Sweetie Ladd's Historic Fort Worth Book

Sweetie Ladd was Fort Worth's own Grandma Moses, a folk artist who captured the city's history in watercolor and lithograph. In her sixties when she began painting, Ladd once told a fellow artist that she didn't know how she achieved her distinctive style. "Just paint poorly, dear, " she advised. In truth, she had attended painting. workshops in Paris, Spain, and Mexico and studied under Fort Worth artist Bror Utter. After she took a class on perspective, her teacher advised her to discontinue formal training and paint what came naturally.

Sweetie Ladd's Historic Fort Worth presents twenty-eight paintings from the Landmark Series, paintings of historic Fort Worth structures, many of which no longer stand today: the T&P Station, Lake Como Pavilion, the Nine-Mile Bridge Casino, the Worth Hotel, the lobby of the Majestic Theater, Goat Island, and the Lake Erie Interurban. The book also contains the "Cries of Fort Worth" series based on Wheatley's "Cries of London." These ten paintings portray such old-time peddlars as the ice man, the scissor man, the bottle man, and the tamale seller.