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In February to March 1949, Felton Coleman had his first and only monographic show at the Carl Ashby Gallery in New York. Elaine de Kooning reviewed the exhibition for Art News: Felton Coleman, janitor in the art department of Louisiana State University, where he informally received his training, reopens this gallery with a first one man show of ten years’ work that, although naïve in drawing and conception of subject, has nothing of primitive cuteness. These dark-toned landscapes peopled with graceful Negro figures at a Delta Wedding, a Hog Killing or a Beer Party are haunting and stern in expression, capable, and often—as in the sharply characterized Baptizing—technically fluent. (Art News 48, no. 2 [April 1949]: 55)
The painting above, which is reproduced beside the artist on the catalogue cover, was acquired by a local collector in April 1949 and is the only work from the exhibition known to have survived.
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