Scenic impressions: Southern interpretations from the Johnson Collection 9781611176759, 9781611177176, 1611177170

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SCENIC IMPRESSIONs southern interpretations

the johnson collection

SCENIC IMPRESSIONs southern interpretations

the johnson collection

estill curtis pennington & martha r. severens

the johnson collection in association with the university of south carolina press

© The Johnson Collection, LLC, 2015 The Johnson Collection PO Box 3524, Spartanburg, South Carolina 29304-3524 864.585.2000 thejohnsoncollection.org David Henderson, Director Sarah Tignor, Collection Manager & Registrar Lynne Blackman, Public Relations & Publications Coordinator Aimee Wise, Collection Assistant Holly Watters, Collection Assistant All rights reserved. Unless otherwise noted, all images are property of the Johnson Collection, LLC. Copublished in partnership with the University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina 29208. 800.768.2500 www.sc.edu/uscpress Editor: Lynne Blackman Photography: Carroll Foster, Hot Eye Photography, Spartanburg, South Carolina; Tim Barnwell Photography, Asheville, North Carolina; Rick Phodes Photography and Imaging, LLC, Charleston, South Carolina Design: Gee Creative, Charleston, South Carolina Production: Printed in Canada by Friesens ISBN 978-1-61117-675-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ This volume accompanies the exhibition of the same title. Exhibition venues include: Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia Frontispiece: Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876–1958), Swamp Scene, watercolor on paper, 21¾ x 115/8 inches (detail). Cover: Hattie Saussy (1890–1978), Path with Mossy Trees, oil on canvas mounted on masonite, 18 x 26 inches (detail). ISBN 978-1-61117-717-6 (ebook)

7 preface david henderson 8 foreword

kevin sharp

11 the larger world of scenic impressions estill curtis pennington 27 some things that are charming martha r. severens

45 works of art 133 artist biographies 185 annotations 210 index 214 acknowledgments 215 the johnson collection

in this day of the ever-present cell phone camera, it might be difficult to imagine the efforts that artists once made to record a memorable view for posterity. Preparation required far more than the overnight charging of a battery or the availability of GPS monitoring. Travel was arduous and conveniences were limited, as was a reliable clientele or lucrative commercial infrastructure, especially for painters working in the South. No, the artists presented in this study invested considerable intention to the discovery and delineation of places of particular beauty. Whether the setting was extraordinary or everyday, artists hoping to capture the moment went to great lengths to provide their patrons with “scenic impressions” that transcribed venue, color, and mood. The experience was a physical and tactile one, and the connection between artist and locale deeply felt. The best paintings reflect such synergy and reward the effort. Intention, location, connection, and synergy have been driving forces in the establishment of the Johnson Collection as well. In just over thirteen years, what began as aesthetic experiment has evolved into cultural statement. To amass a collection (of any sort, really) according to well-defined parameters is fairly straightforward; it can be, at its most fundamental level, purely transactional. What sets meaningful and significant collections apart is effort: the willingness to dig deeper, to discern carefully, and to never settle. A command of the history in question is important, but personal resonance with that history is indispensable, even for a transplanted Canadian like me. In guiding the collection’s acquisitions, my understanding of market conditions has been imperative, but so has the awareness that true value is often determined by far less tangible measurements than price-per-square-inch calculations and sales records. The Johnson family’s vision, and fidelity to that vision, is more critical to the collection’s vitality than their endowment. That they have allowed me to pursue my passion for Southern art in the collection’s name has been a privilege. It has given me a proverbial second act rich with revelation and joy. As the collection evolves, developing nuance and depth, it remains true to its original mission to advance the narrative of Southern art within the national cultural context. Scholarship on the subject is paramount, as evidenced by this, our third volume in as many years. We will continue to interpret the South and champion the cause with an eye toward making an ever clearer impression on the field of American art.

Opposite: Lawrence Mazzanovich (1871–1959), Smoky Mountains, oil on canvas, 253/8 x 251/4 inches (detail).

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david henderson director, the johnson collection spartanburg, south carolina

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i remember a time when we almost never discussed american Impressionist painting. The French inventors of the movement, style, and technique (or whatever it was) were so much riper in their way; their pictures just had more air in their lungs, as I heard one colleague describe the difference years ago, and I agreed. At the time, we were not entirely sure what American Impressionism was—or even if such a thing truthfully existed. When we finally did start talking about American painters of the Impressionist era—neatly avoiding the term American Impressionism, which we distrusted—they were typically the grand expatriates. We sought American artists who had opened studios or planted easels alongside their counterparts in England, Holland, or (of course) France, and had the good sense to remain there. We discussed this mere handful of painters for the longest time, and in nothing less than excruciating detail. Actually, we are still discussing them. It was only later—much later, in fact—that we became interested in the (so-called) American Impressionists, who lived their lives and managed their careers within the boundaries of the United States. We preferred them to have made at least one extended trip to Paris, or to Giverny, or both. And we were only willing to seriously consider artists who after returning from their French sojourns established themselves in New York studios or with notable Manhattan galleries, clubs, or institutions. Granted, we eventually came around to Philadelphia, Boston, and much of New England as well, but there we had to draw the line. From the massive and magisterial book, American Impressionism (1984) by William H. Gerdts, we came to understand that there had been artists in every corner of the United States—not just the Northeast—whose paintings undeniably resembled Impressionism. By the time his Art Across America was published six years later, the number of painters he identified further afield had grown considerably (especially in Volume 2, which catalogues Southern and Midwestern artists). But how were we to account for these artists in the context of Impressionism? Some of them had never left the towns in which they were born, let alone traveled to Giverny. It was puzzling, and easier to dismiss their efforts as mimicry than to contend with it as expression. So, rather than contend, we ignored it. It turns out that we were spectacularly and even proudly parochial in our likes and dislikes about Impressionism. It turns out that by focusing so intently on our preference for riper artists with lungs full of air, we were missing one of Impressionism’s more intriguing qualities—its remarkable durability as an international style

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and especially its longevity in the United States. Decades after most French painters were exploring other

movements, styles, and techniques, it turns out that American artists were continuing to extract expressive value from the Impressionist aesthetic. Even if they later abandoned Impressionism for something altogether different, American painters—fully two generations of them, at least—saw it as a well lit pathway toward the vanguard. And it happened border-to-border, coast-to-coast. By the time we finally grasped that there was something compelling to say about American Impressionism— as practiced in places other than Paris, Giverny, New York, etc.—there were already very good scholars and curators, collectors, and (admittedly) art dealers discussing the subject in the context of those other places. Their animated (sometimes partisan) conversations were finding attentive listeners and particularly in and around such relevant communities as Doylestown, Pennsylvania; Charleston, South Carolina; Nashville, Indiana; Taos, New Mexico; Oakland and Laguna Beach, California; and a dozen other towns and cities, maybe more. The conversations continue to this day, and have only become more interesting over time. All those years ago, long before we started talking about American Impressionism, the last place on earth we would have looked for signs of its existence was in the South. You see, we (many of us) labored under the false assumption that there was no history of painting, no valid or notable culture of art making, selling, or collecting in the South. We were perfectly earnest and sincere in this belief, and meant no disrespect by it. You could and should go southward for good antique furniture, for textiles, or for ceramics, we insisted, but certainly not for paintings. When we (some of us) finally did open our eyes, we were amazed to find painters, paintings, and cultures of appreciation all across the South—in Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta, Charlotte, Birmingham, Memphis, Jackson, and New Orleans to be sure, but also in intriguing spots like Holly Springs, Mississippi; Blowing Rock, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Spartanburg, South Carolina, to name but a few. Moreover, the paintings that emerged from these politely reticent and determinedly Southern places were quite good, and they often spoke to the region in which they were made in eloquent dialects of Impressionism. Scenic Impressions, yet another absorbing exhibition and catalogue organized by the Johnson Collection in Spartanburg, presents the indelible Southern landscape painted by native sons and daughters who worked in one variant or another of the Impressionist idiom. Almost slyly, the show also features works by painters more typically associated with Northern climes, who at least for one interval dipped their brushes into Southern sceneries and sensibilities. As an ensemble, the works in Scenic Impressions describe a region as varied and irrepressible as the Impressionist aesthetic itself. It is hard to believe we once doubted these artists and paintings existed. We do not anymore. kevin sharp linda w. and s. herbert rhea director dixon gallery and gardens, memphis, tennessee

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SCENIC IMPRESSIONs estill curtis pennington

on may 15, 1863, one of the most significant art exhibitions held in the nineteenth century opened at the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris. This installation of paintings by artists who had been rejected from the annual Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts was popularly known as the Salon des Refusés. Among those who submitted their work were the painters Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and the American expatriate James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Participation in the counter-exhibition was completely voluntary, a democratic innovation conceived by the Emperor Napoleon III who announced that he wished “to let the public judge the legitimacy of these claims” against the official Salon, whose yearly displays were deemed, at least by the French, to be of global consequence.1 The involvement of the republic’s leader in settling a highly fractious dispute between the established academic art world and a disparate group of collectors, dealers, artists, and critics indicates both the power of the Salon to make or break an artist’s reputation, and the general public’s enthusiasm for the exhibition. During the haute bourgeois days of the Second Empire, tens of thousands of people attended these annual Salons. Whether those legions of would-be connoisseurs were truly interested in art is irrelevant. They understood that the Salon season was the time to see and be seen in Paris, to shop, to eat, to drink, to play, and to absorb officially sanctioned taste.2 As manifest in the works of William Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, and JéanLeon Gérôme, this taste reflected a preference for paintings whose solidity of form, vivid coloration, and

Opposite: Édouard Manet (1832–1883), Le Déjeuner sur I’herbe [The Luncheon on the Grass], 1863, oil on canvas, 208 x 264.5 cm. Inv. RF1668. Photo: Benoit Touchard/Mathieu Rabeau. Musée d’Orsay. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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thematic implication of moral purpose elevated them above the banalities of everyday life.

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A rejection of that style was on flagrant display in the fleshy realism, bold design, and jarring color contrasts of Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe [The Luncheon on the Grass] (page 10), the painting which attracted more attention and commentary than any other work shown at the Salon des Refusés. In Manet’s densely wooded setting, four figures are seen in the aftermath of a luncheon al fresco. Manet's composition playfully recalls the high baroque organization of the planar field into foreground, mid-ground, and rearground, wherein figural placement is arranged to enhance perspective and establish depth. In the mid-ground, we see three figures: two men fully clothed in the attire of the day and a nude woman at their side. In the background, a woman is bathing in the forest stream. To the left in the foreground, the seated nude’s clothes sit in a chaotic heap beside a tilted basket spilling the repast’s remains upon the grass. The naked woman and her companion to the right gaze out in a pleasant, casual manner which clearly acknowledges the viewer’s presence. Their male companion on the right peers into the background, his arm and hand extended in a mannerist gesture giving two signals—for while he looks within, he points without. The blatant nudity in the midst of modern dress, without a trace of self-consciousness, proved outrageous to bourgeois sensibility. After touring the exhibition with the Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III deemed the painting “immodest.” A verbose British critic had far more to say, denouncing the “wretched Frenchman” who had proved “that the nude, when painted by vulgar men, is inevitably indecent.”3 Manet was not without his defenders. Writing in his daily reports from the exhibition, Zacharie Astruc proclaimed Manet “one of the greatest artistic characters of the time! . . . He is [the Salon des Refusés’] brilliance, inspiration, powerful, flavor, surprise. Manet’s talent has a decisive side that startles.”4 Émile Zola, the iconoclast novelist and a champion of the Impressionist aesthetic, thought the nudes in the painting to be inoffensive essays in natural flesh tones.5 In a modernist moment, Zola envisioned the painting as a departure from convention and was able to simultaneously appreciate the content and technique without assessing some moral purpose by which the painting could be categorized. Ironically, like many of Manet’s works, The Luncheon on the Grass draws on classical compositional sources, in this case Raphael and Giorgione. Edgar Degas later commented on this practice: “Manet drew inspiration from everywhere . . . but with what marvelous handling of the brush did he not make something new of it!”6 That The Luncheon on the Grass should continue to be a difficult picture to read adds to the mystique which makes it, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, an enduring art historical icon. Setting aside the debate about the painting’s narrative context permits us to acknowledge the work’s central role in establishing one of the recurring themes of the Impressionist movement: the artist is an outsider in society whose works offer the viewing public more trenchant insight because they are drawn from inspired personal vision rather than academic consensus. After the Salon des Refusés, the supremacy of the academy was doomed. In one reading of Impressionism, the modern era begins at Manet’s picnic, when a shocking painting provoked a public

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debate about the very role of art in society.

to accept the impressionist impulse as a truly revolutionary moment in the history of art, attention must be focused upon distinct shifts in technique and subject matter. Not only did Manet’s painting contain controversial narrative elements, it was also executed in a style which detoured from fixed academic canon. As mirrored by their contemporary literary counterparts, the Impressionist artists sought to represent the essence of what they saw, unconstrained by formulaic principles of representation. Painting en plein air—or in the open air—with a heightened sensitivity to the subtle nuances of nature, particularly variances in the atmospheric reflections of sunlight, became a central element in the emerging

Above: Jean Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870), Summer Scene, 1869, oil on canvas, 63 x 63¼ inches. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. F. Meynier de Salinelles, 1937.78. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Impressionist style. As the movement matured, several of its adherents became minutely preoccupied with

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the shading of light. To fully explore such subtleties, Impressionist painters developed a much more textured surface than that of more traditional practitioners and executed their work in lighter, more vibrant colors whose close harmonic values add to the sense of spontaneous expression.7 This transition can be clearly traced in the movement’s development. Manet’s picnic painting still employs the use of rather heavy contrasts to suggest volume, depth, and perspective. Manet continued to carry a deep black on his palette, unlike Claude Monet, who was shocked when John Singer Sargent asked him for a bit of black while painting outdoors. Manet’s contemporary, Frédéric Bazille, had already begun to employ more luminous color in sun-lit scenes unrestrained by sobering shadow. Descended from a family of well-to-do French wine makers, Bazille went to Paris to study medicine at his father’s behest. Far more interested in literature and the fine arts, he shared studio space with the fledgling artists Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir at his own expense. He was philosophically aligned with the artists who participated in the Salon des Refusés, and his apartment in the Rue de la Condamine became, between 1868 and 1870, a gathering place for writers, musicians, and painters. Bazille was passionately concerned with light and color as borne out in his last major painting, Summer Scene (Bathers), which was on view at the Salon of 1870, six months before his death in the Franco-Prussian War.

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Though executed in 1869 and debuted four years before the inaugural Impressionist exhibition—as mounted

Above: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Luncheon of the Boating Party, between 1880 and 1881, oil on canvas, 51¼ x 691/8 inches. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

by the Société Anonyme des Artistes in 1874—the work is an astonishing definition of the technical and luminescent goals of the new style. Like Manet’s picnic, Summer Scene is staged in a rather theatrical manner. The setting is pastoral, populated by several male figures, in poses of activity or rest in a dazzling bright field. Seen from a panoramic viewpoint, the various men spread out in a subtle horizontal spandrel defined by the curve of the river bank. Unlike Manet’s work, none of the subjects directly engage the viewer. Some of the figures stem from historical sources, like the young man standing to the left, whose pose recalls the martyred form of St. Sebastian. Others—like the two men wrestling or the figure climbing from the water on the right—were drawn from actual sketches made by the artist from life. The foreshortened perspective and disengaged male figures may account for one critical determination of the “undeniable strangeness.” Bazille himself acknowledged this conundrum when he wrote a friend that he would “arrive in Paris with a single painting, which you may find atrocious; I don’t know where it’s going.”8 While he may not have known where it was going, it is quite clear where he has been: outdoors. As precursors to Impressionism per se, Manet and Bazille’s paintings embody the stylistic evolution from academic studio work drawn from formulaic sources to the pleinairist interest in natural observation first pursued by the artists of the Barbizon School. While both were also caught up in the public critical debate about what was—and was not—appropriate subject matter for contemporary painting, they each still relied upon historical sources for compositional elements, particularly in figurative pose. Following the 1874 exhibition of the Société Anonyme des Artistes, another critical theme of Impressionism, the portrayal of leisure time, can be detected. Growing prosperity and a continuing diminution of the hierarchical power of the aristocratic elite introduced increased leisure time to the burgeoning middle class of France’s Third Republic. This evolution afforded artists the opportunity to depict individuals at rest and play, radically shifting notions of sanctioned subject matter. In the process, the heroic figures that had dominated academic art were supplanted by bourgeois men and women in the pursuit of pleasure.9 Born to a working class family, Auguste Renoir was a rare individual in nineteenth century life: an upwardly mobile artist who overcame the limitations of his background to achieve considerable success. Renoir’s charming compositions of plump, pretty pink women in ribbons and flowers invite the viewer into a world of comfort, ease, and charm, making him the most approachable of the Impressionist artists. While these very abilities have led to a tendency to dismiss him as being of less substance than Monet, Manet, or Edgar Degas, his continuity as a strong public favorite tells much about Impressionism’s enduring appeal. Of Renoir’s best known works in this country, none is more familiar than Luncheon of the Boating Party.10 A seemingly casual depiction of a boisterous gathering on the river bank, it is actually a complex composition which merges mainstream European traditions in design with revolutionary elements of light and color. The entire group of figures that occupies the area beneath the awning is confined within a rhomboid space created by the rigid angle of the promontory, enlivened by the flapping lines of the canvas fringe. A support pole in the center rear ground defines the point upon which the angular lines of the composition converge, leading the

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eye back and dividing the planar field into two distinct episodes. To the left, a burly man leans against the rail

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behind a young coquette holding up a fluffy little dog to which she coos. An abundant still life of fruit, wine, and bread crumbs attests to the midday meal the revelers have enjoyed. On the right, tight little groups are engaged in noisy, lively conversation, evidenced by the gesture of one young woman placing her hands over her ears. Interestingly, classical balance and symmetry abound. The figural group to the right is offset by the relative isolation of the two principal figures on the left, while the strategic use of red highlights to outline the figures enhances volumetric mass. Renoir’s delightful compositions and seductive colors set a precedent which was easy to imitate, but difficult to match. Speaking to a specific moment in time, Renoir celebrates the arrival of leisure, relaxation, and the classless associations implicit within the makeup of the boating party.

these three enchanting french paintings offer a visual vocabulary of style, color, and content prefiguring the scenic impressions of various artists working in the United States. Yet, from the very moment those surging currents of change coalesced into the Impressionist movement, American artists and collectors were present. Not since legions of young American painters had flocked to Benjamin West’s studio in eighteenth century London did such a rich cross-fertilization transpire. By the turn of the century, the essential themes of Impressionism had permeated the American art world to such an extent that an identifiable American Impressionism is now seen as one of the defining moments in national art history. As William Gerdts has observed, “the vital potency of the Impressionist movement in American art is celebrated not only in its aesthetic legacy but in the richness, beauty, and diversity of its own pictorial achievements.”11 The powerful precedent of three American expatriate artists in particular—James Whistler, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent—would prove especially influential. Whistler, who had been expelled from West Point by Robert E. Lee before moving abroad to pursue an artistic career, certainly qualified as a creative rebel. His entry in the Salon des Refusés, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862), was a portrait of his Irish mistress, Joanna Hiffernan—an arresting and monumental work that had the distinction of being rejected by both the Royal Academy and the Parisian Salon. The Massachusetts native had much in common with the fledgling French Impressionists. Like Bazille, Whistler had studied for a while in Charles Gleyre’s studio; under Gustave Courbet’s influence, he experimented with pleinairism. He also shared with Manet an evolving aesthetic which considered depictions of the figure as an opportunity for expressing his color sensibilities and painterly regard for naturalistic textures. When hung at the Salon des Refusés, The White Girl proved almost as controversial as Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass. Critical response ranged from assumptions that the image depicted a young bride on the night after her deflowering, stunned and dazed by the experience, to a medium whose psychic powers rendered her aloof from worldly concerns. Manet, Whistler’s fellow traveler in contemporary realism, acknowledged the American artist’s influence upon his work. Though The White Girl was Whistler’s first significant public success, his was a presence already quite well known in French art circles, and he proved to be one of the more significant American

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expatriates on the European art scene. Frederick Wedmore, the English art critic, deemed his work to be “like

Opposite: James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 1862, oil on canvas, 837/8 x 42½ inches. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Harris Whittemore Collection 1943.6.2.

