Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket by Romare Bearden
Fair Market Value and the Connection Between Romare Bearden’s Art and August Wilson’s Broadway Play
In 1978, renowned artist Romare Bearden created a collage, Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket, which is currently in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum. It is primarily a collage of paper and fabric, completed with watercolor, graphic pencil, gouache, and a felt-tip pen on Masonite. The subject in the center sits despondent and slumped in a kitchen chair next to a standing woman dressed in yellow and a seated child. To the left, a masked man is descending a stairway. Notably, the hands of the adult subjects are oversized, and they appear to be dressed for factory or construction work. In the right top corner, Bearden included a scene of an industrial city with train tracks and a factory spewing smoke. Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1911 and spent much of his childhood in Pittsburgh, where his maternal grandmother ran a boarding house.
August Wilson, an American playwright, was born in Pittsburgh in 1945. He dropped out of high school and educated himself at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. He created a 10-play cycle, one for each decade in the 20th century. These plays, nine of which were set in Pittsburgh, gave voice to Black American life, including the Great Migration, jazz, slavery, and the church. Wilson’s play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which premiered on Broadway in 1988, was inspired by Bearden’s Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket.
In The Piece of Art That Inspired One of Theater’s Greatest Works, Maya Phillips, the arts and culture critic for The New York Times, recently reported on the impact that Bearden’s collage had on Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. In the play, the lead character, Herald Loomis, had been captured and enslaved for seven years. After Loomis was freed, he spent years looking for his wife. Bearden’s imagery of oversized hands could be viewed as representing manual labor, strength, dignity, and endurance juxtaposed with slavery and pain. The set in the play’s 2026 Broadway revival displays the smoke-topped factory Bearden depicted in Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone returned to Broadway twice after its 1988 premier. The premier, as well as the revivals in 2009 and 2026, received numerous Tony nominations.
Art appraisers valuing art that has cultural or historical significance are faced with a question about the impact of this significance on fair market value. For art appraisers, the New York Times article may suggest a valuation challenge: did the past and present success of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone have a measurable impact on the fair market value of Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket, the collage that inspired the playwright? If so, how is the impact measured? Do the Tony nominations and recent revival enhance the value of the Bearden collage?
From a tax perspective, “value” is “fair market value”, which is “the price at which the property would change hands between a willing buyer and willing seller, neither being under any compulsion to buy or sell, and both having reasonable knowledge of relevant facts.”
As Lela Hersh, ASA, ISA AM explains, “When thinking about value, appraisers must consider and weigh all the characteristics that drive value for works by any particular artist. In the Bearden example, the subject of Wilson’s enduring play was directly inspired by the painting’s central seated figure who was, as Wilson described, a symbol of “abject defeat.” That kind of direct relationship between a literary work and a painting, coupled with the social and cultural impact it continues to have, would undoubtedly influence value upward. Exactly how much weight appraisers assign to those factors depends on their methodology. Ultimately, valuation is about assessing the attributes that make a work good, better, and best in the context of the market.”
# # #
If you have any questions about the IRS rules for valuation or contribution of art, contact the attorneys at K. Tyson Law. We have decades of experience interpreting and advising about the tax law associated with charitable donations, including donations of art.
August 14, 2026. Written by Kim Tyson, J.D., LL.M. and Karin Gross, J.D., LL.M.
Sources:
Maya Phillips, The Piece of Art That Inspired One of Theater’s Greatest Works, The New York Times, June 24, 2026
PBS, S29E2: August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand, August Wilson biography and timeline, Jan. 28, 2015
Lit Charts, Character Analysis of Herald Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson