Such institutions became especially necessary in this period. After the American Revolution, immigration to the new nation greatly increased. Alongside this demographic growth, both commercial agriculture and urban manufacturing expanded throughout southeastern Pennsylvania due to a growing international demand for American goods.8 The subsequent development of mining and agriculture along the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers drew people from Philadelphia to coal and iron mines in the countryside, and the expanding canal system connected all aspects of this rising economy.9 Yet during the War of 1812, the US economy significantly declined due to economic blockades and embargoes, stifling shipping and manufacturing.10 Employment shrank in New York City and Philadelphia, and immigrants arriving after the economic downturn of 1817 left cities to find scarce jobs in the countryside. Organizations such as Philadelphia’s Guardians of the Poor cared for unemployed laborers and tradesmen, and by 1820 forty-eight people for every one thousand relied on poor relief assistance.11

Centralized homes for the poor soon emerged as a worthy collective endeavor and prudent public expense.12 As such, public almshouses became places where destitute, ill, or injured men, women, and children could recuperate and receive medical treatment. Yet to proponents of the almshouse system, such care also had the strategic goal of relocating such individuals to institutions outside of towns, where they could not wander or beg. Care was also not freely given, as in the nineteenth century the poor were expected to work for the amenities and accommodations provided by almshouses. Public sentiment classified poor relief into two categories: that of the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.”13 The first category included those who could not work due to circumstances outside their control, such as low wages for women, sickness and disease, disabilities, and job loss from the War of 1812.14 The second included, among others, individuals termed “intemperate” paupers, or those suffering from alcoholism. Initially the almshouses primarily cared for the “deserving” population of aged, sick, orphaned, disabled, or injured persons, but critics argued that unwed mothers and the “undeserving” became their primary users.15 As such, the institutions gained a reputation as a revolving door for those unable to remain employed or sober. Though many of the same people were frequently readmitted, most did not stay for long. Very few residents stayed for over four weeks, while most stayed for two weeks or less.16 Due to his intemperance, Charles C. Hofmann fell into the category of the “undeserving poor,” and this marker plagued the artist for his entire life. In reality, people such as Hofmann who lived in rural locations depended on almshouses less frequently than those in cities.17

Hofmann first journeyed to Northampton County, Pennsylvania, less than one hundred miles from New York City. There he admitted himself to the county’s almshouse in 1864, where he resided for the next two years. Use of the almshouse property by Europeans dated to 1745, when a group of Moravian farmers settled outside of nearby Nazareth. The community was called Gnadenthal (Dale of Grace) and became a part of the “Upper Places”—satellite villages that provided produce and other necessities for the largest community of Moravians, living in Bethlehem, just south of Nazareth. In 1837 Northampton County purchased over 200 acres from the Moravians to build what they called the “Poorhouse and Lunatick Asylum.” Only a year after it was built, the almshouse served 171 residents.18 By the time that Hofmann arrived, the facility had operated for twenty-seven years.

During his two years at the Northampton County Almshouse, Hofmann executed his first identified paintings, four views of the almshouse site dated to 1864 and 1865 that likely paid for his residence at the facility (fig. 3). These early examples are useful in introducing the artist’s materials, style, and remarkable pace of work. Hofmann painted each almshouse multiple times, sometimes in the same month, using multiple media including watercolor on paper, oil on canvas, and oil on metal, likely zinc, or another non-ferrous metal. Hofmann’s early Northampton County Almshouse paintings are consistent with the style employed throughout his career. From the bird’s-eye perspective to painted faux frames surrounding the almshouse and farm scenes, Hofmann’s style combined elements from lithography with watercolor and, later, oil painting. Throughout his extensive travels, his paintings also became increasingly formulaic, akin to the way in which period itinerant portraitists often recycled the same compositions of bodies or heads within their paintings. Similar techniques quickened Hofmann’s pace of work, and he may also have developed a process to copy details from his previous paintings of the same almshouse.19

The directors of the Northampton County Almshouse had good reason to commission Hofmann to paint their institution. As public approval of almshouses diminished throughout the nineteenth century, Hofmann’s paintings likely counteracted negative opinions by depicting the sites as symbols of order, beauty, and rehabilitation. This appeal to public sentiment explains later impressions of his almshouse paintings as “cheerful” and “orderly”—conspicuously devoid of the despair within their walls.20 Hofmann’s attention to the Northampton almshouse’s exterior architecture also reflected well on the communities funding the institution. The facades of the almshouses instilled pride in the public as their grand architecture represented the community’s moral and financial contributions to the poor. At the Chester County Almshouse, for example, administrators sought to convince taxpayers to fund new buildings and renovations so that residents’ overall quality of life might improve. An outside committee inspecting the almshouse agreed, suggesting that additional buildings would further sequester more dangerous inmates from productive working residents.21