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that of the Impressionists in two respects—it aims generally to record what the eye actually sees, and not what the mind knows the eye ought to see, and likewise it addresses itself with courage and confidence to the artistic problems of modern life, and our artificial society.”12 Ultimately, Whistler’s late Tonalist experiments in depicting light and air would prove inspirational for several artists essaying the Southern scene in the early twentieth century. Mary Cassatt, daughter of a wealthy Pennsylvania businessman, was an early and rare instance of the selfactualizing woman artist, the acceptance of whose work by the Salon in 1874 launched a career in France, where she would spend the remainder of her long life. In 1877, she met Edgar Degas, who became both friend and mentor, and who introduced her to the Impressionist circle. Her paintings were shown with the Impressionists in 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886, giving her the singular distinction of being the only American— and only one of two women—included in those legendary group exhibitions. Cassatt shared with Degas a deep interest and sure talent for pastel and for complicated printmaking techniques. Conveyed in richly glowing colors, her subject matter explored the pictorial potential of domestic

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scenes of everyday life—the act of pouring tea, bathing the baby, or enjoying an afternoon stroll—in a way

Above: Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844–1926), Breakfast in Bed, 1897, oil on canvas, 255/8 x 29 inches. © Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California.

that imbues the most ordinary of moments with a sense of reverie. In her art, Cassatt “developed a feeling for individual character, natural charm and grace, for genuine sentiment as well as tenderness and harmonious accord.”13 Her choice of subject matter would find powerful echoes in the genteel Southern Impressionism of Helen Turner and Catherine Wiley. (See pages 124 and 128.) John Singer Sargent was surely the most virtuoso artist of the three seminal expatriates, but the least easy to categorize. Whether or not Sargent was truly an Impressionist is a matter of semantics, poised between definitions of the style as a painterly shift in craft and technique, or as a radical departure from conventions for compositional pictorialism. Best known for monumental society portraits of old English gentry and new American money, Sargent shared Manet’s penchant for bravura brushwork and darker tonalities. Sargent’s work also reflects an inclination for public statement and private reverie—a reflection, perhaps, of the artist’s own enigmatic personality. Having spent the first part of his career in Paris, he was acquainted with both Impressionism and certain of the Impressionist artists. He seems to have met Monet at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1876, and during the next two decades, the artists maintained a cordial relationship. Partially inspired by Monet’s example, Sargent began a series of pleinairist experiments, the results of which differed substantially from his portraiture. In the summer of 1885, following the disastrous premiere and ensuing scandal of his suggestively alluring Portrait of Madame X (1884), Sargent abandoned life in France for England. During that summer and the next, he spent a great deal of time in the Cotswolds, where he created his pleinairist masterpiece Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (page 21). Sargent’s scene depicts two young girls in white dresses lighting paper lanterns amidst a garden profuse with carnations, lilies, and damask roses, illuminated by golden twilight. It was an enormous challenge, which the artist considered a “fearful, difficult subject. Impossible brilliant colors of flowers, and lamps and brightest green lawn background. Paints are not bright enough, & then the effect only lasts ten minutes.”14 Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was the sensation of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1887. British critics were divided as to whether or not the work was truly impressionistic, and if so, what that might mean. At least one reviewer considered it an example of the “dab and spot” school of French art. William Gerdts views the painting as a prime example of the transformational aspect of American Impressionism. “Sargent’s mastery could be seen to lie not in the picture’s Impressionist light, color and broken brushwork, but rather in its overall decorativeness and in the subtle expressivity of the figures. This critical emphasis corresponded with the reading of Impressionism that was developing in England and which, ultimately, found its way to America.”15 Sargent’s greatest admirer in the American expatriate community was the writer Henry James. James was responsible, in part, for introducing the American public to the Impressionists in an article he published in the New York Tribune on May 13, 1876. Approaching Impressionism as a counterpoint to the English Pre-Raphaelitism, he described the new movement’s practitioners as “partisans of unadorned reality and absolute foes to arrangement, embellishment, [and] selection.” James recognized that the Impressionists were

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concerned with that which was inherently beautiful, not that which could be tarted up to seem beautiful. “Let

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it alone, they say, and it will come at its own pleasure; the painter’s proper field is simply the actual, and to give a vivid impression of how a thing happens to look at a particular moment, is the essence of his mission.”16 In taking up the antique argument between that which is universally acknowledged to be beautiful and that which is not, James clearly identifies the American climate of taste into which Impressionism plunged.

if the essential themes of the impressionist movement concern intellectual rebellion, revolutionary artistic technique, and the deliberate selection of non-traditional subject matter, then the American artistic community was ill prepared for the run. Unlike the French and English, the Americans had no established, truly national academy or entity against which iconoclastic artists could assert the social concerns of a fledgling avant-garde.17 Without such an authority, American art also lacked a defining academic style, like that of France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts, from which a painterly mode concerned with light, color, and broken brushwork could depart. As to choosing a more naturalistic subject matter, there the Americans may have already preceded the French. Picaresque characters were pervasive in nineteenth century literature and genre painting, giving initial American naturalism a humorous vein and a subtle substance. What some Americans did have was money, and lots of it. Following the Civil War, the demise of traditional agrarianism and rise of modern industrialization resulted in unprecedented American wealth. The spirit of New England Calvinism, with its dire warnings of vanity and over-indulgence, became as passé as Old South infatuations with classical education and a mannered, hierarchical society. What the American nouveau riche of the late nineteenth century wanted was taste, and for this they turned to Europe. There, they found more than sufficient antiquities to haul back and admire. They also found a new painting style which happily satisfied their longing to impress: Impressionism. Improvements in communication and transportation assuaged the American thirst to stay abreast of European trends, thus blunting the reputation for provincialism. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the East Coast public was privy to several major showings of recent French art. In 1883, the American Exhibition of the Products, Arts and Manufactures of Foreign Nations (known as the Boston Foreign Fair) featured works by Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, and Pissaro. During that same year, J. Carroll Beckwith and William Merritt Chase organized an Impressionist exhibition under the auspices of the National Academy of Design. Proceeds from this show were contributed to the fund drive to erect a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, further proof of Franco-American cordiality. Paul Durand-Ruel, the influential Parisian dealer, held an exhibition in New York in 1886. The fervor of this interest surely culminated during the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 when Bertha Honoré Palmer organized a showing of French Impressionists drawn from private collections to offset their lamentable absence from the fair’s French art pavilion: “in the French exhibit appeared not a single canvas from the Impressionists—at that time the most innovative and most truly native of French painters—whereas in the American exhibit could be found not only some of the best works of the

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native school . . . but also the works of American students of Impressionism.”18

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Above: John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885–1886, oil on canvas, 68½ x 60½ inches. Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1887. Photo © Tate, London 2015.

Indeed, American collectors were diligent in the acquisition of these works. Under Mary Cassatt’s influence, Louisine Elder Havemeyer began to assemble a collection of French Impressionist paintings which eventually found its way into the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Bertha Palmer’s paintings formed the nucleus of the formidable Art Institute of Chicago collection, which grew to include some of the great masterpieces of the era. Well into the twentieth century, American families like the Johnsons and Wideners in Philadelphia, and the Phillipses in Washington, D.C., purchased works which have made American public collections among the most important holdings of Impressionism in the world. French Impressionism also appeared on the American scene at a moment when schools for teaching art were becoming established institutions. While Thomas Eakins and Thomas Anschutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts may not have been Impressionists as such, they shared the French interest in realism, naturalism, and the painterly mode.19 Over time, the academy’s faculty would include a roster of luminaries—Joseph De Camp, Theodore Robinson, Robert Vonnoh, and J. Alden Weir—further ratifying Philadelpia’s place as polestar in the Impressionist milieu. In New York, the establishment of the Cooper Union and the Art Students League attracted influential instructors such as William Merritt Chase, Frank

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Vincent DuMond, Robert Reid, and others.

Above: William Merritt Chase, ca. 1900/unidentified photographer. Rockwell Kent Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

American teaching techniques were loosely derived from the French model. A cursory survey of biographical details of American Impressionists invariably shows some connection to the Académie Julian in Paris. Founded by Rodolphe Julian and conducted as yet another manifestation of the atelier system, the eponymous school was more like a teeming consortium of artists than an institution with a rigorous academic agenda. While the older academies in Paris, which the Impressionist movement soon supplanted, concentrated on the drawing of the figure from life and plaster casts, as well as the craft of laying down colors of close value in harmonic concentration, the Académie Julian was much less structured. Its relaxed atmosphere made it “especially attractive to enterprising young artists: the teaching was flexible, and there were no restrictions; it was open every day except Sunday from eight in the morning until nightfall” unlike other institutions which closed in the early afternoon. Most importantly, “there were no entry requirements, and it was much frequented by foreigners, who were excluded from the official educational system,” as were women of any nationality.20 From the descriptions of noise and activity, it becomes apparent that perhaps the most valuable commodity which emerged from Julian’s atelier was a raucous exchange of ideas. As painting technique moved beyond the rigid sanctions of academic composition, teaching became a matter of developing sufficient technical craft to provide a sturdy platform for idiosyncratic embellishment. George du Maurier describes the artists in this setting as “animated by a certain esprit de corps, and working very happily and genially together, on the whole, and always willing to help each other with sincere artistic counsel if it was asked for seriously, though it was not always couched in terms very flattering to one’s self-love.”21 As the most prominent American teacher, William Merritt Chase was able to foster and perpetuate this atmosphere by the power of his flamboyant personality. Charismatic, nattily dressed, and perennially supportive, he did much “to elevate the profession to a degree of social acceptance and even dignity.” His preoccupation with status and productivity were entirely in accord with the American spirit. Chase had little difficulty in eliciting a sincere endeavor on the part of his pupils, whom “he claimed generally had a strong desire to become ‘real painters, with ambition to excel, but above all, with ambition to do work of permanent value.’”22

until 1883, claude monet pursued a somewhat itinerant existence, working intermittently in Paris, Argenteuil, and Vétheuile, experimenting with light in landscape painting,

while sustaining an interest in still life and the figure. Though his painting Impression, soleil levant [Impression, Sunrise] (page 25) had given the entire movement a name, he was never an ardent member of any group. His pictures were hung in the Société Anonyme des Artistes exhibition of 1874, but thereafter he largely operated on his own. The considerable impact he exerted on two generations of American and French painters derived entirely from the respect that artistic community accorded his masterful approach to light, shadow, and color, and not from any role he played as a teacher or the convivial centerpiece of some extended atelier. After 1880, the dealer Durand-Ruel began to have increasing success selling Monet’s pictures, securing the

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artist sufficient income to relieve his economic anxieties. In 1883, Monet moved to Giverny, a small village

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some forty miles northwest of Paris on the east bank of the River Seine, where he lived until his death in 1926. By 1890, he had purchased his rented house; three years later, he undertook a massive landscaping project, creating a garden whose ambience—part Japanese, part romantic abandon—provided subject matter for his most iconic works: the monumental paintings of lily ponds, flowering arches, and the curvilinear bridge spanning the stream he diverted for his flowering basins. Once settled in Giverny, Monet seems to have found the perfect terrain for his probing depictions of natural light at various times of the day. Daniel Wildenstein, one of his major biographers, notes that to paint what was reflected in the water, the movement of leaves before the light, the mist veiling the sun, a sunset or sunrise, Monet had only to follow the natural slope of the land from his house to the fields and meadows laced by water and trees. There the landscape, shimmering in the iridescent light, was constantly changing, and the hills—depending on the weather—seemed alternately purple and blue, close and far away. It was Impressionism at its purest, registered instantaneously in a natural setting that was always new and endlessly absorbing.23

Like the American Luminists, Monet sought to paint what he saw with a sensitivity and expressiveness entirely compatible with Impressionist notions of the veracity of distinctly personal observation. Preoccupied with infinitesimal changes in light, he began a series of series: poplars on the river bank from dawn to dusk, the front of Rouen Cathedral glancingly resistant to the brilliance of light, supernal haystacks coming to earth with a mysteriously powerful presence, and mists on the Seine. Giverny quickly became a teeming mecca for American artists flocking to France on cultural pilgrimage. By 1887, an art colony had been established in the village, and, over the next forty years, it remained an American outpost, attracting scores of notable expatriates, including J. Carroll Beckwith, John Leslie Breck, William de Leftwich Dodge, Frederick Frieseke, Ellen Day Hale, Richard Miller, Lawton Parker, Pauline Palmer, Lilla Cabot Perry, Louis Ritter, and Blondelle Malone (page 98) among others. Monet’s presence in the community provided a sympathetic, rather than a pedagogical, inspiration. He refused to take pupils, rarely gave interviews, and when questioned concerning technique would bark back: “Paint from nature!” Certainly none of the first Americans painting in the Giverny environs were concerned with the more subtle nuances of light and air, although most of them were at least in the process of becoming aware of the importance and potential of pleinairism. Actually, the village seems to have become an extension of the fertile bonhomie of the Parisian atelier, a “place where expatriate Americans could lead a bohemian life in an atmosphere sympathetic to their experimentation and development as painters.”24 Still, the shadows of Giverny fell far across American art, finally coming to rest in the decided preference of many of the Southern Impressionists for scenes cast in a warm, evocative late light. While they may not have been purist practitioners of the Giverny mood, they do summon its spirit. That they willfully created what Monet sought to sensitively observe is a subtlety requiring a considered reassessment of the communication of style to Southern painters, as well as a careful evaluation of the uses to which that style was deployed.

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If Southern Impressionism has a unique character, then it may be seen to proceed from the use of local color to

represent a place and a culture existing outside the prevailing national pattern. Today, the regional distinctions of the early twentieth century seem quite remote. But they were surely in place, and compatible with, the era in which painters of the Southern scene created a particular and powerful body of Impressionist art.

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Above: Claude Monet (1840–1926), Impression, soleil levant [Impression: Sunrise], 1872, oil on canvas, 18.9 x 24.8 inches. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images.

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SOME THINGS martha r. severens

reproductions of french impressionist masterworks can be seen almost anywhere these days—in doctors’ offices, motel rooms, and college dormitories. The popular taste for these accessible and generally pleasing paintings is ubiquitous. More than one hundred and forty years after Impressionism’s debut, many forget that such widespread acceptance was not always the case. When French Impressionism emerged around 1870, its practitioners were viewed—by outraged critics and a suspect public—as technically undisciplined revolutionaries. Instead of creating art that served historical events and personas or honored religion, they promoted “art for art’s sake.” In America, where there was less of an allegiance to an entrenched status quo, the concept of an art detached from lofty agendas was more readily accepted. Many of the artists profiled in Scenic Impressions embraced other central tenets of Impressionism: light-filled natural settings loosely painted in high-key colors with visible brushstrokes, fluidity of form, and an emphasis on atmospheric transience. A scenic impression is the evocation of something viewed, rather than its literal transcription. In terms of subject matter, it is most frequently a landscape, but can also extend to a figurative composition set outdoors. The artist’s experience—his or her impression of the scene at hand— is paramount. The end result, as the popular and prolific American

Opposite: John Ross Key (1837–1920), View of Washington from Arlington, circa 1908, oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 60 inches.

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Impressionist Childe Hassam opined, is “some things that are charming.”1

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American landscape painting had come of age with the Hudson River School in the years before the Civil War. The South, where portraiture dominated art patronage, was slower to embrace representations of the countryside. This seeming lack of interest was not for want of beautiful scenery, but simply reflected a different attitude toward it. Northern painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt preferred pristine wilderness and spectacular vistas, and often recorded such views with moralistic underpinnings. By contrast, the works considered here reflect a blossoming appreciation for Southern locales rendered in a great variety of styles ranging from the romantic realism of the Barbizon School to Post-Impressionism. This sampling begins with examples from the decade of the 1880s, which corresponds to the declining popularity of the Hudson River School. So familiar today in American art history texts, this misleading appellation—there was never a school with teachers or a prescribed curriculum—was not employed until 1877, when it was meant as a derogatory allusion to dark and gloomy paintings.2 Coincidentally, only three years earlier another art historical designation, Impressionism, was invented in Paris as an insulting reference to a group of painters who did not delineate every detail, emphasizing instead the visual impact of color and light.

this selection of artists from the johnson collection includes native Southerners who recorded both their own terrain and places faraway, as well as painters who explored the region, whether as cultural wayfarers or seasonal residents. As a result, a varied assortment of individual approaches is presented. One of the most scenic and iconic images is View of Washington from Arlington by John Ross Key, its landmarks—the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol Building—bathed in rosy light. Reflections in the Potomac River and the rolling, verdant topography in the foreground reinforce the painting’s artistry. Modern viewers are treated to a nostalgic glimpse of the country’s capital city before multiple bridges, bustling traffic, and suburban sprawl. North Carolina native Elliott Daingerfield developed a distinctive technique of layering varnish and pigment for his moody landscapes, which bring to mind the French painters of the Barbizon School. He earned the sobriquet the “American Millet”—a reference to painter Jean-François Millet who was popular for his quasi-religious peasant subjects in rural landscapes. Madonna and Lamb features just such a pastoral figure, and its earth-toned palette and quiet rustic setting are reminiscent of the Barbizon aesthetic. In 1910, Daingerfield accompanied other artists to the Grand Canyon as guests of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. Their assignment was to depict the dramatic scenery of the canyon in paintings that could be used to attract tourists. Much like Bierstadt’s earlier imposing depictions of Yosemite and other Western sites, Daingerfield’s Grand Canyon canvases are romantically envisaged and evoke the awe he felt during his visits. (See page 69.) More directly related to the Barbizon region is Hiver en Forêt de Fontainebleau [Winter in the Forest of Fontainebleau] (page 49) by George Aid, a canvas painted in the very woods that gave birth to France’s native school of landscape painting in the 1830s. Large moss-covered boulders dominate a wintry scene whose chill

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is evident and relieved only by touches of pink in the background. Aid, who spent several years in France prior

to World War I, was one of the many Americans who gravitated to the region. For example, Ruger Donoho frequented the small village of Grez-sur-Loing, south of the forest, during his seven years abroad. He painted several pictures there that were accepted for the Paris Salon, the most prestigious exhibition venue in the world at that time. When he returned to the States, Donoho settled in East Hampton on the eastern tip of Long Island, about one hundred miles from Manhattan. There, he discovered the appeal of simple farms reminiscent of the French countryside. Ploughmen in a Fenced Field (page 73) reveals Donoho’s pleasure in his new surroundings and his appreciation for an unindustrialized way of life. In East Hampton, Donoho was reunited with his former Académie Julian classmate Childe Hassam, who spent time on Long Island almost every year from 1906 until his death. Under his friend’s influence, Donoho soon turned his attention to flower-filled gardens. Hassam was a key figure in the development of American Impressionism, having imported the innovative French style to New York art circles. And while he was never a teacher, his spirit of collegiality helped to advance an appreciation for sun-saturated canvases with bright palettes and conspicuous brushwork. Living in the Montmartre section of Paris between 1886 and 1889, Hassam frequently painted his picturesque environs. His watercolor, The Flower Seller (page 30), is an early example of his penchant for vibrant scenes featuring women and flowers, a subject he pursued for the rest of his life. Years later, Hassam became an active member of the art colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut, a summer destination for many artists working in an Impressionist mode. These seasonal inhabitants shared in the hospitality of Florence Griswold, lodged in her boarding house, and enjoyed escaping the city to paint the

Above: John Elliott Parker Daingerfield (1859–1932), Madonna and Lamb, 1892, oil on canvas, 22¼ x 401/8 inches.

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unspoiled surrounds.

