BLOOMINGTON - Known as "the farmer who paints and the painter who farms," Alfred Montgomery's exquisitely rendered rustic still lifes of corn tell the story of an unconventional artist who called Bloomington home.

Though Montgomery occasionally painted other subjects, such as sheep, his standing as a well-known folk artist rests with his ear corn still lifes.

Painted 100 years ago, these oils ranged from simple compositions featuring one or two ears to more complex arrangements with ears of corn spilling from sacks and baskets, or scattered among boxes, barrels and corn scoops.

The most striking quality of Montgomery's corn studies is the tactile realism of the kernels, shaped using an expertly turned daub of yellow paint. There were stories, most likely apocryphal, about these works attracting the "nibble of a horse" or the "peck of a hen." Regardless, the uncanny effect was such that Montgomery was once accused of pasting actual kernels onto the canvas, a charge he dismissed with a "disdainful laugh."

Unfortunately for Montgomery, his hit-and-miss career occurred before folk and other "outsider" artists became the darlings of art world sophisticates. In Montgomery's day, his oils primarily appealed to well-off farmers and businesses linked to the Corn Belt, such as grain dealers, seed companies, banks and livestock exchanges.

For long stretches of career, Montgomery would be on the road, and when business was slow, he painted for as little as room or board or a train ticket to the next town.

Given the itinerant nature of his livelihood, he painted on various surfaces, including patched canvas, tin, planed lumber and cigar boxes, and many of his frames were cobbled together from fence rails and barn doors.

Nonetheless, he was an adept salesman who could wheedle his way into the parlor of a wealthy family or the backroom office of a local implement manufacturer.

We know more of Montgomery the painter than Montgomery the man.

He was probably born in Logan County in 1857, but spent part of his youth and early adulthood in Iowa and Kansas, if not elsewhere.

He lived in Bloomington from about 1893 to 1905, and the self-described farmer-painter and painter-farmer ingratiated himself into the city's elite, selling his paintings to prominent families and businesses.

Since some of his most creative years were spent in Bloomington, there are Montgomerys scattered throughout Central Illinois, including many in private homes (such as the one shown here). The collection of the McLean County Museum of History includes a Montgomery corn painting, and Bloomington Public Library owns an oil titled "Sheep in Hay" dated 1896.

Although Montgomery remains the better part of a mystery, there are indications that he struggled to achieve a semblance of order in both his personal and professional lives.

For instance, in August 1896, the Pantagraph reported that Bloomington authorities had arrested "the alleged artist" Montgomery on a warrant for abandoning his wife, believed to be Esther Waddington, and her four children. As with much of his life, what became of this marriage remains unknown.

He remarried in 1906, though, and lived much of the remainder of his life in southern California, though he traveled widely, painting and lecturing in Tulsa, Okla., and many other places. He died in Los Angeles in 1922.

In a 1956 letter to the Pantagraph, George Montgomery, a grandson from the first marriage, said he had known for a long time that his grandfather was a "rascal," an "iconoclast" and "perhaps a bit of a cad."