Near the entrance to his Civil War–era farmhouse on a pastoral hillside in eastern Pennsylvania, Larry Dumont displays two small drawings by James Castle, a self-taught artist born deaf in Idaho sometime around 1900. Although Castle lived well into his 70s, he never learned to read or write. By some accounts, he rarely left his home, retreating instead to a life of isolation, introspection and incessant drawing—typically scenes depicting everyday rural life. When the cultural cognoscenti took notice of his work about 10 years ago—and dropped its collective jaw—Castle became an overnight star. Today, three decades after his death in 1977, collectors of American outsider art still regard Castle as something of a mythic figure.

Of Dumont’s Castle drawings, one portrays a farmer and his family in a small, spartan room; the other shows a modest house and a tree. The unadorned images, absent of affectation, are emblematic of the artist’s approach. Castle, for example, was known to use whatever material was available. If no other surface could be found, he would draw on the back of a Quaker Oats cereal box. One of Dumont’s drawings was done on the back of an ice cream carton. To achieve just the right color and texture in his handmade inks, a brew that might include stove soot and bits of paper, Castle would add his own saliva.

His many idiosyncrasies helped define Castle as the consummate outsider, just the sort of artist for whom Dumont feels a special affinity. What is it about Castle’s farm-family rendering that appeals to him? "Its authenticity," Dumont says, "its primitiveness, its folkiness. I’m just amazed that it’s a relatively small drawing that has, to me, such amazing power. This individual who had no training was able in a relatively small space to really capture something."

Fortunately for Dumont, a 53-year-old child psychiatrist, he’s been afforded more ample space in which to capture a collection of outsider art of stunning breadth. On display in every room of his 5,000-square-foot house—every hallway, staircase and niche—Dumont’s collection represents an impassioned embrace of self-taught outsiders such as Castle. Vagabonds, castoffs and the emotionally disturbed dominate the Dumont gallery. Outsiders all, they rambled through much of their lives as janitors, trash collectors and farm hands long before established art circles came to celebrate their work.

They were overlooked nobodies like Bill Traylor, who was born a slave in Alabama in 1856, didn’t leave the plantation until he was 78 and at 83 picked up a pencil stub and began to draw, a practice he continued until his death at 91. In a mere eight years, using mostly lead, charcoal, crayon and colored pencils, Traylor produced a portfolio coveted today by museums, galleries and collectors of a certain bent. "I buy things because I really love them," says Dumont, who paid $22,000 for his only work by Traylor, a silhouette of a farmer and his dog, at a Sotheby’s sale about 10 years ago. "At the same time, when it comes to my collection of self-taught art, what I try to do is also get a relatively great piece by the biggies."

By Dumont’s own reckoning, the highlights of his outsider works are a large, colorful painting of a poodle by William Hawkins (1895–1990); a drawing of a gun-wielding caballero by Mexican artist Martín Ramírez (1895–1963); a large autobiographical work by Howard Finster (1917–2001) that was originally commissioned by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art; and a limestone angel bust by William Edmondson (1870–1951).

Each of these practitioners of Art Brut took unorthodox routes to public acclaim. Ramírez, for one, produced hundreds of drawings while spending the last 15 years of his life in a
California mental hospital, diagnosed with schizophrenia. Last year he was feted with a retrospective at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and his works today sell for more than $100,000. (For more on Ramírez and the outsider art category, see News, page 34, and Critic’s Notebook, page 121.)