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Harry Hoffman went to Old Lyme in 1902 to study with Frank Vincent DuMond, an Art Students League instructor who conducted the Lyme School of Art during the summer. DuMond emphasized painting en plein air—in the open air—a practice Hoffman enthusiastically adopted and applied to such canvases as Street Scene, Savannah, Georgia (page 85), where light reflects off the pavement and colorful buildings. His handling of paint is decidedly impressionistic, especially noticeable in the overhanging trees. Hoffman first traveled to Savannah in 1914, when his friend and fellow Old Lyme resident William Chadwick was apparently also there. Chadwick returned a decade later as an instructor hired by the Savannah Art Association, which held its classes at the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences. Like Hoffman, Chadwick responded to the brilliance of Southern winter light, as seen in his painting of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. (See page 55.) Eliot Clark also taught for the Savannah Art Association in the 1920s, but responded to the historic city very differently. Instead of the lively streetscapes depicted by Hoffman and Chadwick, Clark’s approach was very muted, emphasizing subtle hue variations in a manner usually called Tonalist. Years later, Clark explained his reaction to his time in Savannah: “The evening light was particularly beautiful. I made a number of pictures in different light and aspects of the harbor. The winter in Savannah was mild and pleasant and what impressed me as a painter was the soft enveloping atmospheric light quite different from the contours and strong shadows of New England. This sylvan light formed the background of the Savannah mood.”3

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Above: Frederick Childe Hassam (1859–1935), The Flower Seller, between 1886 and 1889, watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper, 15¾ x 25¾ inches.

in addition to hassam william merritt chase is credited with the ’

widespread acceptance of Impressionism in America. Both were members of “The Ten American Painters,” a loosely organized group of artists who exhibited together over a period of twenty years. Based in New York and Boston, The Ten shared an impressionistic aesthetic and lobbied against dull, uninspired exhibitions. During the 1880s, Chase made several trips abroad where he was exposed to the old masters in museums, as well as to the emerging and somewhat controversial style known as Impressionism. A successful portraitist, Chase was also a popular and dedicated teacher, serving on the faculties of both the Art Students League and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He conducted his own school in New York City and, from 1891–1902, held summer sessions at Shinnecock, near Southampton on Long Island, where the focus was on painting outdoors. Mississippian Kate Freeman Clark was one of his most devoted disciples, taking courses with him at the New York School of Art and participating in six summer sessions on Long Island. Her cheerful, broadly brushed landscapes reflect his prescribed approach to plein air painting. (See page 61.) Chase encouraged his students to examine work by other artists: “Be like a sponge, ready to absorb all you can,” he told them. “I have been a thief; I have stolen all my life—I have never been so foolish and foolhardy as to refrain from stealing for fear I should be considered as not ‘original.’”4 Chase was a “teacher extraordinaire,” who eschewed the convention of drawing from antique casts and urged his students to excel at drawing from life. Decrying specialization, he stressed fundamentals and technique. Many of America’s best-known artists attended his classes, eventually developing their own styles and reputations. Georgia O’Keeffe took a still life class from him at the League in 1907, earning his admiration and an appointment as class monitor. She described her experience: “Every day we had to paint a new still life. Then once a week William Merritt Chase came in to criticize. . . . There was something fresh, and energetic and fierce and exacting about him that made him fun.”5 Although O’Keeffe had moved toward her singular abstracted vision by 1915, she always valued Chase’s scrutiny of individual objects. Another artist, George Bellows, enrolled in classes with Chase at the New York School of Art in 1904; soon afterward, Chase was instrumental in persuading his young protégé to abandon illustration for painting. Bellows later rejected much of his teacher’s approach, but retained the open brushwork that was a hallmark of Chase’s style and of the Ashcan School painters with whom Bellows was affiliated. Heeding Chase’s advice, Bellows taught for a time, at the League and in 1908 at the University of Virginia’s summer session. While there, he painted the remarkably animated and uncharacteristically happy landscape, Footpath Virginia (page 33). Almost indecipherable in the lush, painterly scene are two women, shown carrying parasols as they cross a narrow bridge; one of them might be a Miss Bowles, one of Bellows’ students to whom he gave the painting.6 Following the closure of the Shinnecock program, Chase escorted groups on trips abroad that combined painting lessons with visits to museums; these, too, were a resounding success. Wayman Adams, mainly a figurative painter and portraitist, joined Chase in Florence in 1910. Guided by Chase, as well as his other mentor Robert Henri, Adams developed a method for working alla prima—without preparatory studies. It

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became a hallmark of his technique, which is brilliantly illustrated in The Three Graces (page 47), an intimate

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portrayal of three beribboned young girls seated at a doorway. The small work resembles a hastily executed plein air sketch, although Adams deemed it worthy of a signature. Clearly, Adams took Henri’s recommendation to “paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you.”7 Another of Chase’s students at the League was Clara Weaver Parrish, who produced a similarly diminuitive, briskly painted sketch titled The Flower Garden (page 105). Bold brushstrokes and vivid colors appear to dance across the surface of the wood panel, a support conducive to painting en plein air. In 1913, Dixie Selden attended a class Chase conducted in Venice. Impressed by her instructor’s dapper dress and charismatic personality, she described his appearance glowingly to a reporter: “white flannel suit, white spats, white Panama hat with its lavender veil wound about it, his monocle, fantastic rings and his dramatic manner of criticism.” A genteel Southern woman in her mid-forties who had no wish to be a voyeur, Selden had been hesitant about painting in public, but under Chase’s tutelage, she became more comfortable doing just that. In addition, he encouraged her to forego her preference for dark tones, enliven her palette, and lay her paint down densely. (See page 115.) Selden’s new freedom and energy was recognized by the same reporter: “She was greatly influenced [by him]. . . . This was a phase in which she was absolutely original and one in which her joyous personality came forth unfettered and clear cut.”8

such educational sojourns to europe were hardly new. since the late

eighteenth century, aspiring American artists had enjoyed travel and study on the continent. In the nineteenth

century, they enrolled at schools in Munich, Düsseldorf, and Paris, where training foreign students was a profitable industry. One student at the atelier of Thomas Couture wrote a most enthusiastic appraisal that was published in The Crayon in 1857: As to Paris, there is no doubt of its being the greatest city in the world: there is the least annoyance of any kind here that can be found anywhere. The city is clean and healthy. Everything is attended to, and the comfort of the individual is well attended to. . . . Paris is a city of Art; you see evidences of taste and cultivation everywhere; in the houses and their decorations, inside and out; in the gardens and public places; in the numerous statues, and fountains, and bridges, and streets. Paris is very brilliant at night, especially upon the Boulevards. We often take long strolls after supper up and down these thoroughfares, and through the brilliantly-lighted passages, where are displayed the most attractive goods of every description. In the afternoons we generally go to the Louvre until four o’clock, at which hour it closes, and then walk to some of the gardens, or turn over the many portfolios of engravings to be found along the quays opposite the Louvre and Tuileries. . . . The Louvre alone is a good six months’ work to study.9

The Académie Julian welcomed American students in droves, including women who were taught separately and paid twice the fees of their male counterparts. The daily schedule was intense, beginning early with many hours devoted to drawing live models and plaster casts of ancient sculptures. Instructors typically visited

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classes only once a week to conduct critiques. William Bouguereau, Tony Robert-Fleury, and Jules-Joseph

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Above: George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925), Footpath Virginia, 1908, oil on canvas, 16 x 201/8 inches.

Lefebvre—all of whom tended to paint conventional canvases of allegorical and historical themes dominated by beautiful, often nude, women—were the most popular teachers. These academicians dominated the annual Paris Salon exhibitions where displays of five thousand pieces were not uncommon. Acceptance by the Salon was a critical milestone for many artists. Hassam, a student at the Académie Julian during the late 1880s, however, had major reservations about the French system of art education: “It is nonsense. It crushes all originality of the growing men. It tends to put them in a rut and it keeps them in it.” Instead, he advocated painting contemporary subjects naturally and was pessimistic about his fellow countrymen who trained in Paris. “But as long as a crowd of apostates from America who have more money than brains continue to go to France to study for such a long time, . . . there will be little growth of an American school.”10 Like Donoho, Aid, and Hoffman, Willie Betty Newman attended the Académie Julian, but, in contradiction to Hassam’s implication about rich Americans, led a very frugal existence in Paris for an entire decade. Nevertheless, her art prospered and gained early recognition at the Salon, where it was regularly exhibited between 1891 and 1900. During summer months, she frequently traveled to Brittany, a quaint setting for her impressionistic landscapes and genre scenes laced with religious overtones. As French Poplar Trees in the Mist (page 103) testifies, Newman was aware of the work of Claude Monet, who immortalized the tall columnar trees in so many of his canvases. Monet also cast a spell on Blondelle Malone, whom he invited to paint in his famous garden at Giverny—an ideal opportunity for a painter acclaimed as “the garden artist of America.” (See page 98.) Flush with excitement, Malone wrote her parents about her experience with the famous French painter: “He refuses to see every one—especially Americans and artists and he is quite right. . . . He told me he did not like to see people and I was the only one he had received in years. I asked him why he received me and he was interested. . . . The interview was more a confirmation of what I had thought and heard than anything else. He told me to keep on and paint as I see and not as others paint, not to be influenced. Our opinions seemed to agree on everything.”11 Like many female artists of the day—and unlike Newman who had left her husband—Malone remained unmarried, a status that allowed her to pursue art and travel extensively. William Posey Silva also studied at the Académie Julian, matriculating in 1909 when he was in his late forties and well after Impressionism had gained widespread acceptance. Leading a peripatetic lifestyle, Silva spent a good deal of time in the South—New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston—before settling in California. His best-known landscapes, a series Silva titled In the Garden of Dreams, were poetic representations of Southern gardens rife with Spanish moss and colorful vegetation. A late painting, Cabins, South Carolina Low Country (page 117), done in the midst of the Depression, is less romantic than many of his other canvases. Three former slave cabins alternate with stark leafless trees, while a lone African American proceeds along a fence.

not everybody, however, wanted to study abroad. alice ravenel huger Smith is a classic example of an artist who stayed home and mined her surroundings for stimulating subject

matter. Throughout her long life, she lived in the same house in the historic district of Charleston, South

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Carolina. Essentially self-taught, she studiously immersed herself in an extensive collection of Japanese

prints from the Ukiyo-e School and absorbed many of those artists’ stylistic tenets, clearly evident in her watercolor, Swamp Scene (page 42). Its verticality, subdued tones, and sensitivity to nature are hallmarks of her Japonisme. While in her thirties, she benefited from the presence of Birge Harrison, who began to spend winters in Charleston in 1908. Although their relationship was informal, it was fortuitous. A Tonalist, Harrison shared with Smith a passion for nature and atmospheric effects, characteristics enhanced by his use of pastel in Sunburst at Sea (page 81). When she asked him to take her on as a student, he demurred. In her autobiography, Smith recalled a discussion they once had: “‘Why do you choose such hard subjects,’ Mr. Harrison would say.” “Because everything is so hard, there isn’t any difference.” “Why do you always put moss in your pictures? I have looked at it with a view to painting it, and it really is unpaintable.” “But, Mr. Harrison that is what I think of snow. I have never lived with snow and you have never lived with moss.”12

In addition to providing Smith with encouragement and casual critiques, Harrison was instrumental in persuading his protégé Alfred Hutty to visit Charleston. Harrison had been Hutty’s mentor at the Woodstock, New York, summer school he conducted for the Art Students League. Hutty became so enthralled with the Southern city that he divided his time between Charleston in the winter and Woodstock in the summer for forty-five years. Unlike Harrison who did not comprehend moss, Hutty embraced it as an important aesthetic device that complemented the trees he loved to depict, as demonstrated by his large, almost expressionist canvas, In Magnolia Gardens (page 36). Hutty became an important force in the cultural reawakening known as the Charleston Renaissance, a movement that took shape between 1915 and 1940, and was fueled by visual artists, preservationists, and writers. He painted the dilapidated conditions of many downtown structures as exemplified by Backstage (page 89), an unidealized view from an alleyway. Such images became popular, and Hutty often made related versions in drypoint (page 88), a technique he took up as a member of the Charleston Etchers’ Club. Well before his arrival, Alice Smith had played a seminal role in arousing an appreciation among her fellow Charlestonians for their city’s rich architectural heritage. Another Charleston native, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, joined Smith in efforts to revitalize the city, and gradually the area became a bustling tourist destination. Writers such as DuBose Heyward and Julia Peterkin likewise contributed their energies and, through their novels, brought positive attention to South Carolina’s Lowcountry. Northerners migrated south to enjoy the mild climate, springtime azalea festivals, and excellent duck hunting at former rice plantations. City and country properties were restored, hotels were built, and the overall economy improved. In addition to Harrison and Hutty, other artists of national repute became entranced by Charleston, including Hassam, Edward Hopper, Colin Cooper, and Wilson Irvine. Both Cooper and Irvine selected a quintessential Charleston landmark, St. Philip’s Church, as the subject

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of their paintings. (See pages 63 and 93.) Although they typify American Impressionism, these paintings are

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Above: Alfred Heber Hutty (1877–1954), In Magnolia Gardens, circa 1945, oil on canvas, 321/8 x 40¼ inches.

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Above: Anthony Johannes Thieme (1888–1954), Entrance to Magnolia Gardens in Spring, Charleston, SC, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches.

distinct in their handling and viewpoints. Cooper rendered the church in an unusual medium—gouache on canvas—which lends the picture a light and airy feeling. The church is viewed from the historic graveyard across Church Street; in the foreground, Cooper has emphasized the geometric shapes of the tombstones with blocky brushstrokes in a manner reminiscent of the Post-Impressionist French painter Paul Cézanne. Irvine’s composition appears more formal, due to his practice of viewing his subjects through a prism, which tends to refract color and light in a distinctive manner. By depicting the structure from the north, looking south on Church Street, Irvine creates a vista that stresses the imposing porticos of the neoclassical building. The truncated tower only serves to reinforce the visual weight of the structure, which is alleviated slightly by the presence of two African American figures, a device frequently employed by both local and visiting artists. A native of the Netherlands who had studied in Germany, Anthony Thieme was another artist “from off”—in Charleston parlance—who discovered the South’s charms. Following an initial trip in 1928, he spent even more time in the Carolina Lowcountry in the mid-1940s. By that time, the ancient plantations along the Ashley River had been transformed into picturesque tourist destinations, especially in the spring when the azaleas were in bloom. Magnolia Plantation and Gardens was perennially popular, having opened to visitors shortly after the Civil War, when travelers arrived by paddle steamer on the river. Artists were particularly welcomed, and Magnolia was a favorite setting for Hutty, Silva, and Thieme. Locals enjoyed taking guests to the gardens, as Harriet Porcher Stoney did in March 1918: “I love to go there with people who have never seen it before, and then when they stand struck absolutely adjectiveless by the wonder of the place I look on with the air of one who would say, ‘Yes, this is the way we raise things in South Carolina.’ As for me though, I am just as speechless as I can never remember from one visit to the next just what a mass of glory the whole place is.”13 Thieme captures much of the splendor—as well as the apparent humidity—in his canvas, Entrance to Magnolia Gardens in Spring, Charleston, SC (page 37).

urban centers like savannah and charleston were not the only destinations to attract Northern artists to the region. Midwesterners in particular found much to admire in the mountains of western North Carolina at a time when the area was becoming recognized for the beauty of its terrain, fall color, and temperate climate. One of the first such designated preserves in the eastern United States, the Pisgah National Forest derived much of its acreage from land that once belonged to George Vanderbilt II, owner of the Biltmore estate and its palatial chateau. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, incorporating parts of the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, was chartered in 1934. These large tracts of rugged virgin territory attracted Rudolph Ingerle, a Chicago artist who developed such a specialty with his mountain scenes that he became known as the “Painter of the Smokies.” In so doing, Ingerle believed that he played a modest role in the effort to set aside the Smokies as a national park. Ingerle’s painting of a rustic cabin surrounded by an autumnal blaze of foliage, Sunday Afternoon, may be a tribute to the painter’s literary counterpart, Horace Kephart, whose volume Our Southern Highlanders documented his experiences living in the mountains of western North Carolina. The tall central figure with a walking stick

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and high boots wears a broad-brimmed hat not unlike the one that the writer usually donned. Like Ingerle’s

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Above: Rudolph Frank Ingerle (1879–1950), Sunday Afternoon, 1929, oil on canvas, 481/8 x 521/8 inches.

paintings, Kephart’s book is credited with inspiring the founding of the park. His reverential descriptions reveal his enthusiasm: “I loved of a morning to slip on my haversack, pick up my rifle, or maybe a mere staff, and stride forth alone over haphazard routes, to enjoy in my own untutored way the infinite variety of form and color and shade, of plant and tree and animal life, in that superb wilderness that towered there far above all homes of men.”14 Nestled further south in the foothills is the small town of Tryon, North Carolina, the home of a burgeoning seasonal art colony in the early decades of the century. Lawrence Mazzanovich settled there in 1923, remaining year-round until his death. Like Ingerle, he had taken classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, but had lived in Connecticut since 1909; his move south is typically explained as a needed escape from an overbearing wife and the demands of his routine in the Northeast. In Tryon, he found the relaxed atmosphere and scenery very agreeable; as time went on, his depictions of the nearby mountains became progressively post-impressionistic, with an emphasis on forms and shapes, rather than the fleeting effects of light. In Smoky Mountains (page

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6), the tactile paint handling and tall pine in the right foreground serve to flatten the composition in a

Above: Emma Josephine Sibley Couper (1867–1957), Fishermen’s Conversation, circa 1925, oil on canvas, 30 x 34 inches.

manner that recalls Cézanne’s paintings of Mont-Sainte-Victoire in southern France. Another artist with ties to Connecticut was native-born Chauncey Ryder, who had also studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He loved mountains and spent years exploring them from his home base in New Hampshire; about 1920, he discovered the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Gateway to North Carolina (page 109) is dominated by a spacious path, which invites the viewer into the scene. Its title implies that the route leads from one state into another. The painting, however, has an alternate title, Gateway North, which indicates that the vista is toward the north. This confusion may derive from Ryder’s dealer who habitually changed titles in the hope of promoting sales. Like Mazzanovich and Ingerle, Ryder used bold forms rendered in blocky, broad brushstrokes.

from the 1880s onward, the number of aspiring women artists increased exponentially. Renowned for his egalitarian attitude, Chase routinely encouraged female students. Women were

also welcomed at the Académie Julian, where their fees—double the men’s rate—were an important source of revenue. Other art schools and instructors were favorably disposed toward women; both Selden and Newman flourished at the McMicken School of Drawing and Design (later the Cincinnati Art Academy) under the tutelage of Thomas Noble. Josephine Sibley Couper studied several summers with Hugh Breckenridge at his Gloucester, Massachusetts, school. The experience was transformative for Couper; her brushwork became more emphatic and her palette brightened considerably. Akin to Selden in Venice and northern France, she responded to summer light reflecting off water as pictured in Fishermen’s Conversation, a scene painted near Gloucester’s harbor. Summer learning experiences were critical to other women as well. Catherine Wiley, who had studied with Chase at the Art Students League, spent the summer of 1912 in Cos Cob, Connecticut, receiving instruction from Robert Reid. A member of The Ten, Reid specialized in decorative paintings of women in sunlit settings surrounded by flowers. Wiley’s Lady with Parasol (page 129) is very much in keeping with Reid’s oeuvre: the subject’s wistful expression shaded by her hat, the profusion of colorful blooms, and bright light reflecting off her white dress all correspond to Reid’s work. Wiley herself was very involved in art education at her alma mater, the University of Tennessee, where she taught art in the home economics department. Many of her models appear to be her female students. For many years, Helen Turner instructed women at the Young Women’s Christian Association in Manhattan. Courses in costume and clothing design prepared these students for careers in fashion and journalistic illustration at a time when women were entering the work force in greater numbers. Turner, like Wiley and Reid, frequently portrayed women outdoors, and her models are often shown in quiet feminine pursuits: examining a Japanese lantern, sewing, or playing a guitar as the woman does in A Song of Summer (page 125). Instead of full sunshine, Turner typically cast her sitters in dappled light, an approach that creates interesting patterns of lights and darks. Many of these canvases were executed on the porch of her house at Cragsmoor, an art colony ninety miles northwest of New York City. In 1906, a journalist described the place as “a harmonious community . . . active-minded and deeply interested in the best art, literature, drama and music. . . . These

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people have seen the world far and wide, yet they find the charms of Cragsmoor undimmed by comparison.”15

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The Clothesline (page 71) by William de Leftwich Dodge is thematically very different. Dodge eschews the delicate and contemplative women depicted by Wiley and Turner for a smiling, muscular figure who removes items from a clothesline while staring pointedly at the viewer. Colorful swirling shapes surround her, and the crumpled fabrics in her workbasket compose a virtual essay in abstraction. Complementing this strong image are the vigorous brushwork and intense contrasts of bright light and deep shadow. Dodge was an accomplished muralist, completing major commissions such as his allegorical decorations for the Library of Congress. Accustomed to working on a large scale, the artist recognized that his paintings needed to be read from a distance. In keeping with his methodology, The Clothesline, an easel painting, exudes its own monumentality. While Wiley and Turner spent many years teaching women, the most dynamic program for female students was at Sophie Newcomb College, the women’s coordinate of Tulane University in New Orleans. Under the leadership of Ellsworth Woodward, Newcomb emerged as a vibrant center for training women in such practical artistic pursuits as pottery, textile and jewelry design, and bookbinding. A native of Massachusetts, Woodward nevertheless became a strong advocate for distinctively Southern art. In an address delivered at the 1926 dedication of the High Museum in Atlanta, he expressed his aspirations for the region: “I wish the South to become conscious of her own personality. . . . In her eagerness to become prosperous the fine edge of her personality is disappearing. Art is the preservative. The art of the poet, writer, musician, painter, sculptor and architect. These constitute your first line of defense against the overwhelming smugness of the commonplace and standardized. . . . Take good care of your artists of all persuasions.”16 Woodward’s dream that the South would rise again by virtue of its art has come to pass. As the paintings in Scenic Impressions attest, the region’s native talent and adopted artists have portrayed its land and people in diverse and evocative ways.

