American artists – Page 13 – my daily art display

Maga’s Daughter by Andrew Wyeth

Today I am returning to an artist I first featured almost twenty months ago. The artist in question is Andrew Wyeth and in My Daily Art Display of January 3^rd 2011 I looked at his famous work entitled Christina’s World. It is an extremely poignant painting and one which will always linger in my memory. I do recommend you go and have a look at it and see what you think. My featured painting today is a beautiful portrait which Andrew Wyeth completed in 1966 and is entitled Maga’s Daughter. The reason for the title will become apparent when you read the life story of Andrew and his wife Betsy.

Andrew Wyeth was born in 1917 in the town of Chadds Ford, Delaware County Pennsylvania. His mother was Carolyn Brenneman Wyeth (née Bockius), a lady from Wilmington. His father was Newell Convers (N.C.)Wyeth, an artist and one of America’s greatest illustrators. N.C. Wyeth had moved from Massachusetts as a young man to study with the illustrator Howard Pyle in Chadds Ford and it was here in 1908 that he and Carolyn married. He then built his home and studio on an eighteen acre homestead close to the site of the Brandywine battlefield, where in 1777 the Continental army led by George Washington fought the British army in the American Revolutionary War. The couple went on to have three daughters and two sons of which, Andrew was the youngest. All the children were extremely talented. The eldest child, Henrietta is considered by many art scholars to be one of the great women painters of the 20th century. Carolyn Wyeth, the second daughter was also an artist whilst the youngest daughter, Ann, was a talented musician. Andrew Wyeth’s elder brother, Nathaniel, was a mechanical engineer and inventor.

Andrew Wyeth’s father although wanting to devote his time to painting had to, for financial reasons, concentrate on his work as an illustrator. It was a well paid profession and the family lived a comfortable lifestyle. As a child, Andrew never kept well, one illness followed another and consequently he spent a lot of time at home and his father had to provide him with home tutoring. There was a marked difference between father and son. His father was a big man and had boundless energy which was in marked contrast to his frail and delicate son. Later in life Andrew Wyeth remembered those days closeted at home with his father. He wrote:

“…Pa kept me almost in a jail,” Wyeth recalled, “just kept me to himself in my own world, and he wouldn’t let anyone in on it. I was almost made to stay in Sherwood Forest with Maid Marion and the rebels…”

Before Andrew Wyeth had reached his teenage years his father had achieved celebrity status as an illustrator having illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous book, Treasure Island. Following on from this success he illustrated other famous novels such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Andrew Wyeth was taught art by his father, who inspired his son’s love of rural landscapes, sense of romance, and instilled in him a feeling for the Wyeth family artistic traditions. From an early age, the youngster soon began to enjoy drawing and with his father’s guidance, he quickly mastered figure study and watercolour techniques. Andrew soon became fascinated by art history and loved to look at works by not only the Renaissance Masters but native born American artists, such as Winslow Homer. In 1937, when he was twenty years of age, Andrew had his first one-man exhibition of watercolours at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. It was a resounding success and all the works exhibited were sold. It was now that he was certain in his own mind that a career as an artist was all he wanted. This immediate success which he achieved did not reassure him as like many talented people he was exceedingly self-critical. He was irritated by some of his work believing it to be too facile.

It was in 1939 that Andrew Wyeth met Betsy Merle James. Betsy James was born in the village of East Aurora in New York State in 1922. Her father, Merle James, a trained artist, worked as a printer for the newspaper, Buffalo Courier-Express. Her mother was Elizabeth “Maga” Browning (hence the title of today’s featured painting). Betsy grew up as the youngest of three girls. In the 1930’s the family spent their summers with their friends on Bird Point, a promontory jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, close to the town of Cushing, Maine. The next door neighbours were Alvaro Olson, a blueberry farmer and his sister Christina . This was the Christina of Wyeth’s famous painting Christina’s World. As a young girl Betsy became great friends with Christina. In 1939, on Andrew Wyeth’s twenty-second birthday, while spending the summer in Maine, the seventeen year old Betsy James and the twenty-two year old Andrew Wyeth met. At this initial meeting Betsy James took Andrew to Cushing to introduce him to her long-time friend Christina, who had been crippled by polio in childhood. Strangely, at this first meeting, it was not Christina who made the greatest impression on Andrew Wyeth but the weather-beaten, three-story, steep-roofed, clapboard house, built on a coastal promontory which was her home. However later Christina and Andrew became good friends and she featured in many of his paintings including three beautiful portraits entitled, Christina Olson (1947), Miss Olson (1952), and Anna Christina (1967). Christina even allowed him to convert one of the rooms in their farmhouse into a studio.

betsy andrew's wedding — Betsy and Andrew’s wedding day (1940)

Andrew and Betsy dated all that summer and in the fall, when Betsy went off to the Colby Junior College in New Hampshire, they faithfully corresponded with each other. They were in love and the following year they married and set up home in an old schoolhouse which lay on the Wyeth family land. Although Betsy was not an artist, Andrew continually sought her judgement on his work. Sales of Andrew Wyeth’s works of art grew steadily and Betsy managed the business side leaving her husband to concentrate solely on his art. Betsy had a strong character and exerted almost as much influence on her husband as his father. In the early days of her marriage, she believed that she had to battle with Andrew’s father to gain her husband’s attention. She once commented to Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth’s biographer, on her battle with her father-in-law:

“I was part of a conspiracy to dethrone the king — the usurper of the throne. And I did. I put Andrew on the throne…”

In 1943 the couple had their first child, a son Nicholas. A second son, James followed three years later and would become a renowned artist in his own right. Eighteen years after the couple married and settled in to life in the school house, they moved and bought an old 18^th century gristmill on the banks of the Brandywine River in Pennsylvania. Whilst her husband spent days on end painting, Betsy set about restoring the old mill, converting it into a home and a studio.

The featured painting today is Maga’s Daughter by Andrew Wyeth, which he completed in 1966. It is a portrait of his beloved wife Betsy, whose mother was Elizabeth “Maga” James . She posed in a three-quarter view. She stands erect. Her bearing is one of dignified pride as she averts her eyes away from the viewer. Atop her head is an antique riding hat with its drawstrings dangling freely on either side of her face, almost if they were acting as a frame of a picture. She wears a drab-coloured, high collared dress which almost blends in with the slightly lighter coloured background. There is a faint flush of colour to her cheeks and a smile is forming on her lips. What beautiful eyes she has, lit by the unseen light source to the left of the painting.

What was Andrew Wyeth thinking as he painted this portrait? Actually we know, for he told us:

“…It’s my wife, Betsy. I had worked a long time on this and knew it wasn’t working. At the time I was on board of trustees of the Smithsonian Institution – quite prestigious. But Betsy didn’t like it, telling me that my work would suffer because of all these boards. I left for Washington one morning, and Betsy got furious, really flew into a rage. All the way down I kept thinking of that colour rising up high into her cheeks. I knew I had captured her. The colour of those cheeks under her coal black hair and that hat gives the portrait a real edge. Really caught her. It’s more than a picture of a lovely looking woman. It’s blood rushing up. Portraits live or not on such fine lines! What makes this, is that odd, flat Quaker hat and the wonderful teardrop ribbons and those flushed cheeks. She could be a Quaker girl who’s just come in from riding… ”

On January 16, 2009, Andrew Wyeth died in his sleep at his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, after a brief illness. He was 91 years old. Andrew and Betsy Wyeth had been married sixty nine years

Portrait of Maud Cook by Thomas Eakins

As promised in my last blog, today I will complete the life story of the great American artist Thomas Eakins and look at another of his paintings, this time a portrait. If you have just landed on this page maybe you would like to go back to my previous blog in which I started talking about Eakins’ early life and had a look at his famous painting entitled The Champion Single Sculls, a perfectly rendered quiet picture of a rower on the Schuylkill River which he completed in 1871.