Hofmann’s watercolor paintings of the Northampton County Almshouse depict four-story stone and brick buildings. Their gambrel roofs and dormer windows reflect the Germanic vernacular architecture that the Moravians had built in Nazareth, such as the stately Nazareth Hall School for Boys, the Single Sisters residence, and the Whitefield House, home to the community’s nursery. In his 1864 watercolor of the almshouse, Hofmann painted a lively scene with groups of visitors entering the large building in the background (fig. 4). Most almshouses arranged public tours, which likely included visits to preselected rooms within each structure. Hofmann also details within the foreground a frieze-like composition of figures harvesting hay and herding cattle, and four of the painting’s primary buildings feature date stones. Both the depiction of daily labor and an acute attention to detail would characterize Hofmann’s paintings over the next eighteen years. Hofmann painted the Northampton County Almshouse two additional times in 1864, including an oil on canvas, and another watercolor in 1865, which is less detailed than the other views.

In the early spring of 1865, Hofmann traveled west from Northampton County to Berks County, admitting himself to that county’s almshouse for the first time. Over the next seventeen years, the Berks County Almshouse would become the artist’s most frequent respite and the eventual site of his grave. At least sixteen of Hofmann’s depictions of the Berks County Almshouse survive today, an archive that visually documents the site’s architectural growth. Founded in 1825 on the site of former Pennsylvania governor Thomas Mifflin’s “Angelica” plantation, the Berks County Almshouse had, in 1865, at least fifteen buildings (figs. 5, 6).22 By 1880 the site had over twenty-five structures, including a five-story residential building with a large Second Empire mansard roof and three towers. Over the next few years, Hofmann painted the almshouse from numerous angles, providing an almost exhaustive study of the property. In one view from the southwest, the city of Reading can be seen in the background, painted lighter than the almshouse buildings in the foreground (fig. 7). In other views, Reading disappears entirely as Hofmann focuses on the site’s inhabitants, landscape, and vignettes of its stately buildings (fig. 8). Interestingly, the artist’s earliest paintings of the Berks County Almshouse also incorporated German within their titles (see fig. 6). This suggests that he still regularly used his mother tongue after five years in the United States. While Hofmann was surrounded by a myriad of German speakers in the four counties where he worked and lived, most of his titles were in English as it was the language used by almshouse administrators.

The artist’s vision of the institution as a utopian idyll is clear from his depictions of the Berks County Almshouse, its residents, and the visiting public. Almshouses were essentially controlled microcosms of the outside world, where residents learned or worked in ways that the institution deemed necessary for survival after release.23 To achieve cohesion among the residents, the almshouse directors, stewards, matrons, and their staff likely relied on the residents to self-identify as a “community of individuals” working together to keep the almshouses productive and orderly. Indeed, Hofmann’s earliest almshouse paintings greatly resemble period watercolor paintings of Shaker and Moravian villages, which similarly feature figures working or otherwise contributing to an ordered rural landscape (fig. 9). In the early to mid-1870s, Hofmann increasingly populated his Berks County Almshouse paintings with figures working together or at leisure. As such, administrators assigned jobs to physically and mentally able residents based on age, sex, and ability; indentured residents were assigned to local farms and businesses.24 A typical almshouse site plan included barns, springhouses, milk houses, smoke­houses, dye houses, a weaving and carpentry shop, and sometimes small factories for manufacturing locally saleable products. Residents might also work in nearby quarries, collect sand, mend shoes, cook, or care for animals or other residents (fig. 10).25 Most almshouses also farmed the land surrounding their buildings, and crops not consumed by residents were sold to local markets. Within such scenes, nonresidents are nearly indistinguishable from almshouse residents, especially when compared to other paintings in which the latter are generally painted as more nebulous background figures. Instead, the figures in Hofmann’s paintings of the Berks County Almshouse appear as personable, hardworking, and full of life and color (fig. 11). It is possible that the artist’s frequent stays at this almshouse gave him greater familiarity with its residents than at other locations.