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Opposite: Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876–1958), Swamp Scene, watercolor on paper, 21 ¾ x 115/8 inches.

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wayman elbridge adams (1883–1959) The Three Graces Oil on wood panel, 10 x 7 inches Drawn to the South by the exotic flavor of the New Orleans French Quarter, Wayman Adams was born in Indiana, where his early artistic achievements earned him the sobriquet of “the boy artist of Muncie.” The author and critic Wilbur Peat has noted that Adams’ “technical development was rapid and his remarkable facility in handling brushes and paint was admired by his fellow students and instructors.”1 His early formation as an artist was guided by several important members of the Hoosier Group—a loose collective of Impressionist artists associated with Indiana. After enrolling in the John Herron Institute in Indianapolis in 1904, Adams soon sought out instructors of national note while undertaking the time-honored journey to Europe. On his study trips to the continent, Adams worked with two seminal, though disparate, figures in the American art world: William Merritt Chase in 1910 and Robert Henri in 1912. While Chase’s flamboyant personal style may have personified Gilded Age American artistic pretense, he was a distinct talent and a nurturing mentor. Whether abroad or at his Shinnecock summer school, Chase encouraged his followers to paint en plein air. Chase’s Long Island scenes captured the brilliance of light on the sand dunes through seemingly spontaneous brushwork applied to an entrancingly clear color. “To Chase, modern painting was both a depiction of modern life—a record of contemporary manners, mores, and dress—and an art, freed from literature and imaginative invention, that stressed, as the strategy for its liberation, the purely visual as well as the means and methods of painting itself.”2 Adams’ affinity with Chase can be seen in his small but masterful oil sketch, The Three Graces. While the subject matter—three little girls elaborately garbed in billowing dresses and fanciful bows—may seem a tad precious, the brushwork and color highlights are at one with the Impressionist avant-garde. The cascading glimpses of pink and mauve, set against a dark background, create a punctuating rhythm made slightly elusive by the faintly evanescent brushwork. A contemporary observer of Adams at work noted that in his “early stages the color was kept exceedingly simple and the tones quite flat, but so true in hue and value that the final painting appeared to be a matter of relatively slight modifications.”3 Adams also worked with Robert Henri, accompanying that artist on a study tour to Spain in 1912. Although both Chase and Henri were leading lights of the American Impressionist style, Henri’s affiliation with the Ashcan School set him apart. While Chase’s paintings often deployed the wonders of natural light, Henri cast his work in darker, oft times more somber and gritty tones. Henri articulated his theories in a series of lectures and comments to his classes at the Art Students League. Advocating a more emotive response to subject matter, he urged his pupils to “start with a deep impression, the best, the most interesting, the deepest you can have of the model; to preserve this vision throughout the work; to see nothing else; to admit of no digression from it.” Henri felt himself to be “looking at each individual with the eager hope of finding there something of the dignity of life, the humor, the humanity, the kindness” essential to “all genius, all true progress, all significant beauty.”4 Adams’ exposure to these ideas is crucial to an understanding of his gaze, especially the way in which he beheld the earthy subjects he found on travels to the Deep South. Exhibition records and extant dated work indicates that Adams often wintered in New Orleans between 1916 and 1928. During those years, the cheap rent and easy living in the French Quarter attracted various artists and writers whose antics make up the legends and lore of what has been called a “Dixie Bohemia.” In this setting, Adams found plentiful subject matter, creating paintings which echo Henri’s lessons in an earnest, and heartfelt, realism. ecp

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george charles aid (1872-1938) Hiver en Forêt de Fontainebleau [Winter in the Forest of Fontainebleau] Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches Once a royal hunting ground, the legendary forest of Fontainebleau became a favored destination for tourists and artists alike during the early nineteenth century. Its name is distilled from the appellation fontaine belle eau—the fountain of beautiful water thought to spring from a source deep in the woods. Though its history was that of a restricted pleasure park for the ancient French regime, Fontainebleau became, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic era, a cherished site for romantic retreats from the Parisian tumult. Located some thirty-five miles southeast of the city, the forest’s popularity was greatly enhanced when train service, established in 1849, provided a quick and easy link from Paris-Gare de Lyon terminal. Once there, “urban bohemians” could “escape the crushing monde of bourgeois Paris and rediscover their own nature and the world’s, amidst the peace and solitude of the forest.”1 Travel writers from the early nineteenth century extolled its untamed quality. “There does exist a forest for which we must admit an especial predilection—for within the limits of civilization . . . yet possessing features as wild and characteristic as [Salvator] Rosa might have deigned to paint . . . [is] the forest of Fontainebleau—still savage in its scenery.”2 The French painters Camille Roqueplan, Jean-Baptiste Isabey, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot responded to that wildness and were among the first generation of artists fascinated by Fontainebleau’s “multitude of picturesque effects. The variety and size of its trees constantly amazed visitors. Barbizon became especially famous for its giant oak trees, which seemed all the more massive next to the many elegant birches and elms.”3 However, it was not until 1849 when Jean-François Millet took up residence in the wood-cutter village of Barbizon that one of the seminal schools of Western art was born. Though the art of this school was often deemed vulgar by French critics fearful for the autonomy of the academy, the renderings of rustic terrain and humble peasantry toiling in the fields found an appreciative audience in America. “As apprehended by the American artist and patron,” art in the Barbizon mood “was a state of mind through which nature could enter the realm of art without ceasing to be nature.” It offered both practitioner and viewer a sensuous “tranquility remote from the grandeur of the Yellowstone” or the majesty of vast Hudson River depictions of blazing sunsets and towering precipices.4 George Aid was part of a second wave of expatriate artists who studied in France and created artwork in the Barbizon style then so fashionable with American collectors. He was a native of Illinois who arrived in Paris by way of Missouri, where he had studied with Halsey Ives, founder of the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts. Ives had established a foreign study scholarship fund, which in January 1899 was awarded, in part, to Aid. Upon his arrival in Paris that spring, Aid came under the guidance of the American Impressionist painter Lawton Parker, who gave him lodging and sponsored his admission to the Académie Julian. Aid and his compatriots established modest studios in Montparnasse, where they “lived cheaply . . . drank wine, and ate mostly beans, dry bread, and raw onions, like the French lower classes.”5 He also indulged in the wealth of artwork available for viewing throughout the city of lights, especially in the Musée de Luxembourg where works by the Barbizon painters were displayed as contemporary masterpieces. Aid’s painting, Hiver en Forêt de Fontainebleau, most likely dates from the early days of his Parisian sojourn. In this work, he has certainly captured the atmospheric essence and tonal values of the rugged landscape whose massive rock formations rise up before the extended view of the distant towering hillside, shadowed in grey-green and mauve. Writing of the artist and his work in 1934, one critic observed Aid’s abiding interest in his chosen subject matter, “be that a human being or a Chinese vase or a mountain. His outlook on life is kindly, so, it shows on his canvases. There is no attempt to force attention. It is gained by the dignity of the work. First, last, and all of the time he is natural and sincere, doing his work as seems fit and best for expressing his convictions regarding art.”6 ecp

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carl christian brenner (1838–1888) Winter, 1884 Oil on canvas, 161/8 x 211/8 inches Carl Brenner’s career as a painter of hauntingly dramatic and serenely alluring landscapes was shaped by two distinctly different developmental phases: his childhood and early education in Germany, and his coming of age during the years of the great industrial expositions held in Louisville, Kentucky, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Brenner was a native of Lauterecken, a medieval trading center poised at the base of a range of towering mountains in the Rhineland-Palatinate. As befits most artistic legends, he was deemed a prodigy, the favored pupil of a local drawing master. Though Brenner later recalled his first teacher with deep affection, it was his love of the Bavarian forest which lingered longest in his creative imagination. Louisville Courier-Journal editor Henry Watterson, an intimate and patron of Brenner, reported that he “was fascinated when a boy by the beauties of the beech in his native German woods, and the love never left him.”1 The Germany of Brenner’s youth was an erratic collection of city-states in search of a unifying history. Had his ambitions of study at the Royal Academy in Munich been realized, he would have found himself in one of the cultural capitals of the German romantic movement. He instead became a member of the flourishing immigrant community that developed in Louisville, where Germans comprised thirty-five percent of the population at the time of the Brenners’ arrival there in 1854. George C. Doern, editor of the Louisville Anzeiger—one of several German language newspapers in the city—was one of Brenner’s earliest promoters; upon seeing the sketches Brenner had made on his upriver journey from New Orleans, he “at once advised Brenner to become a landscape painter.”2 However, Brenner’s father, a glazier by trade, discouraged this pursuit and took young Carl into his own business. By 1861, city directories list Carl Brenner as a house painter, though he soon moved on to more creative and lucrative work as a sign and ornamental painter. Little is known, or remains, of any paintings Brenner created prior to his first public exhibition at the Louisville Industrial Exposition in 1874. The annual exhibitions of European and American art staged in the galleries of that event, as well as the Louisville Southern Expositions held between 1883 and 1887, provided the local audience and fledgling artists an unparalleled opportunity. Old master paintings were shown alongside work by current artists of substantial reputation. Most importantly for Brenner, the realism and naturalism of the Barbizon and Hague Schools were well represented. These installations became so important in scope and so popular with the general public that by 1884, one of the most illustrious art impresarios in America, Charles M. Kurtz, served as chairman of the selection committee. During his first years as a full-time artist, Brenner’s style moved beyond the dark tonal strains of the Munich School towards the rich golden glow of the Barbizon School, as exemplified in Winter. Here, he employs the use of vanishing point perspective to draw the viewer’s attention to a remote point—in this case a rustic cottage, miniscule on the far-flung horizon line. Over time, Brenner adopted the beech trees that lined Louisville’s waterways and parklands and the surrounding countryside as his favorite subject. In 1881, he sold Afternoon in Early June, A Kentucky Beech Grove (1880) to William Wilson Corcoran, securing his place on both the regional and national stages. Though Brenner’s appropriation of the beech tree as his personal icon could result in formulaic work, he did hazard some avant-garde approaches to the subject. Family members recalled how much Brenner “loved these trees and was never happier than when he went out . . . to study them with their drooping boughs, their clinging leaves and great boles flecked with moss and lichens.”3 Subsequent critics have praised the stylistic evolution engendered by Brenner’s plein air painting expeditions, which culminated in a mature Tonalist aesthetic. “He now rendered his subjects in fresh colors which strike the observed as being the colors of nature truthfully observed,” a statement in keeping Brenner’s own vow: “I love nature for its own sake and do not think it can be improved upon.”4 ecp

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lyell edwin carr (1854–1912) Black Mountain Oil on canvas, 295/8 x 40¼ inches Beginning in the late 1880s, Lyell Carr became a frequent visitor to Haralson County, Georgia. Situated in the northwest part of that state near the southernmost reach of the Appalachian Mountains, the area had been a sparsely populated agrarian territory, having survived both the ravages of the Civil War and the first incursion of Northern carpetbaggers. Then, in 1882, the Georgia Pacific Railway was built, provoking a boom in tourism and industrial development. For ten years, Carr spent much of his time in the region, capturing the Southern landscape in paintings that he successfully exhibited and sold in urban art markets. One critic, writing about the 1894 Society of American Artists’ exhibition for the New York Times, commended Carr for creating an “oasis for those who are not interested in experiments and studio clevernesses, but ask that a picture shall tell them a nice little story.”1 Carr had launched his career in Chicago, working as a painter and illustrator specializing in domestic interiors. By 1881, he had moved to New York where he began to create landscape and genre works in the French Barbizon taste, bucolic scenes then much in demand by the new—and vastly wealthy—financial class. He soon came to the attention of Charles Kurtz, Thomas B. Clarke, and Thomas Fortune Ryan, wealthy collectors whose patronage would change the course of Carr’s career. Kurtz, who organized exhibitions for the American Art Union, included Carr’s painting, A Young Jersey, in the 1883 Southern Exposition in Louisville, Kentucky, where it was praised by the local Courier-Journal. The observation that “neither Troyon nor Van Marcke has ever painted anything better” may have inspired Carr to journey abroad in pursuit of further training in the Barbizon style.2 A year spent studying in Paris strengthened Carr’s handling of form and space. Upon his return in 1885, several of Carr’s paintings entered the collection of Thomas B. Clarke. When that collection was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1891, the artist was praised for his understanding of the “underlying truth of the impressionistic theory” as his paintings were “simple in subject, largely composed of rural scenes, good in character and truly rendered.” Carr was also lauded for working en plein air, for “seeking his subjects in nature, out of doors, and in all weathers, he invests them with the subtle spell of familiar fact which renders simple subjects dignified, securing the legitimate results which the sincere impressionists seek, without sacrifice of his personal method of thought or of his personal style of expression.”3 An 1894 article by Marguerite Tracy in the Quarterly Illustrator featured a dozen sketches Carr presumably executed en plein air while in Georgia. In an attitude typical of the day, Tracy opens her article by saluting Carr for his treatment of “the almost unexplored subject of our peasant life in the South.” She continues by praising him for having “an inkling of the primitive people among whom he has become at home” and for whom his style seemed “peculiarly adequate to expressing” in “soft, warm, coloring . . . so true to nature.”4 Tracy’s reference to a “primitive people” reinforces the idea that certain aspects of late nineteenth century American painting can be examined as an echo of a major European art movement. Jean-François Millet’s profoundly moving Barbizon paintings of rural laborers depict “far more than an anonymous peasant lost in his work and nature,” his subjects being “closer in spirit to antique personifications of fertility and agriculture.”5 Millet’s paintings, like Carr’s, are not merely depictions of quaint remnants of humanity residing in remote rural areas. They are illuminations of a distinct and profound theme in the history of Western culture: the idea that there is an inherent integrity in agrarian societies which exists as a redemptive alternative to industrial growth and urban decay. As Black Mountain demonstrates, Carr was also an accomplished painter of scenic landscapes. Located in the Chattahoochee National Forest, the mountain’s summit is the highest peak in Dawson County, Georgia. In Carr’s depiction, its mass underscores the haunting dichotomy between the majesty of nature and the feeble encroachment of man, evident in the vernacular barn and diminutive human figure milking a lone cow. It is an image which recalls the words of Southern Agrarian poet Donald Davidson, who described the South as a place where “lands were golden once; and for the dwellers there, self-reliant and not without a power of their own, they are golden still.”6

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william chadwick (1879–1962) Church Towers, circa 1925–1926 Oil on canvas, 301/8 x 30¼ inches William Chadwick was a part of a group of leading American artists, including Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, and Willard Metcalf, among others, who began to summer at the Old Lyme, Connecticut, home of Florence Griswold around the turn of the century. If not exactly an American Giverny, the Old Lyme community was an Impressionist mecca, and the Griswold boardinghouse was the stage for legendary antics which provided its residents with a great deal of oft-repeated oral history. The quintessential artists of the Old Lyme colony embodied the American preference for brightly lit landscape art whose color tonalities sharply enhanced the sun-dappled fields and shaded groves they transcribed. Chadwick spent his first summer there in 1902 and was often in the company of his former classmates at New York’s Art Students League; by 1915, he had purchased the house in Old Lyme where he and his wife spent the remainder of their lives. However, as Richard Love notes, Chadwick’s later residency in Old Lyme came at a time when “the once exciting milieu . . . had lost its eminence as surely as had the art style it once helped to usher into popularity. For the most part all of America looked at impressionism as a dying style [by 1925] and although a good number of the works of talented painters were still hung in the more conservative shows it is doubtful that many of these painters expected to survive the certain death of their once popular art style.”1 While this may have been true of art developments in the Northeast, it was not the case in Savannah, Georgia. Endowed by the beneficence of Mary Telfair in 1875, the Telfair Academy, under the founding directorship of Carl Brandt, became one of the earliest and most important art galleries in the South.2 Upon Brandt’s death, Gari Melchers, an academically trained American painter of international repute, assumed the role of artistic advisor to the museum from 1906 until 1916. Melchers had married into Savannah society, and, encouraged by his young bride, he successfully built the corpus of the institution’s Impressionist collection. His efforts also insured that painting classes, adjunct to the Telfair, were conducted by leading painters of the day. It was in this nurturing environment that Chadwick worked from 1924 to 1927, teaching at the Telfair Academy while living at 114 Gaston Street West. Chadwick’s Impressionism was grounded in certain realist and naturalist tendencies evident in the Barbizon style. His work has a textured quality effective in depicting the seasoned—if hardly scenic—scrub pine woods of coastal Georgia, and the character of the charming old city moldering in genteel decay. Chadwick knew Savannah from an earlier visit prior to the First World War. Aware of the changing tides of taste and the onslaught of modernism, he sought refuge there even as he participated in his last exhibition at the National Academy of Design. The area’s natural beauty must have appealed to him, as evidenced by his landscapes of the palm-strewn countryside, executed with rough brushstrokes and softly contrasting shades of green and citrine. Savannah, though less well known a muse than Charleston or New Orleans, also proved inspirational to other artists and writers in that time. In a departure from his small, nuanced landscapes, Chadwick chose to paint the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. Though there had been a Roman Catholic presence in Savannah since the late eighteenth century, the structure Chadwick painted dates from 1873. Built surprisingly soon after the devastations of the Civil War, the cathedral is a monumental tribute to the high French Gothic flamboyant style. Soaring spires were added in 1896, just two years before a fire destroyed all but them and the outside walls. The interior restoration and decoration of the cathedral was undertaken by local artist Christopher Murphy. Completed in 1912, the richly colored nave, with its turquoise transepts and elaborate murals, endure to this day. Chadwick’s view of the cathedral is from the rear. His choice to juxtapose a flattened view of a carriage house behind one of Savannah’s renowned urban mansions with the cathedral gives depth and texture to the scene. Diminutive figures go about their daily lives in the glistening sunlight reflected by the cathedral’s imposing presence. In recognition of his contributions to the Savannah art scene, the Telfair honored him with a one-man exhibition in 1927. This painting was later featured as a cover illustration for the definitive 1996 volume on artists working in the city during the first half of the twentieth century.3 ecp

