the Napoleonic painters (Park and Markowitz  He discovered that all these paintings had a “formula” to their composition, and he used that same formula to compose the Millbury mural. An added signature on the mural notes that it was restored, at least partially, in 1991.