After his four year stay in Europe, Eakins had returned to America and the city of Philadelphia where he remained to the end of his life. He once again attended the Jefferson Medical College and resumed his anatomical studies and in 1878 he took up a teaching post as a volunteer at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The following year he was appointed Professor of Painting and Drawing and in 1882 he became director of the artistic establishment. On January 19, 1884, he married Susan Hannah Macdowell, a student at the academy. She was, well known in the artistic community. She was 25 when Eakins met her at the Hazeltine Gallery in Philadelphia, where his painting, The Gross Clinic was being exhibited in 1875. This was to be his most famous picture and at the time aroused controversy because of its detailed depiction of a surgical operation. Unlike many, Susan MacDowell was impressed by the controversial painting and she decided to study with him at the Academy, which she attended for 6 years. Her own artwork became more sober and her painting style became of a more realistic style similar to Eakins. She was an outstanding student and winner of the Mary Smith prize for the best painting by a matriculating woman artist.

Once she married Eakins she all but gave up her art as most of her time was spent in supporting her husband’s career, being the perfect hostess when they entertained and during the difficult times after Eakins left the Academy she never wavered in her support for him, unlike some of his family and so-called friends. The couple did not have children but it was thought they lived a happy and contented life. She and Eakins both shared a passion for photography, both as photographers and subjects, and employed it as a tool for their art. She also posed nude for many of his photos and took images of him. Both had separate studios in their home.

In the previous blog I talked about Eakins disenchantment with the École des Beaux-Arts and their treatment of nudity. He had definite views on the subject and once wrote:

“…She [the female nude] is the most beautiful thing there is in the world except a naked man, but I never yet saw a study of one exhibited… It would be a godsend to see a fine man model painted in the studio with the bare walls, alongside of the smiling smirking goddesses of waxy complexion amidst the delicious arsenic green trees and gentle wax flowers & purling streams running melodious up & down the hills especially up. I hate affectation…”

Eakins was a fervent believer that the male and female nude were things of beauty and nude models should be available to his students for them to complete their life drawing studies. He was attacked for his radical ideas, particularly his insistence on working from nude models. Eakins’s work photographing and painting nudes made him something of a liability for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he taught and it all came to a head in 1886 when he was forced to resign after allowing a class of both male and female students to draw from a completely nude male model.

Thomas Eakins, who by the 1880s had only managed to sell nine pictures for a total of $2,000 now decided to concentrate on portraiture. However, portraiture commissions were equally hard to come by and most of his portraiture works were of his friends and individuals who he admired and offered to paint them without payment. My Daily Art Display painting today is an example of this. My featured painting today is entitled Portrait of Maud Cook. It is such a beautifully haunting portrait which Thomas Eakins completed in 1895 and is looked upon as one of his finest work of portraiture. In 1892, Eakins had already completed portraits of Maud’s sister Weda Cook, the operatic contralto singer, one of which was entitled The Concert Singer.

Thomas Eakins’ paintings were known for being both scientifically and philosophically accurate. For Eakins, portraiture held little interest as a means of fashionable idealization. There was to be no glorification of how people looked. There was to be no hint of making the person look more beautiful or younger than they actually were. Unlike most other portrait painters of the time, Eakins had little concern for flattering his sitters and instead demanded from himself the most precise objective images. The results were comprehensive and revealing portraits that seemed to carry with them the souls of their subjects. Eakins refused to compromise and painted his subjects as they really were, and not as they wished to be seen. However, it was precisely for this reason that his portraits were often rejected by the sitters or their families.

Eakins having studied anatomy and later taught it to his students applied this knowledge to the proportions of the human form in his work. He also had a certain gift for capturing the real embodiment of the person, which many artists strove for but often failed to achieve.

In this portrait of the twenty-five year old Maud Cook we see her wearing a pink dress the fabric of which flows from her shoulders and is pinned between her breasts. Her hair is long and lies, tied with a ribbon, at the back of her neck. Her face is tilted slightly towards the source of light which comes from the left of the painting. Such light casts deep shadows across her face and reveals her facial structure. There is a warmth in the light which illuminates the exposed skin of her neck and upper chest bringing to the painting a demure sensuality. The expression on the young woman’s face is both captivating and haunting. Is it a look of sadness or thoughtfulness? In many of Eakins’ portraits of women he focused on their susceptibility and emotional sensitivity. Is this what he has achieved with this work? Eakins gave the painting to Maud Cook and inscribed it on the back and carved frame:

“To his friend/Maude Cook/Thomas Eakins/1895”

Years later, Maud Cook described the portrait to the artist’s biographer:

“…As I was just a young girl my hair is done low in the neck and tied with a ribbon. Mr. Eakins never gave the painting a name but said to himself it was like ‘a big rosebud…'”

The painting was later bought by the newspaper publisher and art collector, Stephen Carlton Clark, who on his death bequeathed the painting to Yale University Art Gallery where it remains today.

The American artist Robert Henri, who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1886 to 1888 and knew Eakins, wrote an open letter about him to the Art Students League a year after the artist’s death. In it he described the great man:

“…Thomas Eakins was a man of great character. He was a man of iron will and his will to paint and to carry out his life as he thought it should go. This he did. It cost him heavily but in his works we have the precious result of his independence, his generous heart and his big mind. Eakins was a deep student of life, and with a great love he studied humanity frankly. He was not afraid of what his study revealed to him. In the matter of ways and means of expression, the science of technique, he studied most profoundly, as only a great master would have the will to study. His vision was not touched by fashion. He struggled to apprehend the constructive force in nature and to employ in his works the principles found. His quality was honesty. Integrity is the word which seems best to fit him. Personally I consider him the greatest portrait painter America has produced…”

It was only during the final years of his life that Eakins began to receive a little bit of the recognition he deserved. He died in 1916 in the Philadelphia home in which he was born. As is the case with many great artists, Eakins’ fame is almost entirely posthumous. Eakins had struggled to make a living from his work which is somewhat ironic as his painting The Gross Clinic fetched US$ 68 million in 2006. Today Thomas Eakins is regarded as one of the most important American artists of any period.

After his death in 1916, his wife returned to painting, adding considerably to her output right up to the 1930s. Her artistic style changed becoming much warmer, looser, and brighter in tone. She died in 1938.

The Champion Single Sculls by Thomas Eakins

The Champion Single Skulls by Thomas Eakins (1881)

I had planned that this single blog would be all about the American artist Thomas Eakins and I had decided on which painting I would feature. However whilst researching the life and works of this great painter I came across another painting of his which I fell in love with and decided that I could not pass up the opportunity of highlighting that particular work of art as well, so I have decided to split Eakins’ life story over two blogs which gives me the opportunity to feature not just one of his paintings, but two.

Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins was born in Philadelphia in 1844. He was the eldest child of five children of Caroline Cowperthwait Eakins, whose ancestors were part English and part Dutch, and Benjamin Eakins, who was the son of a Scottish-Irish weaver. Thomas Eakins was brought up in a loving family environment and had a close and caring relationship with his father. Father and son both loved sporting activities and they would often go out swimming together in the nearby river and when the harsh winters set in and the river froze over they would go ice skating. It was also Thomas Eakins’ father who introduced him to the world of rowing, which he would enjoy as a sport and also depict in many of his paintings. His father was also very interested in art and had many artist friends and would spend much time discussing art with his son.

Benjamin Eakins was a calligrapher and writing master and as such would spend hours pouring over parchment documents which he had to inscribe. Thomas would watch his father at work and by the age of twelve became competent in line drawing, perspective and the grid work which was the needed in formulating designs and it was a technique that Eakins would sometimes use in his own artwork in the future. Thomas Eakins attended the Central High School, a public secondary school in Philadelphia. The school still exists to this day and is regarded as one of the top public schools in America due to its high academic standards. Here Eakins studied many subjects including mechanical drawing at which he proved an excellent student. In 1861, at the age of seventeen, Thomas Eakins enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art where he studied drawing and anatomy. In 1864 he transferred to the Jefferson Medical College where he once again studied anatomy and at one time considered the medical profession as his future.

In 1866, aged twenty-two, he travelled to Europe to study art and remained there for four years. Whilst in Paris he studied under the French realist painter Jean-Leon Gérome and worked as an apprentice at the atelier of the portrait painter, Léon Bonnat. It was under his tutorship that Eakins learnt the importance of anatomical accuracy in paintings and a technique he would adhere to in his own future works. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris but like so many who studied there he railed against what he looked upon as that establishment’s classical pretentiousness. He was also critical with regards the Academy’s treatment of nudity which was always couched in classical or mythological settings. In William Innes Homer’s 1992 biography of Eakins entitled, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art, he quotes from a letter Thomas wrote to his father in which he expressed his criticism, he wrote:

From Paris he travelled to Spain and became influenced by the works of the great Spanish painters such as Velazquez and Ribera which he saw in the Prado. He returned home to Philadelphia in 1870 and set about working on a series of oil paintings and watercolours, which featured rowing scenes and portraits of champion rowers. However this depiction of such a modern sport in paintings was reported to have shocked the more staid and conservative local artistic establishment.

The featured painting in My Daily Art Display today is one of this series of paintings featuring rowing scenes. It is entitled The Champion Single Sculls sometimes known as Max Schmitt in a Single Skull and was completed by Thomas Eakins in 1871. The setting is the Schuylkill River that meanders quietly through Philadelphia and which is an ideal venue for rowing. The central figure in this painting is the champion oarsman, Max Schmitt, a childhood friend of Eakins and who, like Eakins, had attended the Central High School. Max Schmitt, a lawyer, was by far the best oarsman in Philadelphia at the time and had won, against formidable opposition, the first ever single skulls championship on the Schuylkill in 1867 and his friend Eakins sent him a congratulatory telegram from Paris.

The painting is not of the race itself but simply depicts the moustachioed Schmitt taking a break from his training session. The rower rests and turns to face. His oars cause a ripple on the surface of the river as they continue to skim across the water. Schmitt and his racing scull are reflected on the mirror-like surface of the river. To become a successful oarsmen one needs to have upper body strength and we can see how Eakins has depicted the toned muscular torso of Schmitt.

In the middle ground of the painting we see another oarsman and this is Eakins himself, who is rowing at speed away from us. His name and the date are inscribed on his boat but it is difficult to make this out in the attached picture. The name of Schmitt’s scull is much easier to read. It is Josie which was named after his sister. Another rowing boat can be seen in the background with its two rowers and a coxswain all of whom are wearing Quaker clothes. Just beyond them we see the stone arches of the Connecting Railroad Bridge with a steam train just about to cross its span. Further back is the first Girard Avenue Bridge, behind which we can just make out a steamboat chugging up the river.

Although at first glimpse we presume the setting is somewhere in the countryside, it is not, as the Schuylkill River runs through Fairmount Park, which at the time was the largest urban park in America and would be the site of the 1876 Universal Exposition.

The Life Line by Winslow Homer

When I was flicking through my ever increasing number of art books and catalogues I came across a painting which immediately immersed me in a wave of nostalgia and reminded me of a time almost forty years ago. I will tell you why at the end of this blog. My featured artist today is one of the best loved American landscape and marine painter of the nineteenth century. His name is Winslow Homer.

Winslow was born in Boston Massachusetts in 1836. His mother, Henrietta Homer (née Benson) was a talented watercolour artist and acted as Winslow first art teacher. Both she and his father Charles Savage Homer hailed from New England. Winslow had two brothers, one, two years older, Charles Savage Junior, and one, five years younger, Arthur. He was brought up in an educated middle-class home by his parents in Cambridge Massachusetts. By all accounts he led a very happy childhood walking in the countryside, fishing and playing with his brothers and his many cousins. His father was quite a volatile man who changed jobs many times necessitating the uprooting of his family home on each occasion. Although never a successful business man Winslow’s father, ever the optimist, always believed that things would soon come good and his fortune would be made. It is therefore no surprise that when Winslow was just thirteen years of age his father gave up the family hardware business, left the family and joined the California Gold Rush. Needless to say, all his dreams came to nought and after further spells in England and France in his futile attempt to gain some financial support for his money-making ideas he returned home to his family where he had to financially rely on his wife and family.

Winslow Homer graduated from high school and his father arranged for him to become an apprentice to J.H.Bufford a leading Boston commercial lithographic company. Lithography was a very lucrative business at the time and was in great demand. Winslow Homer not only learnt to draw but he developed a good business sense. Although Winslow learnt all about lithography he found the work monotonous and wanted to concentrate on his real love – painting. It could well have been his mother’s encouragement that finally turned him from being a journeyman illustrator to becoming “his own man” and so in 1857, on his twenty-first birthday, he left Buffords after being with them for two years. One thing his apprenticeship had taught him was that he wanted to be his own boss. In Elizabeth Johns 2002 biography on Winslow Homer entitled, Winslow Homer, The Nature of Observation she quotes Homer’s comments regarding his days as an apprentice:

“…it was too fresh in my recollection to let me care to bind myself again. From the time that I took my nose off that lithographic stone, I have had no master and never shall have any…”

Homer turned down the offer of employment from the magazine Harper’s Weekly but did work for them for a number of years on a freelance basis whilst continuing his career as a freelance illustrator. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design from 1863 to 1866, and in 1867, and at the age of forty-one, he embarked on a trip to Paris where he lived for a year and exhibited at the Exposition Universelle. Whilst in the French capital he continued to supply Harper’s Weekly with scenes depicting Parisian life. Despite the change in style of French art, Winslow Homer remained faithful to his love of paintings of peasant life and was a great admirer of Millet and his works of art.

Throughout the 1870s, Homer continued painting mostly rural or idyllic scenes of farm life, children playing, and young adults courting. In 1875, Homer gave up working as a commercial illustrator and declared that he would continue to exist solely on the money he made from his paintings. Homer started painting regularly with watercolours in 1873 whilst staying in Gloucester, Massachusetts. From the beginning, his technique was natural, fluid and confident, demonstrating his innate talent for a difficult medium. In 1877, Homer exhibited for the first time at the Boston Art Club with the oil painting, An Afternoon Sun, and from that first offering until 1909, the year before he died, he exhibited at the Boston Art Club on a regular basis.