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elisabeth augusta chant (1865–1947) Spring Landscape, circa 1927 Oil on canvas, 18 x 21 inches One of Elisabeth Chant’s most accomplished protégés, Claude Howell, claimed that the cultural life of Wilmington, North Carolina, changed irreversibly upon her arrival in January 1922. He recalled that “a strange looking woman with enormous plaits of chestnut hair over each ear stepped off the Atlantic Coast Line train. . . . Miss Elisabeth Augusta Chant was an artist by profession . . . she was a force to be reckoned with. . . . No one ever knew much about her past life. She had no visible means of support.”1 Chant would spend the final twenty-five years of her bohemian life in Wilmington, working as a multidisciplinary artist, passionate teacher, and arts advocate. A sensitive aesthete with an eccentric personal style, Elisabeth Chant—who often wore voluminous dresses made with brightly colored, embellished fabrics—may have projected an air of mystery because of her unusual upbringing. The daughter of a marine merchant, she bragged that she had sailed the seven seas before age seven as a passenger on her father’s ship. At middle age, she returned to England, the country of her birth, and spent two years, 1901 to 1903, there studying Arthurian legends and at the Royal School of Art Needlework in Kensington near the Victoria and Albert Museum. She traveled to the Far East in her fifties. More traditional periods of her life included earning a nursing degree and serving as a Red Cross nurse during the Spanish-American War, and three years as an art student at the Minneapolis School of Art under Douglas Volk and Burt Hardwood. Her art took various forms and reflects the influence of Japanese art, as well as the Arts and Crafts movement, which was especially strong in Minneapolis, where she had lived as a teenager and young adult. She made pottery and Japanesque prints, painted wood panels and murals, and created batiks and embroidered textiles. With these many talents at her disposal, she was successfully employed for six years by an interior design firm in Springfield, Massachusetts. At times, Chant was emotionally unstable and was even institutionalized by her family between 1917 and 1920, when she was treated for manic depression. According to her pupil and biographer Henry McMillan, “she was realistic and romantic by turns, deeply engaged with life; savoring a cup of choice tea, painting a bouquet of tulips, yet intrinsically visionary and untouched by material needs. She felt herself surrounded by an aura of ‘topaz with bands of deep blue, violet and rich green, encircled by a rose-colored fringe.’ Nightly she communicated with spirits of other worlds, helping them through the difficulties of reincarnation and secretly painting pre-Gothic and Astral world subjects.”2 An active member of the Handicraft Guild, the Minneapolis Art League, and the Minneapolis Arts and Crafts Society, she embraced the philosophy that one should live surrounded by well designed objects of purpose and beauty, preferably crafted by one’s own hands. In Wilmington, she hoped to found an art colony, but that never materialized. Nonetheless, she offered classes in drawing, painting, and batik, and developed a coterie of devoted followers. She became an advocate for the establishment of an art museum and wrote to the local paper about its importance: “It will mean: Wider horizons for the young. New interests for the mature. For visitors and tourists, a place of intellectual enjoyment. For Wilmington, a decided step-up in culture.”3 A colonial port city that serves as the region’s political and commercial center, Wilmington often draws comparisons to its sister city to the south, Charleston. Situated along the Cape Fear River and only a few miles from the Atlantic shore, Wilmington’s natural beauty and historic downtown provided plentiful subject matter for resident and visiting artists. The location of her freshly painted Spring Landscape has not been determined; it is very likely a scene near the Cape Fear River. On its verso, it bears a cryptic monogram consisting of an inverted “V” on top of two others underscored by a line, a cipher the artist used later in her career. Although Chant decried Impressionism, the canvas displays some of the style’s main traits, namely significant impasto and the use of highlights. The tall trees framing the vista serve to flatten the composition, and simultaneously recall the work of Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne and display the influence of Japanese prints, which she greatly admired and collected. mrs

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eliot candee clark (1883–1980) Silver and Pearl, 1924 Oil on artist board, 20 x 18 inches Son of the prominent Tonalist landscape painter Walter Clark, Eliot Clark came of age in his father’s studio surrounded by some of the foremost artists of his time, including John Twachtman, Edward Potthast, Joseph De Camp, and Frank Duveneck. He later recalled that he “grew unconsciously in the association of artists, of studio talk and that smell of paint and turpentine.”1 Eliot also accompanied his father on painting trips, traveling in New England and to the American West in 1901. On these excursions, Clark was encouraged to experience, as well as to observe, in order that he might be able to compose landscape works based on memory, as well as detailed sketches. This approach was in accord with the Tonalist notion that “landscape is the product of the artist’s withdrawal from and partial forgetfulness of nature.”2 Clark, an insightful writer who later authored several scholarly articles on art theory and published artist biographies, defined the Tonalist mood as “intimate . . . the form is treated for significant mass and picturesque contour, the foreground is not overburdened with irrelevant detail, [and] the composition is arranged for organized relation of form rather than purely descriptive landscape.”3 As a successful, widely exhibited, and well connected practitioner of the lingering Impressionist impulse in American art, Clark received invitations to serve as the annual visiting instructor at the Savannah Art Club in 1924 and 1925. For two consecutive winters, Clark reveled in the city’s lush environs, welcoming it as a point of new beginnings. His Savannah “interlude was delightful. . . . The picturesque city with its silvery southern light, its many gardens, and ancient live oaks hung with gray moss” entranced the artist. “During those Savannah winters he painted many of his finest works, the waterfront at twilight, old homes and landmarks, marvelous great trees, colorful warehouses in the half-light and so on.”4 His efforts were rewarded with exhibitions at the Telfair Academy both years of his residency. The subtle color harmonics, and indeed the very title, of Silver and Pearl reveal Clark’s awareness of and deep appreciation for James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Whistler’s series of paintings of the harbor in Valparaíso, Chile, offer an excellent counterpoint to Silver and Pearl. Whistler’s work is composed of profoundly harmonious “arrangements” of bluish-greens, moving from top to bottom. This approach suspends the two-dimensional limitations of the planar field, an impulse which he astutely augments by broad horizontal brushstrokes that have the effect of transcending the left and right margins, extending the field of vision beyond the picture plane. The same elements are at play in Clark’s painting. Tonal variations in mauve, gray, and tourmaline suggest motion in the water, which is brushed in a buttery, horizontal pattern. No effort is made at a sophisticated vanishing point perspective. Instead, Clark has focused upon the interplay of colors in close proximity, enhancing depth from the strongly frontal viewpoint of building mass to the left and right of the receding perspective. The moist, diaphanous ambience of the Southern city is palpable. Whistler himself had given voice to the lyric quality of such scenes: “And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens . . . the fairy-land is before us.”5 One local critic, Jane Judge, writing for the Savannah Morning News, confirmed the Whistlerian mood often present in Clark’s oeuvre, describing the artist’s color as “magical in its vigorous harmony” and praising his ability to portray moments of sincere beauty, “when the sky was pearl, and the world bathed in golden radiance.”6 ecp

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kate freeman clark (1875–1957) Summer Landscape, circa 1909 Oil on canvas, 26 x 30 inches The role of William Merritt Chase in the history of American Impressionism and the education of women artists cannot be undervalued, and Kate Freeman Clark is a stellar example of his influence. Clark descended from a prominent Mississippi family from Holly Springs, a small railroad hub surrounded by cotton plantations. Her widowed mother, Cary Ann Walthall Freeman Clark, was overly protective—chaperoning Kate everywhere, preventing her from establishing a studio of her own, and forcing her to work in classroom settings. At times, the aspiring artist expressed frustration that she had not been “born a male-child.”1 Nevertheless, the genteel Mrs. Clark saw that her daughter was well educated: at a fashionable New York City finishing school, at the Art Students League, and as a protégé of Chase. At the League, Clark initially studied watercolor with Irving Wiles, a noted portraitist, and drawing with John Twachtman, a Connecticut Impressionist recognized for his evocative snowscapes. A medium frequently employed by women and one that is less likely to soil clothes than oil, watercolor may have appealed to Clark’s tidiness. But once she saw Chase—dressed in a smart white flannel suit—neatly demonstrate his painting method, she converted to oil, having “realized, from the immaculateness [and] perfection of Mr. Chase’s attire, that it was possible to paint in oils and yet remain unspotted from the brush.”2 Clark spent the summer of 1895 at Peconic, Long Island, enrolled in Wiles’ outdoor painting course, and then switched her allegiance that fall to the Chase School of Art (later the New York School of Art). Under Chase’s tutelage, Clark painted earth-toned figure studies and still lifes, as well as plein air landscapes. She found his method very stimulating and began to emulate his brushwork: “So exhilarating and exciting an experience was it to watch the magic creation of his brush, that I found myself quite unable to sleep until far into the night after doing so.”3 Between 1896 and 1901, Clark routinely attended Chase’s Shinnecock Summer School of Art. Located slightly west of Southampton on Long Island, the program usually attracted one hundred participants who lived in a dormitory or cottages arranged around a studio building. The majority of students were women, who—dressed in long skirts, white blouses, and bonnets—were encouraged to work outdoors, a practice enhanced by Long Island’s bright sunlight reflecting off of sandy dunes and saltwater bays. By 1903, Clark suspended her formal studies and, at Chase’s urging, attempted to establish her own stylistic identity. She spent summers away from New York City in pleasant settings where she nurtured her forte in plein air scenes. Summer Landscape illustrates her skill at capturing lush greenery and wispy clouds. The composition is based on a strong diagonal that leads from right to left, from heavy forms in the foreground to more insubstantial ones in the background. The entire surface of the canvas is enlivened with brisk brushstrokes. Mountains in the far distance suggest either a Vermont or upstate New York locale. From 1904 until 1917, Clark regularly exhibited her paintings at the National Academy of Design, electing to conceal her gender by signing her canvases and listing herself as Freeman Clark. Ironically, Clark never sold a painting, having been forbidden to do so by her mother who deemed it improper for a lady to conduct business. While Chase was a father-like figure who encouraged Kate as an artist, Cary Clark directed her daughter according to traditional Southern mores. When Chase died unexpectedly in October 1916, Clark was devastated. The deaths of her maternal grandmother and mother followed not long afterwards. Very much at a loss without these three anchors, Clark retreated to Holly Springs in 1923, where she spent the remainder of her life, never painting again. In her will, she left the entirety of her oeuvre—about one thousand objects that had been stored in New York—to her hometown with instructions to build a museum to display her paintings and family archives. In keeping with her accomplishments as a landscape painter, she also requested, “and if possible, I desire . . . lovely lawns and many flowers, masses of color, flowering trees and shrubs, and bulbs in quantities.”4 mrs

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colin campbell cooper (1856–1937) St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, 1913 Gouache on canvas, 18¼ x 15 inches A noted Impressionist and inveterate traveler, Colin Campbell Cooper was a man of two worlds: New York City and Santa Barbara, California. Living in the former during his early career, he was enthralled with the way skyscrapers were dramatically transforming the metropolitan skyline. In the latter, where he spent his advancing years, his subject matter shifted to floral scenery, often articulated by a pergola or similar structure. As a sojourner in Europe during the 1890s, Cooper may have encountered the work of Claude Monet, who created his Rouen Cathedral series between 1892 and 1894. Whether or not Cooper was directly influenced by these paintings is unknown; in any case, he was inspired to paint some of the great cathedrals of Europe: Chartres, Wells, Ely, and Lincoln. Once established in New York, where he moved in 1902, it was only natural that he turned to the depiction of the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, many decorated with Gothic details. He painted the Woolworth Building, once called the “Cathedral of Commerce,” along with the Singer and the Fuller buildings.1 His architectural works optimistically and colorfully record the growing dynamism and urbanism of New York, in contrast to the scenes created by Ashcan School artists which stressed the gritty underbelly of urban life. Characteristically, Cooper employed an unusual format for an Impressionist: a vertical orientation, which serves to emphasize the height of the buildings. Tall modern structures were typically juxtaposed with lower, older ones, frequently churches with their own soaring spires. His viewpoint was often elevated, which increased the drama of his imagery. Foregrounds appear darkened by the shadows made by the towering buildings, but bright spots of reddish pink enlivened the overall compositions. In both spirit and style, Cooper’s paintings resemble the work of Childe Hassam, who also portrayed New York’s high rises and was noted for his scenes of major avenues decked out with flags during World War I. Hassam’s approach was largely patriotic, while Cooper was captivated by the industrialization and impressive scale of his adopted home.2 On a Southern excursion during the spring of 1913, Cooper stopped at four historic cities: Annapolis, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. Compared to his New York street scenes, his palette lightened considerably, perhaps under the influence of bright Southern sunshine. In Charleston, he recorded several significant public buildings, using a small format and gouache, suggesting he may have painted the views en plein air. One such scene shows the imposing City Market and is signed and dated, Charleston, SC Apl 5th 1913. Cooper’s view of St. Philip’s Church is taken from the parish graveyard across the street. The magnificent antebellum building is one of the landmarks that contribute to the designation of Charleston as “The Holy City.” The second church on this site, this stucco building was erected between 1835 and 1838. The tower and telescoping spire, added between 1847 and 1850, rise to a height of two hundred feet, making it one of the tallest structures in the historic district. In elevation, it is equivalent to an eighteen-story edifice; along with its sister Episcopal church, St. Michael’s, it was a navigational landmark for ships entering the nearby harbor. In Cooper’s painting, the tower is artfully framed by the vine-covered tree on the left and the obelisk-shaped grave marker on the right. The lack of full foliage and the fresh greens of the vegetation signify the spring season. The foreground is dominated by rectilinear grave markers defined by quick brushstrokes reminiscent of the work of French painter Paul Cézanne. Cooper took some artistic license in this depiction. On the right, a sketchily painted obelisk—invented or moved by the artist—mirrors the verticality of the steeple. Cooper’s 1913 visit to Charleston preceded the heyday of the Charleston Renaissance during which local artists celebrated the city’s architectural treasures and unique culture in paintings, poetry, and song. Other Northeastern artists came later, presumably attracted by the prospects of a warm climate. In 1925, Hassam sketched several streetscapes, which he later converted into etchings; four years later, Edward Hopper visited and produced eleven watercolors. mrs

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emma josephine sibley couper (1867–1957) Episcopal Church, Spartanburg, SC, circa 1925 Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches When Americans traveled to Paris in the 1880s and 1890s, their cultural interests and sightseeing destinations were largely historic: the grand cathedrals, the Louvre, and heritage sites associated with the French Revolution. Emma Josephine Sibley Couper’s first trip abroad occurred when she was an impressionable twelve-year old. The experience seems to have transformed her from something of a tomboy to a young girl eager for art lessons. Later in life, she recalled how during her time abroad her “love of art began to bud.”1 Her father Josiah Sibley, a wealthy textile industrialist based in Augusta, Georgia, was supportive; he hired teachers for her—including one of John Singer Sargent’s associates—and provided studio space at the family’s two residences. Sibley sent his daughter to Charleston for classes, but when she expressed an interest in going to art school in New York, he put his foot down. Upon his death, however, her aspirations were fulfilled, and she enrolled at the Art Students League. At the League, William Merritt Chase became Sibley’s primary mentor. Perhaps the most influential and popular teacher of the day, Chase was famous for his colorful, impressionistic paintings of city parks and coastal scenes of eastern Long Island where he conducted a summer school. Like many aspiring women artists, she took a summer session, probably with another League instructor, Frank Vincent DuMond who directed the Lyme School of Art. There in the bucolic Connecticut countryside, DuMond’s students painted en plein air, in the manner of the Impressionists. After she became the second wife of textile businessman Butler King Couper in 1891, Sibley began to sign her paintings J. S. Couper, presumably to disguise her gender. The couple first lived in Marietta, Georgia, and later moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina. During this time, her paintings were largely portraits and domestic in theme. In 1907, she and fellow artist Margaret Law founded the Spartanburg Arts and Crafts Club, which was inaugurated by an exhibition of their work alongside that of their instructor Chase, Robert Henri, Elliott Daingerfield, and Columbia, South Carolina, native Anna Heyward Taylor. Couper’s work evolved in the mid-1920s, the result of her attendance at several summer sessions conducted by Hugh Breckenridge in Gloucester, Massachusetts. A versatile technician with an expertise in color optics, he encouraged his student to paint more vividly by incorporating pronounced brushwork and brighter hues. Fishermen’s Conversation (page 40), clearly a scene from Gloucester, reveals Breckenridge’s instruction in its salient, intense blues and vibrant yellows. In addition, the technique of using separate brushstrokes of pure color laid down side by side is directly derived from Breckenridge. Episcopal Church, Spartanburg, SC shares some of these same characteristics: blues once again dominate, while intense, distinct daubs of pigment define flowers and leaves. The building radiates sunshine on one side, casting the flank in purple shadows. Trees on either side serve to frame the church as a single, nun-like figure sits on a bench to the right, opposite to the modest wooden structure where Sunday school classes were held. The painting is a testament to Breckenridge’s influence and illustrates Couper’s full acceptance of an Impressionist—almost PostImpressionist—aesthetic. As she had moved to Montreat, North Carolina, in 1924, Couper probably painted the scene on one of her return trips to Spartanburg. The community’s primary Episcopal church, the Church of the Advent’s Gothic Revival structure dates to 1850 and is one of the city’s most picturesque monuments, even though as a devout Presbyterian, it was not Couper’s place of worship.2 Although Couper exhibited at various venues, sales were never of great importance, and she usually donated any income reaped to churches or missions in Africa. Her one ambition—to have an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—was never fulfilled. Nevertheless, Couper seems to have thoroughly relished her painting career and once wrote on a scrap of paper: “When you do something, let it be 3-fold (1) enjoy doing (2) proud of it (3) glad to remember it.”3 mrs

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john elliott parker daingerfield (1859–1932) Springtime, 1927 Oil on canvas, 241/8 x 341/8 inches Infinities, circa 1913 Oil on canvas, 32¼ x 401/8 inches Symbolism—an emphasis on the spiritual and emblematic rather than the representational—enjoyed a modest following in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Elliott Dangerfield was a noted spokesman for the movement and one of its most devoted practitioners. Inspired by his mentor George Inness, Daingerfield wedded the Symbolist aesthetic to the French Barbizon tradition. Early in his career, he was touted as the “American Millet,” after Jean-François Millet, the author of such well known peasant scenes as The Angelus and The Gleaners. Following the 1891 death of his first wife in childbirth, Daingerfield turned to religious themes, especially the Madonna and child. From 1886 until his death in 1932, Dangerfield divided his time between New York City and his home in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. In the former, he functioned as a respected member of the art community, gaining full membership at the National Academy of Design in 1906 and writing articles about artists who shared his aesthetic inclinations. In the Blue Ridge Mountains, he discovered ample subject matter: rolling terrain, well cultivated farmland, and rustic laborers reminiscent of Millet’s peasants. Blowing Rock’s elevated prospect afforded him great vistas of the sky, sunsets, and the moon in all its phases. Madonna and Lamb (page 29) is typical of Daingerfield’s oeuvre in both theme and technique. The figures are an overt reference to Mary and the Christ child and derive stylistically from Raphael, while the setting with its deep earth tones and rising moon is thoroughly Barbizonesque. The paint application consists of thick, visible strokes layered with varnish to enhance the mood. Over time, the varnish has darkened, happily furthering his goal to create atmospheric depictions. Very different in feeling is Springtime, a later painting and one with a lighter palette than most. By 1927, Daingerfield was spending more time in Blowing Rock at Westglow, his beloved Colonial Revival home that emulated a Southern plantation. He also traveled in the area, going upon occasion to Tryon, North Carolina, a year-round artists’ colony about one hundred miles away. While a frequent painter of sunsets and moonrises, Daingerfield had longed to paint a spring scene, as he indicated in a letter to Chicago investment banker C. W. Sills: “The blossom picture is as fine a thing as I’ve done and the result of a life-time wish to paint a Spring theme. It was done near Tryon, N.C. and has the quality of springtime to a high degree.”1 Tryon was once known for the peach and apple orchards perched on the hillsides and in the valleys surrounding the town. In Springtime, four trees in full bloom frame a rustic farmhouse, while the solemn silhouette of a mountain ridge, cast in shadow by the clouds above, dominates the background. The delicate pinks and whites of the trees dramatically contrast the green grass. Short repeated brushstrokes are evident in the foreground, as are several broad horizontal ones where he dragged a partially loaded brush across the surface.