Hofmann’s contribution to this seemingly harmonious environment was painting each almshouse as a well-oiled machine. Many of the jobs inside and outside the almshouses were physically intensive, but Hofmann’s ability to paint may have substituted for such employment, as these artworks paid for his stays. To acquire his painting supplies, Hofmann may have utilized the trade networks through which almshouse stewards supplied their institutions, perhaps receiving his materials as part of his commissions.26 Hofmann repeatedly returned to the Berks County Almshouse after years of intermittent residence at the Montgomery and Schuylkill County Almshouses.27 Over the many years during which Hofmann painted the site, the Berks County Almshouse evolved from a property of rolling hills, farms, animals, and frolicking people to a company town whose figures and buildings were numerous, impressive, and efficient.

In 1869 Hofmann traveled north from Berks to Schuylkill County. There he produced his only known graphite drawing, a sketch depicting the blacksmith forge of Jacob Fisher & Son (fig. 12). This work features composite images bordered by acanthus leaves and an eagle above the central image containing the Fisher forge and home. The drawing uses motifs commonly employed by Hofmann throughout his career including patriotic images, composite vignettes of the same subject or series of buildings, and scrolls, banners, or banderoles incorporating the work’s title. Like his watercolors of the Northampton and Berks County almshouses, this graphite drawing draws on Hofmann’s earlier training as a lithographer in its precise execution of buildings, roads, and fences in the axonometric style common in nineteenth-century maps, atlases, and other way-finding prints. It was not until Hofmann shifted to painting in oil that his style loosened and became more painterly.

After his initial visit to Schuylkill County in 1869, Hofmann returned twice more. His second visit was in 1876 when he admitted himself to the county almshouse. The Schuylkill County Almshouse, founded in 1833, included several buildings outside of Schuylkill Haven, a village south of the county seat in Pottsville.28 As Reading’s population exceeded that of Pottsville by 50,000 in the late nineteenth century, the Schuylkill County Almshouse served cities with far smaller populations than those of Berks County. Hofmann’s views of the site include fewer buildings than his earlier paintings.29 Yet the almshouse’s buildings are still grand and neoclassical, incorporating transom windows over the doors, dentilled cornices, and bell towers painted white (fig. 13).

Hofmann invariably depicted his almshouse exteriors as impressive, but taxpayers occasionally saw the interiors of these spaces on tours, with special committees, or when visiting interned relatives. In such situations, almshouse stewards and matrons likely put on a show of order and cleanliness, and almshouse records are often untrustworthy as they included adjusted admissions numbers, discharge information, and even finances.30 In fact, eyewitnesses recorded that almshouses were far from comfortable. Residents frequently lost sleep from incessant screaming throughout the halls, and bedbugs were common. According to Dorothea Dix, an advocate for the poor and individuals with mental illnesses, almshouses in Pennsylvania were sparsely furnished and their interiors were whitewashed.31 Administrators employed these stark interiors both for sanitation and to keep residents from becoming overly comfortable and thus less likely to stay or return. As an artist, Hofmann must have found the lack of color and pattern drab indeed.

Hofmann populated his Schuylkill County Almshouse paintings differently within each rendition. Some have numerous figures, while in others they are scarce (fig. 14). It is possible that he painted the almshouse both on days when it was closed and on days when it was open to visitors. Hofmann inscribed on one view from 1881, “The Union forever and notice: Positively no admittance on Sunday. Vistors to the almshouse will be admitted only on Thursday of each week from 9 AM to 5. P. M.” (fig. 15). Within these views, Hofmann’s application of paint for the residents was thinner than that for the public, implying a material difference between the two. His residents were frequently translucent, ethereal, and almost featureless; figures occupying the foreground have greater depth and detail, and their formal attire suggests that they are members of the public or administrators (see fig. 13). Later paintings partly reversed this trend (fig. 16). In 1878 Hofmann again painted the Berks County Almshouse, this time as a composite of eight vignettes surrounding a central depiction of the institution (see fig. 1). In this later view of the almshouse, the residents inhabiting the barnyards and common spaces are depicted with a range of abilities and disabilities, and their numbers far surpass those of the visitors. Consistent, however, are Hofmann’s vibrant colors, bucolic landscape, and the grand and extensive property. Over the six-year period that Hofmann painted the Schuylkill County Almshouse, the site changed little. Among the few alterations, most notable are the number of trees or the types of crops grown in the fields in a particular year.32