Homer became a member of The Tile Club, which was a group of thirty-one notable New York painters, sculptors and architects who met between 1877 and 1887. The group was inspired by William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement and they created hand-painted ceramic tiles and promoted the decorative arts. This group of artists and writers met frequently to exchange ideas and organize outings for painting, as well as foster the creation of decorative tiles. For a short time, Winslow Homer designed tiles for fireplaces.

Winslow Homer travelled to England in 1881 and settled in Cullercoats a Tyneside coastal village on the northeast coast. Whilst there, he completed many paintings depicting the lives of working men and women. His works often depicted the ferocity and relentless power of the sea and the men and women who braved those unforgiving elements of nature. It was whilst staying at Cullercoats that on October 21^st 1881 he witnessed the sinking off Tynemouth of the vessel, Iron Crown, and the daring rescue of its crew by the local life saving society and it is from that memory, which is captured in Winslow’s painting, The Life Line. The wreck of the Iron Crown at Cullercoats involved the volunteer Life Brigade who managed to rescue four of the crew using a rocket and breeches buoy. The local artist George Edward Horton, a member of the Bewick Club and the Cullercoats Colony of artists later recalled his first encounter with Wilmslow Homer:

“…As I stood watching the rescue operations a little cab turned up with an old Cullercoats fisherman on the dicky: out stepped a dapper medium sized man with a watercolour sketching block and sat down on the ways. He made a powerful drawing with some watercolour and some pastel….”

During the night of the disaster, Winslow Homer made sketches as he stood on the beach. Immediately following the incident he painted an austere and dramatic canvas in oils depicting sailors huddled against the sea wall as they waited to find out the fate of their companions who were still in the raging seas. Early during the rescue of the Iron Crown the life savers used a contraption known as a breeches-buoy to reach the stricken sailors. Two years later in 1883, when Homer was back in America at Atlantic City on the New Jersey coast, he went to talk to the local life-saving crews and asked them about this breeches-buoy device and watched a demonstration of the use of it for rescue from the sea. With what he had seen with his own eyes two years earlier and what he had subsequently learnt when he got back home, he painted his large, impressive, and immediately popular painting The Life Line in 1884, which was just one of several paintings he completed at this time on the rescue theme.

The Life Line does not depict a specific rescue but it was intended as a general representation of the distress and heroism that were inexorable aspects of life by and on the high seas. This work of art by Winslow Homer is all about the age-old themes of peril at sea and the power of nature, but at the same time honours modern heroism and yet at the same time encompasses the thrill of unexpected intimacy between strangers, in this case, the male rescuer and the female who is being saved, and who are being thrown together by the catastrophe.

Look carefully at the painting and what often strikes the viewer on their initial perusal of the scene is the fact that the face of the male rescuer is obliterated by the lady’s red scarf. How strange is that? Homer did this as he believed nothing should distract the viewer from the whole image – the actual rescue. It was Homer’s belief that the intensity of the painting would be increased if we just focused our attention on the physical strength and brute force of the rescuer as he holds on tightly to the woman inching his way back to the shore. The two dangle in the breeches-buoy in the trough between mountainous waves. The woman being rescued lies unconsciously in his grasp. Her head is thrown back. Her arms lie limply by her side. Her clothes have been drenched and torn by the ferocity of the sea. She lies there in the man’s arms having been rescued from the ship, which we just catch a glimpse of with its tattered sails in the top left of the painting.

This is truly a terrifying depiction of a rescue at sea. When Winslow Homer’s The Life Line was first exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1884 it became an instant sensation. Some critics, at the time of the painting being exhibited, commented on its powerful sensuality. For them the depiction of the man and the woman in the painting, had it not been part of a life and death situation, may well have been lovers locked in an intimate embrace. The sensuousness and sexuality of the image exhibits itself in the wet clothes clinging to the woman’s flesh with their drenched bodies clutched tightly together. Some were shocked by Homer’s exposing of the woman’s bare knees!!! Homer’s composition propels us into the midst of the action with colossal waves rolling past, drenching the semiconscious woman and her anonymous saviour. Homer’s painting, The Life Line was immediately recognized by critics as a major contribution to American art, portraying a heroic, contemporary subject with both painterly virtuosity and detailed observation.

This masterpiece by Winslow Homer can be found at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and will feature in their upcoming exhibition entitled Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and “The Life Line” which runs from September 22^nd to December 16^th 2012.

Finally I have to tell you why this painting brought on a wave of nostalgia for a time forty years earlier. It was in the early 70’s that I sat the first of my nautical exams and at the oral part of it I was asked by the examiner to describe how, if I was on a sinking ship, would I rig a breeches-buoy. Thankfully I never had to put the theory into practice!

Winter Harmony by John Henry Twachtman

When we hear the word Impressionism we immediately think of French painters such as Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, Degas et al, but how much do we know about American Impressionists and their works? How did the Impressionism Movement become important for a time in America? To find the answer, we probably have to go back to the mid-nineteenth century as it was after the Civil War ended in 1865 that America developed a healthy economy and this was never more so than in the North where many of the victors, who had made their fortunes from the war, had become extremely wealthy. As is the case nowadays, it is often not just enough to be wealthy, one had to flaunt one’s wealth. The newly wealthy Americans wanted not just to be recognised as rich, they also craved to be looked upon as sophisticated which didn’t automatically go hand-in-hand with wealth. So the rich Americans sat in their large magnificent houses and realised that it wasn’t enough to just have a large building, they realised that what they filled their homes with could help in their quest for sophistication and what could be more sophisticated than having their house filled with European art and furnishings. American artists soon realised that European style art was a saleable commodity and many crossed the Atlantic to Europe, especially Paris, to study the latest artistic techniques.

It was also around this time in Paris that French Impressionism was born. Impressionist art was a style in which the artist captured the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. Their paintings were full of colour and, in the main, the paintings depicted outdoor scenes. There was a wonderful brightness and vibrancy about the works of the Impressionists. The images we saw on their canvases were without detail but were painted in bold colours. In the 1870’s there were already two American painters who had been seduced by the Impressionist style of art and were considered great exponents of this style. They were Mary Cassatt and the Italian-born son of American ex-patriots, John Singer Sargent.

During the mid-1880s, French Impressionist art became very popular with American collectors who began to appreciate this new style, and more American artists realised that they had to take on board this new phenomenon. Soon, exhibitions of Impressionist works were held in American cities and the paintings sold well.

Today I am going to look at a work of a less well known Impressionist, the American painter, John Henry Twachtman. John Twachtman was born in Cincinnati in 1853. His parents, Frederick Twachtman and his mother Sophie Dröge were German immigrants who had arrived in the country in the late 1840’s. His father had many different jobs including being a policeman, a storekeeper and a cabinetmaker but his most lucrative work was as a window-shade decorator at the Breneman Brothers factory, and when his son, John, was fourteen years of age he joined his father in the business, as well as attending classes at the Ohio Mechanics Institute. John developed a love for art and persuaded his parents to allow him to enrol for a part-time course at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati and this is when he met and was mentored by an already successful American realist artist, Frank Duveneck who invited Twachtman to share his studio in Cincinnati.