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In contrast to the pastoral simplicity of Springtime are the sublime paintings Daingerfield did following two trips to the Grand Canyon. On the first in 1910, he was invited by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad to join four other painters—Thomas Moran (who had already painted the site several times), DeWitt Parshall, Edward Potthast, and Frederick Ballard Williams—charged with creating imagery the railroad could use in materials promoting tourism. The artists traveled in style, transported in private rail cars and lodging at the celebrated El Tovar Hotel, which sits close to the edge of the south rim of the canyon. Their introduction to the canyon was rather dramatic, as recounted by Nina Spalding Stevens, an Art Students League-trained artist and assistant director of the Toledo Museum of Art who was part of the entourage. “The artists were led to the rim with their eyes closed, that the vision might burst upon them for the first time in its entirety. All was still with the silence of infinity. . . . It was as though the earth had opened before them and heaven was spread at their feet.” She later described Daingerfield’s somewhat dumbfounded reaction: “Mr. Daingerfield was sometimes silent and, sometimes,

colorful adjectives came tumbling from his lips in a passion of appreciation. Words which in his moments of ecstasy came nearer to describing the emotions of the Canyon than the most finished efforts of authors and poets.”2 The canvas Infinities captures some of the awe Daingerfield reportedly felt, including the “silence of infinity.” The gray mist and clouds of a passing storm soften the jagged edges and contrast the cliffs’ brilliant red. He enhanced the atmospheric quality of the image through heavy impasto on the rocks that dominate the foreground, which juxtapose a thinner application of paint across the bottom and on the right. Positioned at the composition’s midpoint is a diminutive horse and rider whose identity is ambiguous: is he a Native American or, more likely, a conquistador? Apparently unafraid of the precipice below him, he gestures toward the landforms beyond—a movement that reinforces the latter interpretation. Daingerfield probably knew that Spaniards had been the first Europeans to visit the canyon in the 1540s, only to abandon their expedition when they found no way to cross to the chasm’s other side. The large triangular butte with a stepped profile in the distance is known as Cheops Pyramid; behind it, in the distance to the left, is Isis Temple. Both lie about five miles north of the south rim at the El Tovar Hotel and are two of the many sites in the Canyon that bear Egyptian names. The association with ancient Egypt no doubt appealed to Daingerfield. An enduring fascination with the canyon prompted Daingerfield and other members of the 1910 excursion to organize the Society of Men Who Paint the West. They circulated exhibitions of their work, and Infinities was included in one grouping that went to Detroit, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles in 1916. The Grand Canyon was a site—“a great freak of nature,” to use the artist’s own words—that met Daingerfield’s predilection for romantic interpretations of the landscape. Because of its unfathomable scale, irregular shapes, variegated colors, and constantly changing weather, the place defies exact transcription. A guidebook from 1927 states: “Its motionless unreality is one of the first and most powerful impressions it makes.”3 All an artist could do is capture something of its ethos. In an autobiographical sketch written in the third person, Daingerfield explained his point of view: “If one were to ask Mr. Daingerfield what is most essential . . . he would say to you ‘spiritual vision.’ This is sometimes called merely imagination. It is something higher than that, says Mr. Daingerfield. Spiritual vision is a message imparted to a man of genius who, if he has technical ability, may pass it on to the observer.”4 Over the ensuing years, Daingerfield painted a series of Grand Canyon views based on sketches he did on site. Some renditions include a reclining nude or visions of exotic architecture, which bestow impressive Symbolist connotations. They carry such evocative titles as The Spirit of the Storm, City that Never Was, and Tower of Silence. In addition, Daingerfield was inspired to write poems in response to his visits to the Grand Canyon, and these literary works, like the paintings, evoke a sense for the grandeur and timelessness of nature, as well as the insignificance of mankind. Strip from the earth her crust And see revealed the carven glory of the inner world. Templed—domed—silent: — The while, the Genius of the Canyon broods. Nor counts the Ages of Mankind A thought amid the everlasting calm.5 mrs

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william de leftwich dodge (1867–1935) The Clothesline, circa 1928 Oil on canvas, 481/8 x 401/8 inches Entrance exams to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris were notoriously difficult. Mandatory for admission, these rigorous tests required candidates to not only display artistic aptitude in fundamental technical skills, but to also prove intellectual proficiency in art history and other classical subjects. Competition among applicants was fierce. As a teenager, William Dodge had taken advantage of free classes the academy offered to adjunct learners. He quickly decided that his artistic ambitions hinged upon his enrollment there, where he could study under the French academic legend Jean-Léon Gérôme. Gérôme was one of the deans of old-line history painters, an artist whose canvases depicted inspiring scenes from ancient history and mythology. Dodge, determined but naïve, first sat for the exam in 1883 at the tender age of sixteen—and failed, trying again only six months later. In fact, it was not until his sixth attempt—after a period of two years and an extended stay in Germany for additional instruction— that Dodge was granted admission. He spent the next four years, from 1885 to 1889, learning at his master’s feet.1 Very little drawn from these early studies would have inspired the propensity for the impressionistic expression apparent in the stalwart female figure and breezily waving laundry in The Clothesline. The schools Dodge attended in Paris and Berlin were conservative academies whose curriculum stressed the importance of life drawing and subdued color harmonies in the naturalistic tradition. Dodge emerged from this atmosphere to become one of the most celebrated muralists of his day, an esteemed practitioner of the high-minded classicism which flavored the American Renaissance style. “Intensely nationalistic,” American Renaissance artists “appropriated images and symbols of past civilizations and used them to create a magnificent American pageant” in which the young nation “became the culmination of history for an age that believed in progress.”2 Dodge’s monumental dome for the New York State Capitol Building in Albany thrust heroic figures of symbolic civic virtue into a vast expanse of space, emblematic of the nation’s continental expansion. His soaring image of Ambition at the Library of Congress imagines an ethereal, transcendental scene reminiscent of European cathedrals. In previous commentary on the development of Dodge’s more impressionistic style, much has been made of the fact that Dodge spent three consecutive summers—1898, 1899, and 1900—“near the home of Claude Monet in Giverny, France” where “he began to paint plein air landscapes.”3 As a counterpoint, the artist’s daughter, Sara Dodge Kimbrough, reports an episode in Giverny when her father expressed a certain skepticism regarding the revolutionary stylistics of the legendary painter of gardens lush with lily ponds and Japanese bridges. Passing by Monet’s house one afternoon, Dodge’s wife glimpsed the artist at work, proclaiming that the “exquisite” work in progress “has all the vitality and luminosity of the atmosphere. How does he do it?” Dodge replied that “broken color is what gives the whole picture that fresh, brilliant look, but old Monet isn’t the first to use this method. . . . Jongkind and Turner really created the style and inspired both Manet and Monet.”4 However apocryphal the story may be, it does affirm an historical visual acuity altogether fitting for an artist whose Beaux-Arts training demanded, and then nurtured, comprehensive scholarship. On trips to the South taken between 1900 and 1910, Dodge—whose murals were typically “composed of iconic figures placed in a shallow space”—created far more personal works of art which were “naturalistically conceived . . . and easily read.”5 Many of these were made while visiting Sarah Barnes Livingston in Harris Neck, Georgia, including a portrait of the artist’s daughter sitting in the lap of an African American woman in the Livingston home; Sara and Aunt Katy was subsequently exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1907.6 Other paintings inspired by the wild coastal swamps and salt marshes reveal an Impressionist interest in leisure activity, “dappled sunlight and verdant gardens.”7 In these paintings, as well as the energized image of the laundress, the venerable muralist establishes a representative dichotomy between his sense of public pride and his private reflections. ecp

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gaines ruger donoho (1857–1916) Ploughmen in a Fenced Field, 1891 Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches Seeking to escape the demands, dirt, and bustle of city life, Ruger Donoho—as he preferred to be known— established his primary residence in East Hampton, New York, in late 1890. Located about one hundred miles from Manhattan on the eastern end of Long Island, East Hampton enjoyed a colonial past and a bucolic present. For artists such as Donoho, the area was reminiscent of Barbizon, where he had spent his formative years as an art student. An 1883 Lippincott’s Magazine article entitled “The American Barbizon,” extolled the village’s agrarian way of life, basic simplicity, and the quaintness of its shingled houses and windmills.1 Eastern Long Island was the antithesis of Gotham, so rife with crowded immigrant neighborhoods and the burgeoning modernization of looming skyscrapers and noisy transportation systems. When Donoho moved to East Hampton, the picturesque community had already been discovered by artists and, by the time of his death twenty-six years later, had evolved into an elite summer enclave. The Tile Club—a group of artists that included William Merritt Chase and Winslow Homer—explored eastern Long Island in 1878. Four years later, the acclaimed painter of the American West, Thomas Moran, and his wife, Mary Nimmo, became the first artists to live there year round. In 1891, Donoho purchased acreage on Egypt Lane, not far from the town’s historic center, and soon built a substantial house for himself and his new wife, Matilda Ackley. While a student in France, Donoho had worked hard to establish his reputation, often participating in the exhibitions of the prestigious Paris Salon, as well as ones in this country at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His paintings, typically landscapes, were based on sketches and studies made during summers spent mostly in Grez-sur-Loing near the forest of Fontainebleau, in the Barbizon region. Once Donoho was established in East Hampton, his work became more intimate, lighter in palette, and increasingly impressionistic. Eventually, lush flower gardens replaced pastoral scenery as his primary theme. He also painted nocturnal scenes of area houses that recall the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The shift in Donoho’s oeuvre has been attributed to his friendship with the Impressionist painter Childe Hassam, which probably began while both men were attending the Académie Julian in Paris during the 1880s. In 1898, Donoho introduced Hassam to East Hampton, and Hassam returned to the area almost every year from 1906 onward. In 1919, Donoho’s widow sold Hassam an old house known as Willow Bend, which her husband had lovingly restored. After its acquisition, Hassam spent May through October there every year until his death.2 Painted shortly after Donoho’s arrival in East Hampton, Ploughmen in a Fenced Field is a transitional work; the expanse of green fields and pastoral emphasis are reminiscent of paintings done in France, while the foreground anticipates the broken brushwork that would typify his later canvases. The composition is carefully orchestrated: the split rail fence typical of Long Island creates a left-to-right diagonal that is countered by the movement of the farmer. In the middle distance, a series of rounded hayricks contrast the more geometric shapes of small buildings. The landscape illustrates how agrarian East Hampton was in the 1890s. The view is from the east, looking west toward Willow Bend, recognizable by its red chimney. The barn on the right was located on Egypt Lane, and the field behind it extended to Main Street.3 A commentator in the local press noticed Donoho’s fondness for his adopted home: “When Mr. Donoho first came to East Hampton in 1890 . . . [he] began to paint our beauty spots and quiet lanes.”4 mrs

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alexander john drysdale (1870–1934) Louisiana Twilight Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches Alexander John Drysdale is one of those Southern artists whose prolific production of formulaic paintings and local notoriety provoked a colorful and persistent oral history. Legends about him abound in New Orleans, where he is said to have painted in department store windows, selling his works only when a pressing need for cash to fund his French Quarter revelry so moved him. Much of this rather unflattering reputation has been dispelled by Howard A. Buechner, a physician and talented antiquarian, whose 1985 monograph on Drysdale remains the most exhaustive source of information on the artist.1 Sadly, the sheer volume of the artist’s surviving body of work—the remains of an estimated ten thousand paintings executed during his active career—threatens to overshadow Drysdale’s considerable achievement as an immortalizer of the lush Louisiana landscape. Drysdale “became a professional artist relatively late in life, after training and working as an accountant and banker,” a career path necessitated by the untimely death of his father.2 Art, however, had long been his passion, beginning with private studies and classes at New Orleans’ Southern Art Union as a teenager; he also studied briefly with Paul Poincy. Thanks to the financial assistance of a friend, Drysdale moved to New York where he established a residence and promptly enrolled at the Art Students League in 1901. His teachers there included the painters Charles Courtney Curran and Frank Vincent DuMond. DuMond’s combination of Tonalist naturalism—characterized by textural brushstroke and color harmonies—with a heightened sense of light informed the impressionistic leanings of several painters from the South in this period. Drysdale was also inspired “by the work of George Inness, whom he termed ‘wonderful in his facility as well as in his genius’” and whose “transitory effects of nature . . . painted much from memory” he greatly admired.3 However influenced, Drysdale’s personal expression as an artist springs from his creation of a highly idiosyncratic medium. He thinned oil paints with kerosene to create a wash—not unlike watercolor—which he applied to a very porous artist board. In a tactic that surely increased his productivity, he employed not only a brush, but also used cotton balls dipped in the color wash as a tool for daubing pigment onto the surface. Kerosene has a rapid evaporation factor which, combined with the viscosity of its petroleum base, gave these works precisely that moist and humid glow he sought to express the light and environment of the Louisiana bayous. Having developed and perfected this technique, Drysdale made it his trademark. His preferred compositional format is usually a variation on the theme of vanishing point perspective, achieved by a curvilinear line drawn from the foreground to the mid-ground of the planar field. To affirm the distinctions between the spatial mass to the left and right of this line—most often a meandering watercourse—he counterpoints a well defined organic form—usually a live oak dripping with Spanish moss—with a more indistinct grouping of towering pines shimmering vaguely in the distance. Like Harvey Joiner’s endless rows of beech trees and Joseph Meeker’s ever-present live oaks attended by a solitary heron, Drysdale’s weeping trees are unmistakable. One senses that Drysdale layered these works, front to back, with increasingly specific detail, moving from the diaphanous structure rendered by the kerosene soak towards a clearer impression of the scene. Detail all but disappears in hazy foregrounds. The artist acknowledged this sublimation in assessing his own work, noting that the “fellow who painted that is somewhat of an Impressionist, and . . . was trying to sacrifice everything to atmosphere and color, and left out the minutiae.”4 His works in oil on canvas are more rare and—like the darkly foreboding setting of Louisiana Twilight—often recall what John James Audubon called the “baneful effluvia” immanent in the Louisiana wetlands. It is a place the Southern Agrarian writer Robert Penn Warren envisioned as a living being, whose “ectoplasmic fingers of the mist reached out of the swamp, threading out from the blackness of the cypresses, to snag us.”5 ecp

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william gilbert gaul (1855–1919) Van Buren, Tennessee, circa 1881 Oil on canvas, 295/8 x 44 inches Gilbert Gaul’s New Jersey origins, formal education, and eclectic oeuvre give little indication of his sensitivities as a painter of naturalistic impressions of the Southern scene. His early instruction was very much in line with the academic milieu of the day. Beginning in 1872, he studied with John George Brown, a genre painter of shoeshine boys and street urchins, and with still life painter Lemuel Wilmarth at the National Academy of Design. The paintings he began to exhibit there in 1877 were either sentimental genre scenes such as Gathering Kindling (1874) or history paintings centered on armed conflict, including Holding the Line at All Hazards (1882), which received the American Art Association’s gold medal in 1882. Despite his early success at the National Academy, when students disgruntled with the more staid aspects of the institution founded the Art Students League in New York in 1875, Gaul followed. A year later, he traveled to the Dakotas, making sketches of Native Americans and the frontier terrain, which he subsequently developed as studio paintings. Though he was born and reared just outside New York City, Gaul’s family included Southern relations. In 1881, Gaul inherited a farm in rural Van Buren County, Tennessee, from a maternal uncle. The bequest carried a stipulation, however, which required Gaul to reside there for a minimum of four years. Located in the rolling hills of the Cumberland Plateau near the state’s midsection, Van Buren County, though “small in size . . . is large in scenic beauty.”1 In order to comply with the terms of the will, Gaul and his bride of one year took up residence there between 1881 to 1885, building both a log cabin and studio.2 During this period, he painted several impressionistic landscape paintings and oil sketches which represent one of the first manifestations of the Impressionist style in the South. While there is no evidence to confirm a supposition that these works were rendered en plein air, their freshness and panoramic sweep suggest a visual acuity honed by close on-site observation. As with many of his colleagues working in the early 1880s, Gaul’s work combines a Barbizon interest in the pictorial values of the local scene with impressionistic broken brushwork. He establishes the atmospheric mood through a blue/green color harmony, separating the tones of water and sky with a broad band of deeper hue in the mid-ground. A trio of figures on the left recalls the idealized peasant farmers of Jean-François Millet. While charming, Van Buren, Tennessee lacks the nostalgic note or subliminal suggestion of heavy-handed sentiment often evident in the artist’s work. Instead, Gaul masterfully integrates the figurative elements with the multi-layered landscape, lending the work a sense of wholeness that transcends the individual components. It was during his time in Tennessee that Gaul’s earlier explorations of military subject matter expanded. After his dramatically lit canvas depicting a nighttime confrontation between Union and Confederate soldiers, Charging the Battery (1882), was awarded a medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition—followed by additional honors won at the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair—Gaul’s status as one of the foremost painters of the Lost Cause was cemented. He specialized not only in vivid battle recreations, but also in depictions of poignant moments on the anxious home front. Popular magazines such as Scribner’s, the Century, and Harper’s regularly commissioned him as an illustrator. Gaul’s work drew praise for their creator’s “penchant for severe and sad yet highly picturesque and stirring” images of “armed combat,” as well as his sensitive “delineation of more peaceful domestic scenes involving both earnestness and humor, brightened by the costume and the romance of a century’s antiquity.”3 It seems possible that these historical genre paintings, often executed on a large scale, consumed much of Gaul’s creative energy throughout his career, with the result that few landscapes of the caliber of Van Buren, Tennessee have been found. The painting is at once an eloquent ode to the South’s scenic beauty and a testament to the rising tide and regional distinctions of American Impressionism. It is also a great tribute to that “sympathetic view of the rural South that [Gaul] had come to adopt as a young, newly-married, and gifted artist.”4 ecp

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edward b. gay (1837–1928) Beach Scene, 1924 Oil on board, 16 x 20 inches The quintessential Irishman is typically portrayed as an affable storyteller, surrounded by a large and loving family. Such a description fits Edward B. Gay nicely, but he was also a prolific and successful painter, recognized in his day for sensitive depictions of unpretentious landscapes. As a resident of Mount Vernon, New York, just sixteen miles north of Manhattan, Gay had the best of both worlds: he was close enough to the metropolitan area to take advantage of its cultural offerings, but sufficiently removed that he could make his environs the subject of his paintings. His inexhaustible work habits were recounted by his wife, Martha Gay: “In the seclusion of his country studio his hand had learned the choice of many a touch. He painted unaware, and out of long, quiet hours grew those still canvasses which marked the ardor of the painter.”1 Geographically and collegially, Gay could be connected to the Hudson River School, but his paintings lack the majesty and grandeur of the stirring canvases created by his contemporaries Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt. Furthermore, Gay’s work did not have the crystalline light of such Luminists as Martin Johnson Heade or Fitz Henry Lane. Instead, Gay, who had trained under conventional landscapists in Karlsruhe, Germany, gravitated toward carefully composed, serene pastoral settings and river scenes, typically devoid of human figures or buildings. His aesthetic strength, however, was his naturalism, as noted by a New York reviewer: “The freshness, the freedom, the poetic truth and abundant sunshine in not a few of these canvases show that Mr. Gay has gone for his inspiration out of doors and studied nature in some of her enchanting moods. The artistic instinct which has led him to depict some quiet nook or broader stretch of country with his facile brush was everywhere apparent.”2 Stylistically, Gay’s approach shifted significantly after his 1881 encounter with the work of John Constable. After seeing the British master’s work in London, Gay began to emulate the low horizons and billowing clouds of his English counterpart. As his work matured, Gay’s career advanced to include exhibition opportunities at such notable venues as the National Academy of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Tonalist painter George Inness praised a canvas that Gay exhibited at the National Academy: “But I will express to you my belief that your picture ‘Washed by the Sea’ is the finest piece of nature in tone and colour that has ever been on our walls. To my knowledge nothing of local force is shirked and the tone is nature’s. The gradation leaves nothing to be asked for and the greater part of the picture is magnificently rendered.”3 Gay’s biographer and grandson, Richard G. Coker, estimated that the artist’s annual income was about six thousand dollars—equivalent to the revenue from about forty paintings.4 With these resources in hand, Gay began to spend winters in the South, and, starting in 1905, summers at the art colony at Cragsmoor, a rustic village in upstate New York. A warmer climate was not the only reason Gay began to travel South during the winter months around the turn of the century. In 1889, his eldest daughter married the son of a successful manufacturer of paper products from Hartsville, South Carolina. Gay first visited the area in 1898, describing it as “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” Hartsville—where he often stayed for a month—was a convenient stopover on his way to Ormond, a few miles north of Daytona Beach on the east coast of Florida. Ormond boasted a hotel owned by industrialist and railroad magnate Henry Flagler which drew wealthy visitors—and prospective patrons—from the North. Beach Scene probably resulted from one of these sojourns in Florida. Rendered on a firm board with broad brushstrokes, it exemplifies a plein air sketch. The artist could have easily carried the board down to the beach and completed the painting in one sitting. Although it lacks bright sunshine, it demonstrates the influence of his artistic mentor, Constable. In February 1902, Gay sent his dealer William Macbeth a playful note: “Your letter to Hartsville was forwarded to me here. I was lounging on the sand in the shade of a palm tree fanning myself when it was handed me. These particulars are given you with malicious intent, for I see by the papers that you have it very cold in New York!”5 mrs