In 1872 Hofmann was again living in Berks County when he completed a series of paintings for farmers in the countryside surrounding Reading. He likely traveled to the farms from his residence at the Berks County Almshouse, but he also may have painted them before admitting himself on October 26 of that year. These commissions may also have helped him to settle his debt to the almshouse. According to family lore, Henry Z. van Reed paid Hofmann $5.00 and a quart of whiskey for his first painting of the farm, and Hofmann continued to paint the farm for van Reed’s children at the same price (fig. 17).33 Hofmann’s painting of the van Reed farmstead serves as a valuable document on the property, which was originally a paper mill built at the confluence of the Cacoosing and Tulpehocken Creeks around 1820. Based on Hofmann’s painting, it appears that Henry Z. van Reed did little to upgrade his early nineteenth-century paper mill, as much of what Hofmann painted was outdated technology by the early 1870s.34 The painting of van Reed’s farm introduces another motif common in Hofmann’s work—that of men smoking pipes or cigars while working or relaxing. Hofmann painted delicate puffs of smoke emanating from his figures’ hands in the same way that he frequently depicted smoke emerging from brick chimneys.35

For the next year or two, Hofmann stayed in the Berks County Almshouse and painted the institution at least three times. His association with the almshouse administrators led to other local commissions, including painting a series of farms in or near Lower Heidelberg Township. In addition to painting Henry Z. van Reed’s farm in 1872, Hofmann also painted those of Daniel B. Lorah and Benjamin Reber. Lorah, described in the Reading Times as “one of Berks County’s most highly esteemed citizens,” was a member of the Berks County Agricultural Society and an award-winning orchardist whose house was surrounded by apple trees.36 More important for Hofmann was Lorah’s role as Berks County’s director of the poor, a position that oversaw the county’s almshouse. Evidently, Lorah allowed Hofmann to travel the eight miles from the almshouse to Lower Heidelberg Township, where his farm was located. At least two paintings of Lorah’s farm exist. In one Hofmann painted the title in white; in the second he painted the title in a brown-gold paint, a mixture that likely included gold leaf (fig. 18).37 Both views of the farmstead prominently feature Lorah’s orchards directly in front of his house, and the focus is on the landscape, house, and barn rather than individual figures. The second painting depicts the same landscape but also includes figures—perhaps members of the Lorah family—tilling the field and chasing steer. As Lorah died in 1872, shortly after Hofmann finished the commission, it is possible that the farmer planned to gift both paintings to his children. Hofmann’s almshouse paintings likely paid for his accommodations, but it is unknown whether Lorah similarly considered this more personal painting of his homestead as a payment to the Berks County Almshouse. It is clear, however, that Lorah sought to flaunt his personal holdings in addition to documenting his work at the almshouse.

Hofmann completed his second painting of Lower Heidelberg Township—and his third of a Berks County farmstead in 1872—for Benjamin Reber. Unlike Lorah, Reber had no known connection with the Berks County Almshouse, but he likely knew Lorah since their farms were in the same township. It is possible that Lorah informed his neighbors of Hofmann’s abilities, prompting Reber to commission a painting of his own farm, later titled View of Benjamin Reber’s Farm (fig. 19). The Reber family was prominent in the Tulpehocken and Lower Heidelberg regions of Berks County, having inhabited the same property since Benjamin’s grandparents, Johannes Bernhardt and Magdalena (Hahn) Reber, settled there in 1736.38 Hofmann’s view of the farm illustrates several houses on the property, consistent with several generations of the Reber family living together on the farm at one time or another. The painting details the changing styles and tastes of a Pennsylvania German family both before and after the American Revolution; the Rebers originally occupied stone houses with Georgian details and later built brick homes. The family continued to improve their land and buildings for almost one hundred and fifty years before Hofmann immortalized the farm.