In 1875, when he was twenty-four years of age, he and Duveneck, who was just five years his senior, travelled to Europe to study European art. First stop was Munich where Twachtman studied for two years at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Art tutored by the German genre and landscape painter, Ludwig von Löfftz. This artistic establishment was a long-standing center of artistic excellence and was one which attracted increasing numbers of aspiring American artists. From there he, Duveneck and another American student attending the Academy, William Merritt Chase, travelled to Venice in the spring of 1877 and spent much of their time painting en plein air.

Twachtman returned to America in 1878 and for a brief time taught at the Women’s’ Art Association in Cincinnati. He also joined the Cincinnati Etching Club where he became friendly with Martha Scudder, a Cincinnati artist and daughter of a local physician. Martha had studied at the School of Design and also in Europe, and had, on a number of occasions, exhibited her work. In 1880, Twachtman married, Martha Scudder. Soon after she married she gave up her artistic career and simply devoted herself to bringing up her family. John and Martha had two children: a son, J. Alden Twachtman, who was born in March 1882 and went on to became a painter and architect and a daughter, Marjorie, who was born in Paris in 1884. In 1880 John and Martha left America on honeymoon and went to Europe and Bavaria where Twachtman helped out as an art teacher in Duveneck’s school. Twachtman tired of the Munich style’s painting especially its lack of draughtsmanship and so he upped roots and moved to Paris, where in 1883 he enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he studied under Gustave Boulanger, the French figure painter who was renowned for his classical and Orientalist subjects. Another of his tutors was the French figure painter, Jules-Joseph Lefebvre.

Twachtman returned to the United States in 1887 and remained there for the rest of his life settling in Connecticut where he established an informal art school at Holly House, a boarding house for artists at Cos Cob, a small fishing village near Greenwich. This became a magnet for young aspiring artists, who came and were taught by Twachtman. Ten years later in 1897, Twachtman along with Childe Hassan and J Alden Weir became founder members of a group known as the Ten American Painters generally known as The Ten. This group was considered to be a sort of Academy of American Impressionists who had broken away from the more conservative Society of American Artists. From 1899 onwards, although living on his farm in Greenwich, Twachtman spent most of his last summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts and it was here that he died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 1902, aged 49.

The painting by John Twachtman, which I am featuring today, is one of his many winter landscapes. This one is entitled Winter Harmony and was completed by the artist in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The painting features a pool on the artist’s property and was to be depicted in a number of his works.

The Copley Family, by John Singleton Copley

In my last blog I looked at the English portraitist James Sharples and talked about how he took his family from England to America in search of patrons and their lucrative commissions. He was just one of many European artists who decided that the way to make a fortune from their art was by crossing the Atlantic. He of course had not only to compete against the new immigrant artists who had also made the journey but he also had to compete for work against America’s own painters. Today in My Daily Art Display I am focusing my attention on of those great 18^th century American artists, John Singleton Copley, who in fact moved across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, from Boston to London.

John Singleton Copley was born in 1738 in Boston, Massachusetts. Both his parents, Richard and Marie were of Irish descent and had arrived in America just two years before he was born. His mother ran a tobacco shop which was on the Long Wharf pier at the port. His father, who was also a tobacconist, suffered from poor health and went to the West Indies around about the time of his son’s birth in the hope that the warmer climate may help, but he died there in 1748, although the actual year of his death is contested. His mother remarried when Copley was 10. She married the engraver, painter, and schoolmaster Peter Pelham and it was believed that he gave young John Copley his first artistic tuition. Pelham made his living by selling his portraits and engravings and even ran evening classes in arithmetic and writing as well as a dance class. Another tutor of Copley was the Scottish born portrait painter John Smybert who had left his homeland and had come to America in 1826. Both Copley’s tutors died when he was just thirteen years of age and so his artistic tuition was handed over to Joseph Blackburn, an English portrait painter, who had left home and worked in Bermuda and in colonial America. Blackburn worked in Boston and eventually set up a studio in the town. Although this master-student partnership started well it ended in acrimony. The master (Blackburn) realised his student (Copley) was becoming a far better artist than himself and jealousy ended the arrangement.

Boy with a Squirrel by John Singleton Copley (1765)

In 1776 Copley had sent his painting, entitled Boy with a Squirrel, to London, for the Society of Artists Exhibition. The painting featured his step-brother, Henry Pelham with his pet squirrel. It was the first work of art painted in America to be exhibited abroad and it was well received by the critics and on the strength of this work he was made a Fellow of the Society of Artists of Great Britain. Benjamin West, the American artist who had moved to London in 1763, invited Copley to do as he had done and move to Europe to continue his artistic studies. For Copley, the invite was tempting and in some ways made him more unhappy with his present situation. He was aware of his talent and the lack of artistic stimulation in Boston. In the book Letters & Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776, there is one letter which Copley wrote to the American artist, Benjamin West:

“…In this Country as You rightly observe there is no examples of Art, except what is to [be] met with in a few prints indifferently executed, from which it is not possible to learn much…”

However although the invite to leave America was tempting Copley was aware that his portraiture was selling well and he had a good standard of living, mixing with the aristocracy who were his patrons and so he decided to stay in Boston and wrote back to Benjamin West in 1768 explaining his reasons:

“…I should be glad to go to Europe, but cannot think of it without a very good prospect of doing as well there as I can here. You are sensable that 300 Guineas a Year, which is my present income, is a pretty living in America. . . . And what ever my ambition may be to excel in our noble Art, I cannot think of doing it at the expence of not only my own happyness, but that of a tender Mother and a Young Brother whose dependance is intirely upon me…”

Susanna_Farnham_Clarke — Susanna Farnham Clarke (Mrs Susanna Copley) by John Singleton Copley

However, although not wanting to move to England himself, he continued to send his art work to London where his artistic reputation was on the rise. In 1769 John Copley married Susanna Farnham Clarke, whose father was one of the richest Boston merchants and a very wealthy and powerful business man, the Boston agent for the prestigious Honourable East India Company. Copley and his wife were very happy and his wife’s beauty was portrayed in a number of her husband’s paintings. The Copley’s marriage lasted for forty-five years and they went on to have six children.
Copley’s early works were in oils but he then began to dabble with pastels. By the age of nineteen Copley had built up a reputation as an outstanding portraitist. However Copley wanted to branch out and tackle historical paintings which at the time were very popular and the market for them was excellent. Copley’s family connections and his wife’s relatives were Loyalists, staunch supporters of British Colonial rule. Copley’s father-in-law was the merchant to whom the cargo of tea was consigned which sparked the infamous Boston Tea Party in December 1773 and this incident and what followed drove Susanna Clarke’s father to the brink of bankruptcy.

The unstable political climate worsened by the day, leading in 1774 to the rise of patriotism and the birth of the Patriots, the supporters of the colonists of the British Thirteen United Colonies who would within eighteen months rebel against British control. Copley’s lucrative work started to dry up and it was because of his fear of an oncoming war that Copley decided to take up Benjamin West’s invitation to come to England. His clear intention was to return to America as soon as the troubles were over, at a time when there would be a resurgence of his once-thriving art business and he would be looked upon once again as America’s leading portrait painter. He set sail for England from Boston on June 1^st 1774 leaving his mother, wife and children in the care of his step brother, Henry Pelham. Copley had fully intended to return soon to America but the long and bloody War of Independence which eventually broke out in 1775 forced him to postpone his return. After the war ended, Copley financial situation no longer permitted a return, and the painter ended up staying in Britain forever.