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lovell birge harrison (1854–1929) Sunburst at Sea, circa 1913–1914 Pastel and graphite on paper, 277/8 x 30 inches The history of art is punctuated with the writings of artists. From Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists to The Andy Warhol Diaries, the articulated commentaries of artists upon their own lives and work—as well as the lives and work of those around them—have provided insight, technical advice, colorful opinion, and, in the case of Birge Harrison’s Landscape Painting, high-minded theories on the very specifics of certain forms of painterly expression. Liberally educated and advantageously placed, Harrison was one of the most eloquent artists of his generation. From his colonial New England antecedents, he surely derived a sense of purpose and gravitas that was tempered by his exposure to the experimental teachings of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, his association with John Singer Sargent, and the four years he spent at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Upon his return to America, Harrison’s unique approach to landscape painting—notable for its close color harmonics and appreciation for the poetic effects of twilight and rainy weather— placed him in the forefront of the Tonalist movement. One contemporary critic wrote glowingly of his landscapes in “tones of azure, of mauve and of pale and ethereal rose and amber. He painted it as he saw it, in the opalescent radiance of dawn, in the golden glow of sunset, or under the pale mystery of twilight skies.”1 Harrison was also a teacher, known for his generous manner and the nurturing regard in which he held his students. In 1909, his most important lectures were gathered into the publication Landscape Painting. Though phrased in genteel terms, his views on the subject were somewhat radical and certainly dismissive of prior efforts. He was “quite certain that the old masters knew little about landscape—and cared less,” for to them it “was never more than a stage setting, a background against which the human actors played their parts. . . . Nevertheless, it was not landscape at all in the modern sense of the word—landscape as we know it. It was conventional in form, false in color, and devoid of atmosphere and luminosity.” He was also convinced that the “most splendid achievement of the nineteenth century in painting, and its best legacy to the future, was the discovery of the technical means by which the scintillating effect of living light could be transferred to the dead and rigid surface of a canvas.” He called this revolutionary technique “vibration [which] is obtained by means of a cool overtone painted freshly into a warm undertone, care being taken not to mix or blend the two coats and not to cover up completely the undertone, rather letting it show through brokenly all over the canvas; the vibration being secured, naturally, by the separate play of the warm and the cold notes.”2 This process, which Josef Albers later defined as the “interaction of color,” indicates Harrison’s awareness of the human eye’s construct of rods and cones whose “vibration” results in the perception of color, which is, after all, the prismatic effect of refracted light.3 For Harrison, a painting was a living creation, one which sparked not only the imagination, but provoked a physical, sensate response. The artist, therefore, had a sacred mission, to “return once more to kindly nature, whose beauty is exhaustless and everlasting” in order to create “an endless feast of beauty for those who have eyes to see and minds to appreciate.”4 Landscape Painting was published two years after Harrison’s first visit to Charleston in 1908. Descriptive travel accounts in popular magazines—illustrated by cityscapes of weathered textured buildings overgrown with lush foliage and flowering plants—may have piqued Harrison’s curiosity.5 But true to form, it was the “most beautiful and special effects” of light upon the “pearl-shell quality” of the water in Charleston harbor that inspired the works he created in his winter studio there.6 While Sunburst at Sea cannot definitively be associated with Charleston, it is reminiscent of the artist’s Moonlight on Charleston Harbor (1908). Executed in pastel, Sunburst at Sea is a symphony of blue tones that testifies to Harrison’s facility in transcribing water and his ability to create an image that vibrates. Pastel was conducive to reinforcing Harrison’s aesthetic, and he endorsed the medium in a 1915 Art and Progress article: “During the past two years I have produced a series of paintings in pastel which are as sound and lasting as the best oil paintings while retaining the exquisite bloom and atmospheric quality which is the distinctive beauty of the pastel, a quality which is due, of course, to its soft, dry, unreflecting surface.”7

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james vernon herring (1887–1969) Beach Landscape, circa 1925 Oil on academy board, 81/4 x 12 inches James V. Herring was a tremendous force for the education and promotion of African American artists beginning in the 1920s when the Harlem Renaissance was in its ascendancy. He spent the majority of his career at Howard University in Washington, D.C., considered the foremost historically black university in the country. Professor— as he liked to be called—Herring did not subscribe to the same radical approach as his colleague Alain Locke, chairman of the philosophy department at Howard and editor of The New Negro: An Interpretation. In his influential writings, Locke advocated for black art based on African heritage, much like the work of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Amedeo Modigliani that he had seen in Europe. Herring was pointedly more expansive: “Our policy has been to leave the discovery of racial and nationalistic artists to our chauvinistic friends. We have preferred to exhibit the works of all schools and trends regardless of ideology or any designated sphere.”1 A native of rural Clio, South Carolina, Herring received his early education in Greensboro, North Carolina, and at Howard Academy, a college preparatory high school that paved the way for the university. In 1917, he received a bachelor of pedagogy in art degree from Syracuse University. When Herring joined the faculty at Howard University in 1921, there was no art program; he taught in the architecture department. By the end of that year, he had convinced the administration that an art department was warranted, and he soon hired instructors to teach design, composition, and drawing. By the end of the decade, he established the Howard University Gallery of Art, which was hailed in the New York Times: “Never until now has there been such a place where Negro art students have had the opportunity to study on such a large scale within the walls of their own institution products of artists of the highest rank both at home and abroad.”2 In addition to his on-campus activities, in 1943 Herring co-founded the Barnett Aden Gallery with his life partner, Alonzo J. Aden, a fellow South Carolinian and former student. Exhibitions and soirées for integrated audiences were held in the row house they shared, using their living spaces for the display of art. The emphasis was on art for the home—small to moderate size pieces by both black and white artists. They hosted one-artist exhibitions and group shows, which tended to be racially mixed. The gallery operated as a not-for-profit entity with the expectation that when a work sold, the artist would, in turn, donate a piece to the Barnett Aden Collection. Noted artist and author Romare Bearden commented: “The Barnett Aden Gallery was one of the few places where black painters, sculptors, and graphic artists could come to exhibit their works for a period of almost twenty years. . . . Beyond this, Mr. Aden and Mr. Herring, as pioneers, must be credited with having preserved, often through times of real adversity, a collection of art works of value in the history of Afro-American artists—indeed of American artists.”3 A colleague painted the following picture of Herring: “He was a great organizer and administrator, had excellent taste, was a renowned critic, an impeccable dresser, and quite a gourmet.”4 He maintained a demanding schedule teaching classes, administering the art department, overseeing two galleries, and participating in such membership organizations as the College Art Association and the American Federation of Arts, as well as advising the Harmon Foundation about their exhibitions of African American art. It is little wonder that his painting oeuvre is rather limited and appears to date largely to the 1920s. Stylistically, Herring leaned toward an impressionistic approach characterized by thick impasto. Beach Landscape is a small painting on board, probably created as a plein air sketch. It is noteworthy that Herring preferred landscape subjects, eschewing representations that might easily be defined as “African American.” In this respect, he diverged from Locke who proclaimed: “We ought and must have a school of Negro art, a local and racially representative tradition.”5 Herring instead followed the more liberal position of his protégé James A. Porter, author of Modern Negro Art, who declared that the artist should “seize upon any material that may enrich his ideas and his productions.”6 mrs

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harry leslie morris hoffman (1871–1964) Street Scene, Savannah, Georgia, 1914 Oil on canvas, 30 x 401/8 inches Painter, musician, and performer, Harry Hoffman was one of the most diversely talented members of the Old Lyme School to work in the South. As a student at Yale, he was a champion gymnast and something of a campus character, playing his flute and banjo in impromptu recitals on the college lawn. After he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York, Hoffman and a group of fellow students developed a vaudevillian revue, which they performed at venues along Maine’s coast during the summer of 1900.1 Such levity was balanced, however, by considerable artistic ambition and serious study, first with John Ferguson Weir at Yale and then with Frank Vincent DuMond at the League and during summers at Old Lyme. In 1903, Hoffman left America for France, where his personal and aesthetic sensibilities found a home at the Académie Julian. Founded in 1868 by Rodolphe Julian and conducted as an atelier— or studio study system—the Académie Julian was more like a creative consortium of artists than a school with a strict academic agenda. Older academies in Paris, which the Impressionist movement soon supplanted, concentrated on classical instruction, such as drawing of the figure from life or plaster casts and the laying down colors of close value in harmonic concentration. By contrast, Julian’s curriculum was more fluid and accessible, which enhanced its appeal to younger artists and, in particular, to Americans. It was in this atmosphere that Hoffman soaked up the principles of painting en plein air, while reveling in the lively artistic camaraderie reminiscent of his earlier student days. Indeed, it was at the Académie Julian that many American Impressionists absorbed the spirit of a key theme to the understanding of that painterly school’s manifestation in the South: observe and express. After two years abroad, Hoffman returned to the United States and in 1906 was once again a member of the group of artists who lodged in Florence Griswold’s boardinghouse on the Connecticut coast. By that time, the seminal Impressionist and tastemaker Childe Hassam was a regular seasonal resident, and the colony had taken on the air of an American Giverny. “Members of the Colony, preferring to work from nature, spent the day in the presence of their subject, often painting ‘en plein air’—in the open air. Canvases were sun-soaked or moonlit depending on the weather. Nature’s cycle dictated themes and subjects.”2 Hoffman created several paintings based on the Greek Revival Griswold house and its gardens, rendered in rich color and his own personally ecstatic broken brushwork. A restless and innovative spirit, Hoffman traveled extensively—throughout Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States—in search of subject matter. He began to visit the South as early as 1914, becoming one of the first Northeastern painters to discover the textured ambience of the languid Southern scene. Many of the works he created during his Southern exposure are rather large and panoramic, juxtaposing an impressionistic sense of the natural environment with the solidity obvious in his massing of structures and inhabitants. During the winters of 1914 and 1915, he worked in Savannah, where he depicted the old market and various street scenes populated by African Americans at work and play. The observation that “Hoffman’s Savannah paintings are loosely painted and brightly colored” is vividly borne out in Street Scene, Savannah, Georgia.3 The combination of warm and cool colors emphasizes the presence of the fierce summer sunlight as it blazes down over the rooftops and through the leaves of the towering live oaks, scorching a patch of pavement in searing light, and casting deep shadows across the roadway. Street Scene, Savannah, Georgia celebrates the cross-fertilization of the Southern locale with an innate artistic imagination finely honed at the most sophisticated French and American fountainheads. ecp

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alfred heber hutty (1877–1954) Charleston Garden, circa 1925 Oil on canvas, 32 x 341/8 inches Backstage, 1940 Drypoint on paper, 117/8 x 8 inches; Edition: 75 Backstage, circa 1940 Oil on canvas, 361/8 x 321/8 inches In her seminal history on artists in the life of Charleston, South Carolina, Anna Wells Rutledge refers to the nineteenth century nomadic portrait painters from the North who descended upon the city in winter months as “birds of passage.”1 Comparing those painters to birds flying south for the winter calls up a rather charming image, and as a metaphor it is applicable to Alfred Hutty’s extended seasonal residency in the Holy City. Birds of passage arrive with their own nesting patterns, partake of nurture from the local scene, and then depart, only to return again. Hutty’s three-decade itinerancy between Woodstock, New York, and Charleston resulted in a rich crossfertilization. Nearly a century after his arrival in the state, “Hutty’s contributions to the artistic fabric of the South Carolina lowcountry . . . are indelible.”2 Hutty’s career shift from Midwestern stained glass maker to painter at the age of twenty-seven was inspired by the atmospheric landscapes of Birge Harrison. Hutty relocated to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, where Harrison was an instructor. Harrison’s art, though not as vividly brushed or highly colored as French Impressionism, reflected the quieter spirit of American Tonalism, though his pronouncements on the craft of painting were tinged with an experimental air. In his book Landscape Painting, Harrison asserted his belief in “the importance of vibration and refraction in landscape painting.”3 For a fledgling artist in the Impressionist manner like Hutty, vibration—or the harmonious interaction of color laid down in close value—and refraction—the evocation of the clarity of natural light—became the method he used to depict the sultry air and luxuriantly verdant settings he encountered in the South. Harrison, who had wintered in Charleston beginning in 1908, served as the link between North and South, and, at his mentor’s urging, Hutty applied for a teaching position with the Carolina Art Association in late 1918. However, it was not until February 1920 that he traveled to Charleston for the first time. In a 1950 newspaper interview, Hutty reiterated his initial reaction which had appeared earlier in an article by Harrison: “Since I had no preconceived ideas of Charleston, having seen no pictures of it at any time, and knowing little if anything, of its history and traditions, it was with open vision that I first beheld its quaintness and beauty.”4 Hutty’s Southern sojourns occurred during an era when artists and writers throughout the South were discovering the atmospheric potential of decayed colonial cities, depleted landscapes, and Civil War survivors, all languishing outside the boom times of Gilded Age America. Charleston—peopled by an established gentry, many of whose grand houses had survived fire, war, and earthquake—was an enchanting anachronism, which lived on as an exotic place defying the conventional boundaries of time. To convey his affection for Charleston, Hutty created impressionistic oils of gardens; watercolors, oils, and etchings of urban scenes; and employed all three media for his depictions of African Americans. In Magnolia Gardens (page 36) is a dramatically expressive tribute to one of Hutty’s favorite sites that exemplifies his talent for rendering trees, especially live oaks. Bunches of new growth along the gnarled limbs and white azaleas in full bloom attest to a springtime setting. The artist’s friend, author DuBose Heyward, fittingly described the season: “Usually by the first of March the short winter is over and spring pre-empts the city. This is a dramatic invasion . . . it seems to hang poised, then descends, sweeping the parks and gardens with a tidal wave of color and perfume. Climbing roses foam over old garden walls. Wisteria hangs like purple clouds in ancient pine and oak; and everywhere the azalea seems determined to spend itself utterly in a short, breath-taking burst of color.”5 Hutty admitted that “although I loved the old town greatly, the magnificence of Middleton and Magnolia Gardens completely enthralled me.”6

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The city, with its narrow alleyways, decrepit buildings, and overall local color, was another source of inspiration for Hutty. Backstage shows an interior view—that is, not from the street—of several buildings along Rainbow Row on East Bay Street. Characterized by tall structures that served as warehouses and residences, the densely packed area was a vital part of the port city’s commercial life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although the neighborhood was undergoing gentrification in the 1930s, Hutty portrayed the buildings in a pre-preservation state, with peeling stucco and broken panes of glass to convey the “quaintness” he found so charming. In the foreground, he included a clothesline and a stooping washerwoman, a reminder that Charleston once was fully integrated with African Americans living in humble outbuildings. Ever adept and willing to assay new forms, Hutty experimented with the etching technique of the old masters, stabbing out crisp drawings with a sharp-edged stylus on metal plates. His first Charleston examples were produced in 1920, his initial year there. He was inspired by the contrast between the foliate environment of Charleston and the strong lines of its aged architecture in both its highly sophisticated and vernacular forms. When Hutty mounted his first exhibition of these works at Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1922, Harrison gave the work lavish praise. An artist, he wrote, must use “well-known technical forms of expression to convey his message to the public. . . . With the etcher and draughtsman, line in all its intricate variations must be the tool employed.” Hutty, he felt, had used that tool well, for he was an “artist so sensitive to all the possibilities of line and so gifted in its use” that the “dear old city of Charleston is . . . to be congratulated in having thus placed on permanent record so admirable a display of its little known and fast disappearing beauty and individuality.”7 By 1926, Hutty’s son had devised a strategy for the production and distribution of his prints, which would prove to be one of the most sustaining sources of his commercial success. The print Backstage, issued in 1940, relates to the oil of the same title, although it is not a direct replica. Hutty appears to have taken some liberties, emphasizing the many different materials and textures of the scene and the crazy quilt-like arrangement of forms. His preference for drypoint, an etching technique in which the burrs raised by the stylus are left intact to catch more ink, allowed for an amazing range of tones in an essentially black-and-white medium. Although a bird of passage, Hutty’s seasonal visits heralded not a winter of discontent, but periods of inspired creativity, which extended beyond his own studio and nurtured the flock of artists who comprised the Charleston Renaissance. His ultimate legacy is a human one. He expressed his regard for Charleston in quite simple terms. “I love it dearly and its people seem like my own people.”8 ecp & mrs

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rudolph frank ingerle (1879–1950) Oconolufty, circa 1920 Oil on canvas, 301/8 x 32¼ inches Hailed as the “Painter of the Smokies,” Rudolph Ingerle captured the beauty of mountain scenery and the craggy character of area residents in Southern Appalachia. One contemporary commentator referenced Ingerle’s Eastern European heritage, surmising that the artist’s talent was rooted in childhood visits to grandparents in the mountainous region of Bohemia.1 Another influence was Hamlin Garland, an essayist who actively promoted American regionalist subject matter in art and literature. Ingerle encountered Garland at the Cliff Dwellers Club in Chicago where the artist was based throughout his career. For his landscapes, however, Ingerle sought firsthand inspiration, exploring various scenic areas, first in the Midwest—in Brown County, Indiana, and the Ozark Mountains—followed by numerous summers and autumns spent in the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains. Ingerle exhibited his paintings over thirty times at the Art Institute of Chicago between 1908 and 1946, and his work was included in exhibitions at the National Academy of Design through the 1930s and 1940s. The resulting visibility drew attention to ongoing efforts to conserve the Smokies, and Ingerle believed he played a modest role in helping create Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which was officially established in 1934. A critic for the Chicago Tribune substantiated the impact of his paintings: “Rudolph F. Ingerle has won an enviable reputation as a landscape painter. In recent years he has done a great deal of painting in North Carolina. His superb mountain landscapes have captured the imagination and heart of an enormous public.”2 Almost square in shape, Oconolutfy is an imposing canvas that portrays a full moon rising through a cloudy sky as the sun sets on two intersecting mountain ranges. The river in the middle distance is framed by foreground trees, one of which is almost leafless; the bare tree and rust and golden hues convey that this is an autumnal view. Another critic raved about Ingerle’s talents in a description that aligns with this painting: “Rudolph F. Ingerle paints with an exquisite finish that makes each canvas a brilliant composition. No one could mistake the richness and depth of color, the suave flow of the pattern, or the intriguing distinction of detail. The sunshine on the distant hills is a favorite theme of Mr. Ingerle and one never tires watching for that warm glow beyond the chill shadows of the foreground. It breaks like an anthem over the hills. Ingerle is noted too, for his moonlight pictures.”3 The valley depicted in Oconolufty derives its name from the Oconaluftee River as well as the Cherokee village known as Egwanulti, meaning “by the river.” Explorer and naturalist John Bartram (1699–1777) noted the location in his journal dated 1775. For the Cherokee, the waters of the Oconaluftee were sacred.4 Heavy logging took place there until the mid-1930s, but ceased once the National Park Service took control. In 1940, the Civilian Conservation Corps built a stone and log ranger station, which served from 1947 until 2011 as a visitor center.5 Oconaluftee is the conventional spelling of the name, although variations do exist. In a 1931 article in the Palette and Chisel Club’s newsletter, Ingerle described his reaction to his first encounter with the Smoky Mountains as “love at first sight.” He went on to discuss the derivation of the name, the abundance of tree and wildflower varieties, and the admirable mountaineers, before concluding: “The Smokies have one quality that is unique—charm. . . . The Smokies have enduring charm. Having seen them once they lure you back again and again. I love them, and they just keep a callin’ ‘Come Back, Come Back,’ and it makes me mighty lonesome for them.”6 mrs