In 1874 Hofmann appeared for the first time in Montgomery County, admitting himself to its almshouse that same year. For the previous ten years, Hofmann had lived and traveled north of Montgomery County between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. Although he would spend the least amount of time in this almshouse, the institution provided the artist with a subject different from those depicted in his previous paintings. The Montgomery County Almshouse sat directly upon the Schuylkill River, providing Hofmann with a waterway to paint. Immediately north of the almshouse the Schuylkill Canal, which began operating in 1825, emptied directly into the river, which explains Hofmann’s inclusion of a small island within the right foreground of the artist’s identified paintings of the site. Thus, all four of Hofmann’s extant views of the Montgomery County Almshouse include canal boats, shipping barges, and vignettes of daily life along the Schuylkill River. These paintings are also Hofmann’s only works to include the names of local businesses. The Montgomery County Almshouse was founded in 1808 and built upon 265 acres of land purchased from Abraham Gotwalt of Upper Providence Township.39 The institution’s new residential stone building was completed in 1872, just two years before Hofmann admitted himself to the almshouse. By then fires had already devastated the almshouse three times, but despite this, residents filled its rooms each time it was rebuilt.

Hofmann’s view from the southwest side of the Schuylkill River shows the almshouse’s three-story brown stone building at the center surrounded by outbuildings, farmland, dirt roads, and tenant houses (fig. 20). People fish along the banks of the Schuylkill River as two boats travel south, pulled by a team of mules along the canal towpath. The narrow boat to the left carries barrels and flies a large American flag topped by an eagle. On the side of the boat, Hofmann painted “Williamsport & Scranton,” stops along northern divisions of the Pennsylvania canal system. The second vessel is a typical canal boat with a manual tiller; on its rear Hofmann painted “Gay & Happy” and “Pottsville,” and on its right side “Bright & Co[.]” and “Pottsvil[le,] Pa.” (fig. 21).40 In a similar painting of the almshouse created only ten days later, Hofmann included many of the same motifs, such as the American flag, this time reversed, and people sitting along the river (fig. 22). The same boats are present, but with different names painted on their sides. On the narrow boat, Hofmann painted “To: Clinton & Norwalk. Pittsburg Pa”; the rear of canal boat reads “Alli Gator at Reading Pa”; and a woman packing fish into a barrel is accompanied by the text: “For Chester Co. Market” (fig. 23). Hofmann’s views of the Montgomery County Almshouse thus also document the industrial history of the Pennsylvania canal system and the Schuylkill River waterway.41

During his stay in Montgomery County, Hofmann painted one of his most unusual paintings—remarkable not necessarily for the artist’s skills but rather for the dynamism of its subject matter (fig. 24). Against a background of a small, distant village, a man seated in a horse-and-buggy jolts along a gravel road. A young man, engulfed in dust, frantically chases after the carriage. Seemingly unconcerned with his pursuer, the carriage driver gazes directly at the viewer, his deadpan expression humorously juxtaposed with those of his agitated companion. The young runner is matched by a leaping black-and-white dog. Such carriage dogs were bred and trained to trot alongside the carriages of wealthy individuals, and the number of dogs running next to a carriage often denoted the owner’s level of wealth. Remarkable within Hofmann’s oeuvre, this untitled painting of a horse-drawn carriage is perhaps akin to the vignettes that he included within his larger, composite paintings (see figs. 1, 8, 12). The only identifying inscription on the painting is the milestone prominently depicted in the bottom right corner and inscribed “40 miles to Philadelphia,” which would be the vicinity of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1752 and incorporated as a borough in 1815, Pottstown is one of the largest towns in Montgomery County. Its location, along the Schuylkill River and about halfway between the Montgomery and Berks County almshouses, was doubtless familiar to Hofmann.42

Hofmann’s painting, although detailed, does not allow definitive identification of the buggy. Several similar models were in production after the Civil War, and Hofmann, who probably executed the painting from memory, likely fabricated some details. It is possible that the vehicle is a Goddard Buggy, named after designer Thomas Goddard of Boston, or a so-called Coal-Box Buggy, referring to the shape of the body and seat.43 Regardless of the buggy’s model, the eventful scene invites speculation. As nearly all of Hofmann’s paintings were commissioned by almshouse administrators or farmers living near the almshouses, who might have commissioned this unusual painting? Hofmann completed the work in April 1874 after admitting himself to the Montgomery County almshouse, and by 1875, he was painting again in Schuylkill County. Did this colorful carriage scene depict an event witnessed on his previous travels, or was the scene fabricated? The painting’s expressive figures raise more questions. Dressed in a brown coat, baggy pants, and a button-down shirt, the individual chasing the carriage presents as a laborer while the man in the carriage, wearing a jacket, cravat, and hat, is doubtlessly a wealthier individual, perhaps even an administrator of the Montgomery County Almshouse. Hofmann may also have painted this scene to flaunt his painting skills, or perhaps the painting funded his transportation to Schuylkill County.