On his arrival in England in 1774 Copley sought out Benjamin West who introduced him to Sir Joshua Reynolds both of whom were founder members of the Royal Academy of Art. Copley set off in September of that year on a nine month European tour taking in Paris before moving to Italy and from there journeying north into Germany and the Low Countries. In 1775 whilst still in Europe, Copley became alarmed at the deteriorating political situation in America and for the safety of his family. In a letter to his step brother, Henry Pelham, he wrote:

“…if the Frost be severe and the Harbour frozen, the Town of Boston will be exposed to an attack; and if it should be taken all that have remained in the town will be considered as enemies to the Country and ill treated or exposed to great distress…”

Having also been alarmed about the situation at home, Copley’s wife and children, unbeknown to her husband, had already left Boston at the end of May 1775 and arrived in London where they stayed with her brother-in-law. Her father and her brothers followed shortly after. Copley returned from his European trip and he and his wife set up home in London where Copley remained for the rest of his life. By the start of the nineteenth century, life for Copley the artist, was becoming problematic. He was still painting but sales were declining probably due to the Napoleonic Wars. The house his family were living in was expensive to run and the cost of putting his son, John Jnr. through law school was proving costly. The problem for Copley was that he couldn’t equate the fall of his earning power with the necessity to rein back his expenditure. He became very depressed with life and by 1810 his health was concerning those around him. At a dinner party in August 1815 Copley suffered a stroke and although he seemed to be recovering, he suffered a second seizure the following month and died in September 1815, aged 77.

On his death, Copley was deep in debt and his barrister son, John, who would later become Lord Lyndhurst and Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, had to settle his father’s financial affairs, maintain his parents home and look after his mother, Susanna, until she died in 1836.

In My Daily Art Display today I am featuring the large oil on canvas painting entitled The Copley Family, by John Singleton Copley, which he completed in 1777 and is now housed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It measures 184cms x 229 cms (72 inches x 90 inches). He started this group portrait painting a year after his family had arrived from America and settled in London and shortly after he himself had returned from his artistic tour of Europe. Although an accomplished portraitist, this was the first time Copley had executed a group portrait. The figures are almost life-size and his talent as a portraitist ensure that they all have a life-like appearance.

Copley himself is seen standing at the back of the family group grasping a sheaf of sketches and stares out at us in a manner which gives the impression that he is about to introduce the members of the Copley family to us. Copley’s father-in-law, the once prosperous merchant, Richard Clarke is seated on the left of the painting, stern-faced avoiding our gaze, holding the youngest of his grand-daughters, Susanna. To the right of the painting we see Copley’s wife Susanna, cradling her son John. Look at how Copley has captured the look of love and tenderness in his wife’s face as she gazes down at her son. On the far right of the painting and to his wife’s left, her daughter, Mary, vies for her attention. Standing upright and in a formal pose is Copley’s eldest child, his daughter Elizabeth. It is interesting to note that in those days boys wore dresses like their sisters until they were about six or seven years of age and old enough to wear breeches.

Copley had decided on the setting of the painting so as to give an air of classical refinement. He has achieved that by the inclusion in the painting of elegant and fashionable furnishings and as we look over the shoulders of his sitters we see the ancient and classical Arcadian landscape à la Claude Lorrain and this background setting could well have come from paintings Copley had seen during his travel around Italy. This group portrait of a family is of greater intimacy as it is the father who has lovingly depicted the scene.

Staue of John Singleton Copley — Bronze statue of John Singleton Copley in Copley Park, Boston

John Singleton Copley’s hometown Boston has memorialised their artist by naming a city square after him, Copley Square, located in the Back Bay district of the city. The square-shaped park at the centre is a mass of greenery and on the north side is the bronze statue of the artist.

The Monk by George Inness

For my artist today I had decided to cross the Atlantic and look at the work of an American painter. I have always liked the beautiful landscape works of the Hudson River School artists and so I dipped into my book, which featured these painters and came up with George Inness. I particularly liked his superb and beautiful painting entitled Our Old Mill, which I had considered for today’s offering. It was only when I was researching his life and his works of art that I came across a hauntingly beautiful work of his entitled The Monk. It had little to do with the landscapes along the Hudson River but it was just too good to ignore. So today my featured artist is an American who was famous for his American landscapes, but you will just have to forgive me for abandoning those works. However I am sure that My Daily Art Display featured painting today will impress you.

George Inness was born in Newburgh, New York in 1825. He came from a very large family being the fifth of thirteen children of John William Inness, a farmer, and Clarissa Baldwin. In 1829 when George was just five years old the family moved to Newark, New Jersey. Inness began his artistic education at the age of fourteen when he received tuition from an itinerant artist, John Jesse Barker. Later he would work as a map engraver in New York and during the summer of 1843, he studied under the French painter, who had recently arrived from France, Régis-François Gignoux. From this he developed a great interest in art and enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where Gignoux taught, and the following year he exhibited his first work at the Academy. This was to be the beginning of a great partnership between the artist and the Academy.

In 1848 he opened his first studio in New York and he received his first commission. The following year he married Delia Miller but sadly she passed away a few months later. In 1850, at the age of twenty-five Inness marries Elizabeth Abigail Hart and the couple go on to have six children. The patronage of Ogden Haggerty allowed him to take a trip to Italy where he was able to paint and study the work of the great Italian masters. Once there, he fell in love with the beautiful Italian landscape. In all, he spent fifteen months in Rome and took the opportunity to study the works of the great landscape artists such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Whilst in Rome he rented a studio, which was in the same building as the American painter and portrait artist William Page who had arrived in the Italian capital two years earlier.

In 1853 Inness moved to Paris and began studying the work and technique of the French Barbizon landscape painters and soon Inness became the leading American exponent of the Barbizon-style of painting. His main influence was the work of The French painter, Pierre Étienne Théodore Rousseau, which totally captivated him. The Barbizon-style of painting, which uses loose brushwork and places an emphasis on mood, became part of the artist’s tools to create the luminous and atmospheric landscapes that eventually established Inness’ trademark. A year after the couple settled in Paris, their son George Junior was born. He would later become a leading landscape painter.

During the 1850’s, Inness received a lucrative commission from the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroads. The train operator wanted him to record and portray the progress of DLWRR’s growth in early Industrial America. George Inness and his family settled in the small town of Medfield, a suburb of Boston, where they remained for five years. It was during this time that Inness completed what art critics believed were some of his best paintings. In 1864, he was on the move once again. The family moved to the town of Eagleswood in New Jersey where he taught art. He made many trips to Europe, especially France and Italy where he lived between 1870 and 1874 before he returned to America and settled in Montclair, New Jersey.

In 1894 he and his family made a trip to Europe, visiting Paris, Munich and Baden-Baden before arriving in Scotland where on August 3^rd he and his son visited the famous beauty spot of Bridge of Allan. In Adrienne Baxter Bell’s biography of Inness entitled, George Inness and the Visionary Landscape she recounts the time as described by Inness’ son:

“…My father threw up his hands into the air and exclaimed ‘My God oh, how beautiful!’ fell to the ground and died minutes later….”

George Inness died aged 69. His funeral was held at the National Academy of Design in New York City and he was buried in West Orange, New Jersey.

George Inness painted today’s featured work, entitled The Monk, in 1873. Without doubt this can only be described as a haunting work and one of his best paintings. The setting of the painting is thought to be a secluded corner of the Villa Barberini, which is near the pope’s summer residence of Castel Gandolfo and lies a little distance south of Rome. Just to the right of centre in the foreground we see the small figure of a cowled monk, holding a staff, as he walks within the walled garden. He is diminutive in comparison to the tall stone wall behind him and further back, the cluster of tall slender pine trees that we see in the middle distance. Inness often painted just the odd figure in his landscapes. In most cases they would be solitary figures with a degree of anonymity. Look how Inness has portrayed the pine trees with their unusual shaped branches. They stand out so well against the brilliant yellow-ochre sky. The bright yellow light also filters between the slim branches which rise vertically to support the tree canopies.

I like this panting. I like the evocative nature of the depiction of the lone monk. I suppose it is his white cowl which gives the painting a ghostly feel. The painting can be found in the Addison Gallery of American Art, at the Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. The Phillips Academy is unique among secondary schools in the United States in as much as it is home to two museums, each of which is dedicated to educating and enriching its student community while also serving as a resource to the general public.

Unemployed by Ben Shahn

My featured artist today was quite unknown to me. I came across him and his paintings when I was flicking through an art book looking for information regarding another painter. One painting stood out from the rest and I have made it My Daily Art Display featured painting of today. There was something very haunting about the picture with its great sense of realism and I had to find out more about the work and the artist, Ben Shahn.

Ben Shahn was at the forefront of the American Social Realist art movement of the 1930s, a grouping, which included the likes of artists of the Ashcan School, many of whom I have featured in earlier blogs. Social Realism is a term used to describe visual and other realistic art works which record the everyday conditions of the working classes and mainly feature the life of the poor and deprived and how they had to live. The works are a pictorial criticism of the social environment that brought about these conditions. Social Realism has its roots back in the mid-19th century and the Realist movement in French art. Twentieth century Social Realism refers back to the works of the French artist such as Courbet and his painting Burial at Ornans or Millet’s great work The Gleaners. Social Reailsm art became an important art movement in America during their Great Depression of the 1930’s.

The art of the Social Realist painters often depicted cityscapes homing in on the decaying state of mining villages or broken-down shacks alongside railroad tracks. Their art is about poverty and the hardships endured by the ordinary but poor people. Often the works would focus on the indignity suffered by the poor and how they would work hard for little recompense. The depiction of this inequality of course implied a criticism of the capitalist society and capitalism itself. The Social Realist painters of America did not want their works to focus on the beauty of their country as portrayed by the likes of the Hudson River School painters. For them, to get their message across to the public, their works needed to depict the industrial suburbs with its grime and unpleasantness or the run-down farming communities with their broken-down buildings. Occasionally these artists would depict the rich in their paintings but they were only included for satirical reasons.

Ben Shahn was born in Kovno, Lithuania in 1898 and was the eldest of five children of an Orthodox Jewish family. His father, Joshua, was a woodcarver and cabinet maker. In 1902, probably because of his revolutionary activities, his father was exiled to Siberia. His mother, Gittel Lieberman, and her children moved to Vilkomir, which is now the Lithuanian town of Ukmerge. Four years later, in 1906, Shahn’s mother and three of her offsprings emigrated to America and settled in Brooklyn with Joshua who had already fled there from Siberia. Ben Shahn original artistic training was as a lithographer and then as a graphic artist.

At the age of twenty-one Shahn went to New York University and studied biology. Two years later he transferred to City College of New York to study art and then moved on to the New York National Academy of Design which is now known as The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts.

In 1924 Shahn married Tillie Goldstein and the two set off on a long journey of discovery taking in North Africa and the traditional artist pilgrimage of the capital cities of Europe taking in the works of the great European modern artists of the time such as Matisse, Picasso and Klee. He had not been won over by their art or the European Modernist art scene and soon felt less influenced by their work and preferred to follow the style of the Realists painters especially those who showed a concern for the plight of the downtrodden. Shahn was inspired by the likes of the photographer Walker Evans, the Mexican communist painter Diego Rivera and the French Realist painters. It was with Rivera that Shahn worked on the public mural at the Rockefeller Centre, which was to cause such controversy and had to be hidden from public view and eventually destroyed.

As a political activist Shahn became interested in newspaper photography. Photography was to act as his source material for some of his paintings and satires. During the 1930’s he was engaged in street photography himself, recording the lives of the working-class and immigrant populations and the hardship of the unemployed. Over the years Shahn, with his trusted 35mm Leica camera, built up a large collection of photographs which poignantly recorded the horror of unemployment and poverty during the Depression years.

My Daily Art Display featured painting is simply entitled Unemployment and was completed by Shahn in 1934. Shahn exhibited many paintings and photographs which highlighted the plight of the unemployed and homeless especially during the time of the Great Depression. Before us stand five men, all purported to be out of work. They look down on their luck. Their black eyes stare out at us. They stand upright trying to muster a certain amount of dignity despite the hopelessness of their situation. In some of their faces we see a look of desperation and fear of what their future may hold. The man in the right foreground has his arms folded across his chest. His look is more defiant almost questioning the viewer about what they intend to do about his plight. One man has a makeshift patch on his eye which makes him look even more vulnerable. I suppose Shahn and other Realist painters believed that through the moving nature of the subjects of their works it would help remind everybody of the horrors of life we could face and counsel us to avoid similar pitfalls in the future. Sadly, as in the case of war with its tragedies and horrors, we rarely learn by our mistakes and seem to always repeat our mistakes. There seems to be little we can do but shake our heads sympathetically as we view these Social Realist paintings and can only hope that we ourselves are never touched by similar tragedies.

Niagara by Frederic Edwin Church

My Daily Art Display for today returns to a painting by an American artist and another member of the Hudson River School, which was a mid-19th century American art movement personified by a group of landscape painters whose artistic vision was influenced by the 18^th century European Romanticism movement. The paintings for which the group is named depict the Hudson River Valley and the area around the Catskill, Adirondack and the White Mountain ranges. The artist is Frederic Edwin Church.

Frederic Church was born in Hartford Connecticut in 1826. His father, Joseph, was a silversmith and watchmaker and through his success and that of his father who had owned a paper mill, the Church household lived a prosperous lifestyle. Frederic studied art at school and through a family neighbour, Daniel Wadsworth, was fortunate enough to be introduced to Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, who agreed to take Frederic on as his pupil. Church thrived under Cole’s tutelage and within a year, he had some of his paintings shown in the National Academy of Design annual exhibition. The following year, 1848, Church was elected as the youngest Associate of the National Academy of Design and was promoted to Academician the following year. That year he sold his first major oil painting to the Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, which had been founded by Wadsworth.

In 1848 he went to live in New York and began to teach art. In his spare time in spring and autumn he would travel throughout New York and New England, particularly Vermont, all the time sketching the beautiful scenery whilst during the winter months he would return to New York City and his home and convert his numerous sketches into a number of landscape paintings, all of which sold well. Church and a friend set forth on an adventurous trip through Central America and Ecuador. From this trip, Church’s first finished South American pictures, shown to great acclaim in 1855, transformed his career. For the next decade he devoted a great part of his attention to those subjects, producing a celebrated series that became the basis of his ensuing international fame. During a two year period, 1854 to 1856, he travelled extensively visiting Nova Scotia, and journeying throughout Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and it was around this time that he visited the Niagara Falls. The late 1850’s were the high point of Church’s career, artistic triumph followed artistic triumph. In 1857 he made another trip to Ecuador and also took a voyage to Newfoundland and Labrador. In 1860, Church bought some farmland at Hudson, New York, and married Isabel Carnes, whom he had met during the exhibition of his paintings. He and his wife lead a settled and happy life and he spent most of his time tending to his farm but his happiness was shattered in 1865 when both his young children contracted diphtheria and died. However, with the birth of Frederic junior in 1866, Church and his wife began a new family that was eventually to number four children.