In 1877 Hofmann produced another painting unrelated to his almshouse commissions. This painting, titled Die Wacht am Rhein (The Watch on the Rhine), is a visual representation of an eponymous German patriotic anthem (fig. 25).44 The lyrics were based on an 1840 poem composed by Swabian merchant Max Schneckenberger (1819–1849) and set to music in 1854 by Karl Wilhelm (1815–1873) of Krefeld. The anthem became popular during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), a conflict between the Second French Empire and the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia.45 The song was later a second national anthem of unified Germany that evoked deep feeling, especially among Germans who had defended the Rhine during the war.46 In this painting, Hofmann depicts Germania sitting atop a rocky outcropping outside of Rüdesheim, high above the Rhine River. Depictions of Germania—or a deific female personification of Germany—emerged in antiquity and later represented the “Mother of the Nation” after the German states unified in 1871. Like other period representations of Germania, Hofmann painted the figure wielding the Reichsschwert (imperial sword) and clothed in a Roman-style dress. She also holds a shield with the coat of arms of Germany: a black eagle against a field of gold. Along the edges of the mountainside, Hofmann wrote: “Und! sie sollen ihm nicht haben, Den freien deutschen Rhein” (They shall not have him, the free, German Rhine), a quote that Hofmann attributed to Otto von Bismarck. Yet the words actually originated in an 1840 poem by Nikolaus Becker called “Rheinlied” (Rhine song).47 Rising behind the windswept hair of Germania is Hohenzollern Castle, home to the Prussian dynasty that ruled imperial Germany between 1871 and 1918. An abundance of laurel leaves cascade down the mountainside, surrounding German soldiers and weapons of war. Hofmann’s pride in his homeland is also hinted in his depiction of German industry, including the train from Berlin to Paris and steamships charging through the Rhine. Like the painting of the well-dressed man seated in the carriage, this work marks another departure for Hofmann from farms and almshouses. The commissioner of this painting remains unknown, but Hofmann was likely familiar with period visualizations of Schneckenberger’s 1840 poem. In the November 26, 1870, issue of Harper’s Weekly, political artist and cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840–1902) produced a similar image of Germania sitting along a mountainside with the Rhine River below her feet (fig. 26). Similar images appeared over the course of Germany’s unification and were so popular that Nast, who was born in Bavaria, used it for more than one illustration in Harper’s Weekly. The political magazine was widely circulated and could easily have inspired Hofmann’s painting seven years later.

Between 1878 and 1882, Hofmann traveled between the Schuylkill, Berks, and Montgomery County almshouses, painting each location multiple times. His work evidently remained popular to the administrators who repeatedly commissioned new views of their institutions, with each subsequent painting recording the sites’ latest additions and improvements to the property. The paintings, therefore, had many uses, standing in for maps that allowed visitors to view the institutions all at once or to navigate when the institutions were open to the public. Hofmann’s composite style, incorporating framed vignettes flanking the central bird’s-eye view of each institution, supports the idea that these works had more than purely aesthetic value. Hofmann’s skills in lithography helped the administrators to produce accurate views of the almshouses both pleasing to the eye and as advertisements, creating the perception that the properties were orderly and clean and that their residents engaged in “restorative” physical tasks such as farming.

Building on his successful paintings for Daniel B. Lorah earlier in the decade, Hofmann worked privately for another almshouse administrator in 1879. John B. Knorr, an undertaker and cabinetmaker by trade, was also the clerk of the Berks County Almshouse.48 He commissioned Hofmann to paint his home in Wernersville, a village about eight miles west of the almshouse and near Lorah’s farm. Knorr also asked Hofmann to paint the church he attended, Hain’s Church, and a view of Wernersville (figs. 27, 28).49 Hofmann’s painting of the Knorr home features several people in the foreground including a horse, carriage, rider, and running dog reminiscent of the scene painted in Montgomery County (see fig. 24). However, in the work for Knorr, a spectator admires the carriage rather than chases after it. Typical of Pennsylvania German homes in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, the Knorr house has two front entrances with a covered porch and a detached summer kitchen. As in his painting of the Reber farm, Hofmann documented the way that Pennsylvania German domestic architecture blended multiple styles from the early eighteenth century until after the American Civil War.