At the end of 1867, Frederic Church and his family embarked on a long trip to Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and Greece that was to last eighteen months and was to lead to several important paintings. As Church got older he spent more and more time on his farm and farming. From the 1870’s onwards Church suffered badly from rheumatoid arthritis and it badly affected his right arm which curtailed much of his art work although he did teach himself to paint with his left hand. Frederic Church died in 1900, aged 74 and is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Hartford, Connecticut.

Today’s painting by Frederic Church entitled Niagara is one of four he painted of this waterfall. This one was painted in 1857 and guaranteed for him, still a young man of thirty-one, the role of America’s most famous painter. It is probably the most famous painting of it ever made. During the 19th century, American artists flocked to the Falls to paint the various views of it. The Falls were looked upon as the nation’s greatest natural wonder. This picture was painted from the Canadian shore, a short distance above Table Rock, and includes the sweep of the Horseshoe Fall and the edge of Goat Island in a notable depiction of water and light. The time is towards evening. We can see an amazing amount of detail in every stage of the water’s journey as it cascades downwards. Look at how Church has incorporated an optical flourish of the rainbow against the falling waters.

The painting was introduced to the American public shortly after its completion, as a one-painting exhibition at the commercial gallery of Williams, Stevens, and Williams in New York City. People flocked to see the work and were willing to pay 25 cents each to view the monumental canvas, which measured 109cms x 230cms and sometimes they would use opera glasses or other optical aids to augment the experience. With their 25 cents admission fee the people would also receive a pamphlet that reprinted contemporary critics’ praise of Church’s picture and offered exhibition-goers the opportunity to purchase a print of the work. Within a fortnight of the exhibition’s opening more than a hundred thousand people had paid to see it. Art critics lavished praise on the work describing it as “the finest oil picture ever painted on this side of the Atlantic.” After this success in New York the painting was taken to a number of American cities before it made two tours of Britain and was exhibited at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris where it won a prize

The painting now hangs in the The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC

Fur Traders descending the Missouri by George Caleb Bingham

For My Daily Art Display today I cross the Atlantic and return to the nineteenth century in order to discover the art of George Caleb Bingham. Bingham was born in 1811 in Augusta County Virginia. He was the second of seven children to Mary and Henry Bingham and his early life should have been a life of plenty as his grandfather on his mother’s side passed on to his mother and father the family mill and a vast tract of land along with a number of slaves and servants. However when Caleb was seven years old, an unwise decision to stand surety for a friend’s debt by his father lost the family everything. It was time to move on and the family went West in search of their fortune.

The family settled in Missouri in the small town of Franklin in Howard County, a few miles north of the great Missouri River, and eventually Caleb’s father became a county judge. Sadly, when Caleb was only twelve, his thirty-eight year old father contracted malaria and died. The family moved to a farm just outside the town. Caleb spent much of his leisure time down by the river and many of his paintings he did as an adult featured this magnificent waterway. Caleb became an apprentice to a cabinet maker when he was sixteen years old and he was put to work painting signs. A few years earlier Caleb Bingham had met Chester Harding the portrait painter who had passed through Howard County looking for work. The artist had sparked an interest in art with Caleb, so much so that the teenager started to paint portraits of the local people which he sold for twenty dollars.

Bingham married Sarah Hutchinson in 1836 and the couple moved to the city St Louis where he was able to expand his artistic career and soon made a name for himself as a portrait painter. He travelled to Philadelphia where he spent some time at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before moving to Washington. He returned back to his Missouri home in 1844 and started painting river scenes, one of which is my featured painting today. As far as his paintings are concerned, it is reckoned that the period between 1845 and 1855 he produced his greatest works. In 1848 his wife died and his mother moved in with him to look after his children. She too died three years later. In 1856 Caleb made a trip to Europe with his second wife Eliza Thomas. He visited Paris and was able to fulfil one of his ambitions which was to study the works of the Great Masters at the Louvre. They moved on to Germany where the family lived in an artists’ colony and he enrolled at the Dusseldorf School of painting where he studied historical painting.

Eventually he and his family returned to America and he continued his lucrative career as a portraitist. He also fulfilled another of his ambitions; he entered politics and held positions in the state legislature of Missouri and later became president of the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners and was appointed their first chief of police. His second wife died in an asylum in 1876 and soon after he married for a third time. He became the first Professor of Art at the University of Missouri but he died in 1879, early into this tenure.

The painting I am featuring today in My Daily Art Display is entitled Fur Traders descending the Missouri which he completed in 1845. This was one of his genre paintings of everyday life on the Missouri River. He loved to depict the river boatmen and fur traders whose livelihood was tied up with this vast waterway. In some ways Bingham’s painting was out of date and it really was just his nostalic look back on the past as by 1845 when he completed this work, the world of the lone hunters and trappers bringing their pelts to trading posts by canoe was over, superseded by the big companies which shipped their commodities up and down the river by steamer and barge. The painting was originally titled French Trader, Half Breed Son. It was quite common in those days for fur traders to take up with Native American women. However when first exhibited the American Art Union considered the title to be, what we would now term, “not politically correct” and so the Art Union renamed it, hence its present title. In front of us we see an old French fur trader, wearing his liberty hat along with his son with their cargo, riding a dugout canoe along the shimmering Missouri River. In the centre of the canoe is their cargo of furs atop of which is a dead duck which will provide supper for the duo. In the prow of the craft is a tethered animal. I say “animal” for to me it looks like a cat but doing some research into the painting I believe it is supposed to be a small bear cub!

The light in the painting adds a haunting quality to the work and this is where I give you another “-ism” to think about – Luminism and the American Luminists. The term luminism came into being in the mid-twentieth century when art historians used the term to describe a 19th-century American painting style that arose as a derivative of the Hudson River School, examples of which I featured on Feb 4^th and Feb 9th. Luminism was a retrospective name given by art historians and was not a term used by the luminist artist themselves nor did they align themselves with the Hudson River School of painters. The landscapes of Luminists could be characterised by the use of clear and cool colours. It was hard to detect brushstrokes in paintings done by the luminists. These artists liked to paint very large works emphasising nature’s grand scale that emphasized tranquillity, reflective water and soft hazy skies.

Today’s featured painting was looked upon as Caleb Bingham’s most famous, evoking an era in America’s early history. There is no question that the painting today is a prime example of luminism. I am amazed by the aura of serenity and stillness I detect in this painting. The composition is well balanced. There is no hint of any motion and yet we know the small craft is carrying its passengers downstream. Caleb Bingham will have seen such sights many times over when he lived near the banks of the Missouri. It was thanks to the paintings of the likes of Bingham that folk back in the East learnt about the pioneering push to the West as although cameras had been invented before the time of this painting, photographs were expensive to produce and so for the ordinary people works of art were their window to the West.