While the home was important to Pennsylvania Germans, faith and community were equally significant. Thus it makes sense that Knorr also commissioned Hofmann in 1879 to paint Hain’s Church and Wernersville. The church was established in 1735 as a German Reformed congregation, built on land donated by the Hain family (fig. 28).50 The first church, a log structure, was called the Cacusi Church because of its proximity to the Cacoosing Creek but also was known as the Heidelberg Church. By 1766 a new limestone structure was built, rising fifty-five feet above the hill overlooking the valley below. Hain’s Church was one of several non-Moravian congregations that commissioned an organ from Moravian organ-builder David Tannenberg, installed between 1789 and 1795 and rebuilt in 1878.51 In that same year, the limestone church building incorporated a new structure. Knorr likely asked Hofmann to paint Hain’s Church to commemorate this new worship space and landmark moment in the congregation’s history.52 The painting includes several of Hofmann’s most recognizable motifs—a genteel couple strolling, a carriage and rider, blue skies and clouds, and the lush green landscape of the Pennsylvania countryside. The man looking at the road sign, smoking a pipe and carrying a knapsack, is thought to be Hofmann’s self-portrait (fig. 29).53 Perhaps this figure is deciding between travel to the public house, the church, or the return journey to the Berks County Almshouse where he had spent much of his life.

Hofmann’s view of Wernersville, his third painting for Knorr in September 1879, represents an ideal of rural life in Pennsylvania (fig. 30). In the foreground, the Knorr family struts in their Sunday best; in the background a verdant landscape of rolling hills and farms creates a bountiful patchwork, with industries such as the town quarry at the center right. Wernersville became a bustling resort and spa town for the wealthy who traveled from Philadelphia and Reading to vacation or rejuvenate themselves by taking part in the various therapies offered by health sanatoriums. The large buildings among the hills in the painting’s background depict these resorts, including the Mountain Sunset Resort, the Grand View and Walters Park Sanatorium, and the Green Terrace Hotel.54

By the time that Hofmann completed Knorr’s three paintings in September 1879, his days roaming the countryside and staying at alms­houses had nearly drawn to a close. In 1880 the artist admitted himself to the Berks County Almshouse and painted the site for the last time. The following year, he traveled to the Schuylkill County Almshouse and similarly painted it for the final time. In 1881 Hofmann made his last trip south, from the Blue Mountains and into the rolling hills of Berks County. By then he was likely experiencing painful symptoms of the edema that took his life a year later; one can only imagine the physical strains of long-term addiction and itinerancy. In 1882 Hofmann passed away at the Berks County Almshouse, a site that he had painted so many times over the past two decades.

Bereft of documentary records or firsthand accounts of Hofmann’s life, we are left only with the artist’s surviving paintings with which to better understand him. Indeed, within a select few paintings it is likely that viewers encounter the artist himself. Scholars have noted the appearance of a distinctive figure within several of Hofmann’s paintings. Wearing a humble straw hat, jacket, and trousers and carrying a pipe and bindle, this itinerant figure appears in at least eight of Hofmann’s paintings and is likely the closest that we will come to knowing the artist first-hand (figs. 28, 29, 31, 32).55 Outside of this elusive self-portrait, Hofmann’s thirty-plus known works stand as rich testaments to his capabilities and wandering spirit. While almshouse administrators doubtless asked Hofmann to depict their properties as stately institutions worthy of praise, we might also speculate that he depicted such bucolic scenes, grand buildings, well-dressed people, and clean roads for his own mental health. For Hofmann painting offered escape from a difficult life. Yet his itinerancy enabled him to experience more of Pennsylvania than did most people of his class in the nineteenth century. Additional paintings by Hofmann will inevitably surface over the next several decades, and scholars will continue to identify connections between Hofmann and other period almshouse painters. It is clear that Hofmann influenced John Rasmussen (1828–1895) and Louis C. Mader (1842–c. 1899. Rasmussen, also intemperate, lived at the Berks County Almshouse at the same time as Hofmann and painted that almshouse in a style similar to Hofmann’s, including the use of bird’s-eye perspective and composite vignettes. Perhaps Hofmann and Rasmussen bonded over their skills as painters, their Germanic heritage, and shared German language. Working at a slightly later date, Louis Mader’s almshouse paintings also reflect the influence of Hofmann’s work. Undoubtedly, Charles C. Hofmann will continue to inspire future generations interested in the struggles, hardships, beauty, and complexity of everyday people living and observing life from the fringes of society.