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wilson henry irvine (1869–1936) Church Street, Charleston, 1932 Oil on canvas, 321/8 x 261/8 inches A prolific Impressionist with a penchant for atmospheric scenes, Wilson Irvine was an inveterate traveler, especially late in his career. He also seemed to enjoy the collegial aspect of his chosen profession, and while in Chicago from 1888 until 1918, was an active member of such groups as the Palette and Chisel Club and the Cliff Dwellers. He left his native state of Illinois to move east, eventually purchasing property near Old Lyme, Connecticut, home of the most communal of all art colonies. In that seaside resort, the boardinghouse of Florence Griswold was a great gathering place for American Impressionists, including such prominent figures as Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, and William Chadwick. Most of these painters, like Irvine, worked en plein air, earning for their colony the sobriquet “the American Giverny.” In a rare interview, Irvine expounded on a critical aspect of painting outdoors, a tenet evidenced by many of his paintings: “There’s nothing that makes more difference to a landscape painter than the kind of wind blowing. You get that sense of hazy distance best on a day when there’s a south wind or southwest wind blowing. Some painters wait for a northeast wind, for they like clear sunlight and black shadows, a day in which everything stands out as clearly as if it were cut out of paper patterns. But personally I like to paint when there’s a kind of hazy beauty in the air.”1 Among Irvine’s many paintings, Church Street, Charleston is unusual in several ways, although the canvas does retain his preferred 2:3 ratio. It is a vertical cityscape with figures, rather than a pure—or hazy—landscape. The two African American street vendors are exceptional in his oeuvre and may be viewed as a concession to a Charleston tradition that added local color to numerous works by both local and visiting artists. Early morning sunlight casts dramatic shadows onto the sidewalk and street, and the sun shines brightly on the sides of houses in the background. Pinkish tints enliven the surfaces of the church’s tower and portico. In addition, light can be seen through the transom window and below through the door—an instance of artistic license, as the door in reality is solid wood. The surface of the painting glistens with evident brushstrokes. Irvine seems to have visited Charleston around 1932, perhaps aware that Hassam had been there in 1925. He also visited nearby Cheeha Combahee Plantation, a hunting preserve owned by Northerners. Several years before, Irvine had begun to experiment with “prismatic” paintings, an extension of his lifelong exploration of natural light, and a tactic wholly unique to him. In these paintings—often still lifes or figurative compositions done in the studio—he viewed his subject through a prism, resulting in heightened color effects. According to Harold Spencer, author of the most authoritative study of the artist: “The most consistent pattern, when looking at objects through the prism, is one in which the dominant red and green halos appear on opposite sides of the same object, whether it is light or dark, or is against a light or dark background. In some instances, with light objects against light backgrounds under bright light, a fuller spectrum appears on each side.” The roseate glow of Church Street, Charleston certainly reflects this method, although it is unlikely that Irvine painted St. Philip’s Church on site using a prism, and instead may have worked from a photograph, which he did on at least one occasion.2 Given his background in the airbrush technique, as well as his experiments with prismatic paintings and aquaprints—a process similar to making marbleized paper—Irvine appears to have been pushing the proverbial envelope of oil painting, perhaps in response to the rise of modernism. He once commented: “Any painter who in this day and age clings tenaciously to the one thing which he can do best, in a technical sense, and is satisfied, is not only standing still: he is retrograding.”3 His prismatic approach was, in the eyes of one reviewer, ideally suited to the historic city; Irvine “discovered Charleston as containing some of the few remaining traces of antiquity which America has preserved [and made a] pattern of harmony out of the crumbling plastered walls.”4 mrs

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charles harvey joiner (1852–1932) Woods Scene Oil on canvas, 18 x 30 inches Like his contemporary Alexander John Drysdale of New Orleans, Kentucky artist Harvey Joiner created an extraordinary body of work based upon a simple compositional format which he repeated, with only slight variation, in hundreds of paintings. This reiterated format became a formula for suggesting two conceptual constructs simultaneously: first, the great sense of depth and perspective experienced when standing at the edge of a forest and looking down a line of adjacent trees seemingly placed in random order, and secondly, the subliminal suggestion of transcendental elevation that viewing experience conveys to the viewer’s consciousness. To achieve this, Joiner placed rows of towering beech trees—leaning towards each other across a narrow gap in the forest—in a consistent pattern, diminishing the size of the tree from foreground to rear ground as a means of enhancing the illusion of space and depth. To elevate the viewing experience to a transcendental level, he deployed a lateral light to pierce the space between the trees, imbueing them with a sense of motion and a spectral quality, vividly glowing in contrast to the other forms of nature about them. The source of this illumination is the subject of a popular culture myth, passed down in the oral history of the arts in Kentucky. Supposedly, Joiner parked his Ford Model T just outside the range of trees and turned on the headlights, casting a narrowly focused, if somewhat artificial, light.1 During his lifetime, this formulaic practice earned Joiner steady financial reward and local popularity. His work, usually framed in ornate gold surrounds and then embedded in a fly-resistant glass shadow box, was often given as a bridal present. These signature works were lavishly praised in the Kentucky press. A reviewer writing for the Louisville Courier-Journal noted that a “single tree, the trunk aslant, the strong sunlight striking the trunk or the lower branches, perhaps a bit of the path . . . these are the bits which are winning art recognition for Mr. Joiner.”2 Though successfully responsive to market demand and popular taste in his own era, some present-day critics have dismissed Joiner’s art with that most damning of critical summations: his work is kitsch. Kitsch is cultural slang for any work of art which avoids the obfuscations of modernity and appeals directly to the viewer’s predictable aesthetic preferences. However, the very “repetitive quality of kitsch addresses a general problem of modernity, that of ‘disembeddedness,’ or the undermining of personal horizons of social and cosmic security.”3 Or, to put it more simply, though condemned as kitsch, Joiner’s art has an enduring appeal sustained by a public who can simultaneously access and appreciate the artist’s work. Such appreciation of Joiner’s ouevre may also be seen in accordance with certain theories of the profoundly influential twentieth century art historian Rudolf Arnheim, whose seminal work, Art and Visual Perception, postulates that what the eye finds pleasing is what the brain recognizes and acknowledges as satisfactorily familiar. “Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which familiar things look as they have never before looked to anyone,” wrote Arnheim. “They organize a wealth of meaning and form in an overall structure that clearly defines the place and function of every detail in the whole.”4 The art of Harvey Joiner returns us to a central theme in the study of late nineteenth and early twentieth century painterly impressions of the Southern landscape: the role of the rural South as an exotic other, existing outside the pressing demands of an increasingly urban, industrialized world. For artists like Joiner and others, “a sense of time does not exist. It is not even that the pace of time is more leisurely in the South; these dreamlike landscapes contain no sense whatsoever of the movement of time. What is perceived is a landscape outside of time, that could exist at any time, and therefore exists in none. The landscape recalls a more halcyon time, or a more primordial one . . . a kind of sanctified, mythic, immortal space free from the ravages of time and free, too, from the secular preoccupations of mortal man. It is a time, then, and a place instilled with grace which, if not demonstrably divine, was blessedly close.”5 ecp

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john ross key (1837–1920) Summertime on Chain Bridge Road Oil on canvas, 261/8 x 34 inches John Ross Key’s monumental View of Washington from Arlington (page 26) in all likelihood dates from 1908, shortly after his return to Washington, D.C., where he had lived as a child. Key’s family had played a prominent role in the founding of the republic, beginning with his great-grandfather and namesake—a Revolutionary War general and jurist—and his grandfather, Francis Scott Key, the celebrated author of the lyrics to the national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” By both inclination and experience, Key was well disposed to create this work. Although he lacked any formal art education, Key first demonstrated promise as a cartographer drawing maps for the United States Coast Survey from 1853 to 1856. During the Civil War, he served as a draftsman for the Corps of Engineers of the Confederacy, which led to the execution of another tremendous historical landscape, Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Siege of Charleston Harbor, 1863, painted in 1865. By 1908, Key was engaged in making and hand-coloring photographs of significant sites in the Washington vicinity, including the Custis-Lee Mansion, located high on a hill in Arlington, overlooking the Potomac River. View of Washington from Arlington shows the nation’s capital—dominated by the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol—sparkling in the sunlight across the river in a stunning panoramic vision. At that time, the sloping green space between the house and the river was still clear of graves or large statuary memorials. First used as a military burial site in 1864, the 624-acre expanse now known as Arlington National Cemetery is the resting place of over four hundred thousand Americans, including President John F. Kennedy, and home to memorials like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In Key’s painting, there is no bridge spanning the Potomac, and the area along the tidal basin fronting the Washington Monument is still forested. There were only two bridges between the city and Virginia in 1908: the small Chain Bridge north of Georgetown and the multi-purpose Fourteeth Street railroad bridge. The McMillian Commission plan of 1901, which resurrected L’Enfant’s original design, was still on the drawing board.1 Once funded by Congress, construction of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial (1914–1922) and the Arlington Memorial Bridge (1922) radically altered the view Key documented. However, the direct sight line between Arlington House and the National Mall remains intact, a symbolic link between past and present, with its suggestive imagery of a temple on the hill, presiding over the passing of life and the surging tide of events. After the Civil War, Key applied his aesthetic talents to a series of landscape paintings he created while working in an itinerant pattern from Chicago to California and back to St. Louis. Among his more notable recorded works are views of the entrance to the Golden Gate Strait at San Francisco, the Yosemite Valley, and a series depicting the Beaux-Arts structures built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Key’s work draws upon two stylistic traditions in American art. His early California landscapes have been praised as a “rare example of the luminist sensibility imposed upon a western subject. While the delicate transition of hues in the seamless sky suggests the influence of his friend John F. Kensett, the insistently horizontal format and richer tones are reminiscent of the works of [Martin Johnson] Heade and [Frederic Edwin] Church. Key’s paintings are nonetheless easily distinguishable by a certain poetic delicacy and knowing exactness.”2 After he made the obligatory trip to Paris in 1873–1874, however, Key’s work began to reflect the influence of the Barbizon School and Impressionism. Several contemporary critics commended his later landscapes, describing them as “rich and beautiful in color,” especially those of “the so-called Chain Bridge Road, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, not far from Washington.”3 The bridge’s curious name derives from the chain suspension system initially used when the span was constructed in 1808. In Key’s depiction, the pastoral elements—meandering cows tended by a lone figure—and the sun-splashed road receding in a curvilinear fashion combine to offer an evocative, and tantalizing, contrast to the vast horizontality of Washington as seen from Arlington. Both paintings affirm Key’s ability to adapt to the subject at hand; one is a heroic endeavor encompassing a vista richly laden with enduring historical import, while the other is a personal glimpse into the momentary splendor of a late summer afternoon. ecp

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blondelle octavia edwards malone (1877–1951) Garden Scene Oil on canvas, 261/8 x 301/8 inches Blondelle Malone’s last will and testament bequeathed her artwork to the Columbia Museum of Art and her extensive personal papers to the Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. The papers were given with the stipulation that they be used as the foundation for a biography documenting Malone’s life and career as an artist. In the resulting book, Enigma: The Career of Blondelle Malone in Art and Society, John Richard Craft, director of the Columbia Museum of Art, avers that “Blondelle Malone presents a double personality enigma in the voluminous writings presented from her cosmopolitan life and especially in her status as an artist. These may well be interwoven.”1 While the characterization of Malone as enigmatic may say more about lingering paternalism regarding the role of women in the world of art than about Malone’s oeuvre, per se, the idea that her writings and art “may well be interwoven” is an understatement of considerable proportion. Other historians have ungenerously characterized Malone as a spoiled Southern belle of great will and wiles who used her parents’ financial resources to pursue a socialite’s pleasures. What is unquestionably clear is that Malone persevered in her aesthetic ambition, defying convention and reveling in the artistic experience. There is no doubt that Malone came of age at a time when women, “idealized as domestic producers of art, clearly did not belong in the public, often rambunctious, spaces associated with antebellum masculinity where men made art and did business.”2 In the waning days of the Victorian era, genteel women, tastefully arranged in home parlors, were encouraged to create attractive still lifes for sale at the local ladies’ auxiliary or perhaps paint a family member’s portrait. By contrast, Malone, a spirited unmarried redhead, traveled to the ends of the earth—from South Carolina to New York, from Japan to Europe—in a conscious effort to learn her craft and bring her perceptions of beauty to fruition in a series of spontaneously Impressionist works which earned her the title “garden artist of America.”3 No shrinking flower, she was a shrewd observer of style and substance, and ever suspect of affectation. Nor was she reluctant to reach out to the most famous painters of the day. Having written the reclusive Impressionist master Claude Monet a letter of introduction, Malone arrived, by invitation, at his home with a cart load of her paintings on December 21, 1904. Monet encouraged the young artist, exhorting her “not to be influenced” by others and allowed her to paint in his famous garden, a rare invitation to a most private sanctum.4 In similar fashion, she also wrote to Mary Cassatt that year, soliciting her thoughts on Impressionism and the climate of taste in the venerable French capital. True to form, Cassatt’s response was both candid and concerned. “You speak of ‘impressionist’ art. I never, to tell the truth, could understand what that meant exactly. I class painters as artists and not artists even though the latter may be very clever.” She went on to discourage Malone from living in Paris, “with the crowd of American and English students,” and suggested she instead “settle in some place in the neighborhood, not too far to be able to go often to town for study at the Louvre, then to send your pictures to the Independents Exhibition in the spring, where there is neither jury nor rewards.” Access to the Louvre was important, Cassatt stressed, as all “painters who have risen to any positions in art have begun by studying the old masters, it is our classical education, it is by that we can form a style of our own.” She closes with the thoughtful observation that “I conclude from what your letters [say] that you are a landscape painter. Remember that all modern landscape painters have formed themselves on the French School. I think if you study Corot you will find it an immense help.” Despite her rather formidable reputation, Cassatt’s closing is kindly, for while she is “truly sorry I cannot help you better,” she promises to “do anything for you in my power.”5 This letter is at once singular and significant. Blondelle Malone’s query was one of substance, contradicting condescending notions of painting in the South as an antiquarian pursuit with little relevance to the more sophisticated global avant-garde. Malone was hardly enigmatic. Neither her writings nor her art elude the reader or the viewer. Instead, they give evidence of a dynamic, self-actualizing individual less concerned with defying restrictive social constructs than with walking a garden path of her own design.

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lawrence mazzanovich (1871–1959) View from Tryon Oil on canvas, 30¼ x 30¼ inches Lawrence Mazzanovich arrived in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1923, a successful middle-aged artist in search of a fresh start. He had prospered, critically and commercially, while working in the Northeast, with exhibitions of his impressionistic landscapes held at such prestigious galleries as the Vose Gallery in Boston, the Macbeth Gallery in New York, and the W. Scott Thurber Gallery and O’Brien Galleries in Chicago. Leaving behind his wife and the hectic pace of life in suburban Connecticut, “Mazzy”—as his family and friends called him—believed that the quaint North Carolina village, tucked at the foot of the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains, would provide him with renewed personal and professional inspiration. In Tryon, Mazzanovich embraced a different lifestyle, combining community theatrical and musical performances with his pursuit of painting. The local views, framed by the rolling hills of the Piedmont and hazy mountain peaks, led to paintings that were gentler and softer than his earlier work. He recorded his new surroundings at various seasons, taking special pleasure in the brilliant colors of fall foliage, for which the area is highly regarded. Because he was a notoriously slow painter, his output in Tryon was modest, but significant. In 1926, his Chicago dealer, William O’Brien wrote: “For the love of Mike send on some of the things which you say are nearly finished and push along the large picture. It seems a pity we have possible buyers here and can’t do anything.”1 Overall, Mazzanovich participated in fewer exhibitions once he relocated to the South, benefitting instead from the patronage of John R. Kimberly, the chief executive of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation who provided the artist with a monthly stipend in exchange for paintings. Tryon itself is a small town nestled among hills. During Mazzanovich’s time, vineyards and orchards covered the nearby slopes, which flourished under the Southern exposure. Tryon was also something of a resort destination; as early as the 1880s, hotels began to attract tourists who arrived via one of the six daily passenger trains. They enjoyed the pleasant climate and quasi-rustic nature of the area, as well as golf and horseback riding. Over the years, several artists of note passed through Tryon seasonally, including George Aid, Homer Ellertson, Josephine Couper, and Margaret Law, but few lived there year-round or for as long as Mazzanovich. Mazzanovich’s version of Impressionism is a blend of Tonalism—in which atmosphere interacts with color—and a post-impressionistic emphasis on form and expressive color. He had a tendency to use trees either as screens across the foreground or as a repoussoir, a framing motif that guides the observer’s eyes into the distance. Characteristically, the surfaces of his paintings are heavily textured. Color, however, was Mazzanovich’s primary concern, and he believed in the potential of hues to induce certain moods: “Yellow and all light colors make one’s thoughts brighter and on a higher plane. Black is depressing. It is always used to picture the worst in nature and imagination. Demons are always black.”2 View from Tryon is a square canvas, an unusual format for landscapes, which tend to be horizontal. However, this atypical orientation allowed Mazzanovich to accommodate the tall mountains in the distance, which are rendered in a misty Tonalist manner. In contrast, the foreground is enlivened with daubs of brilliant pinks, oranges, and light greens. The prominence of brushwork that defines forms is reminiscent of the late work of Paul Cézanne, while the intensity of the colors in the lower half of the composition recall Vincent van Gogh, European masters whose work Mazzanovich would have encountered during his long sojourn in France during the first decade of the century. In an article entitled “Southern Art Awakening,” Chicago critic Lena McCauley commented on the artist’s life in Tryon: “Lawrence Mazzanovich, the landscape painter, came from Connecticut to taste the inspiration of these mountains wrapped in a glamour of violet atmosphere. He has a spacious studio on an upward leading trail—a marvelous view from his windows. . . . In this quiet place Mazzanovich is painting as he never painted before, with strength and a use of gorgeous color to depict the views near by.”3 mrs

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willie betty newman (1863?–1935) French Poplar Trees in the Mist, circa 1900 Oil on canvas, 20 x 121/8 inches During a decade spent in France, Willie Betty Newman attended the Académie Julian for several years, but also traveled beyond Paris on numerous occasions to paint landscapes and peasants in Brittany. Although her instructors offered a traditional curriculum, Newman was intrigued and influenced by the fresh—and sometimes controversial—work of the up-and-coming French Impressionists. In a “Forum of the People” article, Newman criticized the poor quality of Impressionist paintings to be seen in this country, an indication that she was familiar with better examples of the style from her Paris days: “I hope that we will not be influenced by the French Impressionistic things you see here, for they are not good or they would not be here in an exhibition.”1 She shared with the French Impressionists an interest in colored light that radiates out from the canvas and an inclination to broken brushwork. Newman’s landscapes most resemble those by arch-Impressionist Claude Monet, whose work she would have had ample opportunity to see in Paris, though there is no record that she ever went to Giverny like many of her fellow Americans. Beginning in 1891—the year of her arrival in France—and continuing through 1900, Newman’s paintings were regularly on view at the Paris Salons, a sign of critical acceptance. Works dating to this period reveal her penchant for sentimentalized genre imagery, often of Breton peasants wearing their distinctive head garb and wooden shoes. When Newman settled in Nashville in 1902, however, an exhibit of some of her French canvases earned mixed reviews. Writing for the Nashville Banner, one critic revealed his own gender bias: “Something of the spirit of this stalwart people has entered into the work of the artist, and she paints vigorously and powerfully, with an almost masculine touch. Of many of her pictures it is difficult to believe they are the artistic production of a woman, but there is always, never the less, a delicacy of feeling and beauty of sentiment that are distinctly feminine.”2 In the face of this prejudicial climate, Newman often signed her paintings W. B. Newman to mask her identity, a challenge compounded by the ambiguity of her maiden name, Betty. This is true of French Poplar Trees in the Mist, which is signed in the lower right. Despite its size and relative sophistication, Nashville was ill prepared for a female Parisian-trained genre and landscape painter. Like so many other professional artists of the day, Newman turned to that staple of Southern patronage—portraiture—to support herself, recording the likenesses of leading citizens. Newman’s best work dates from her years in France when she managed to carve out a distinctive style all her own. While these paintings reflect the broader Impressionist interest in the effects of light, Newman explored the theme in unique ways. At times, she used the device of light shining through a window, often serving to backlight figures and cast them partially in shadow. In her landscapes—with or without people—she tended to heighten the coloristic effects by using an intense warm palette. In a series of four articles, a Nashville journalist praised her work: “Mrs. Newman is an apostle of the beautiful and the true; her fidelity to form and line is uncompromising; in some ethereal realm, her imagination it would seem has its abode.”3 French Poplar Trees in the Mist depicts the tall columnar trees immortalized by Monet. Known for their unusual vertical branches and ornamental elegance, poplars had been deemed the “tree of liberty” following the French Revolution and were often strategically planted in rows to define an edge along a road or the perimeter of a park. Newman painted her trees on a relatively small canvas, which could easily have been executed en plein air. Its evident and broken brushwork is another hallmark of Impressionism. In spite of her strong association with France, Newman was an advocate for Southern art. “I believe that the South is the natural and logical home of all true art and that God so intended it to be. Not only on account of the temperament of the people, but all the environments of ‘Dixie’ are artistic. Nowhere do the flowers bloom more beautifully, the trees and grass more luxuriant, nor the sunlight more healthful than in this fair Southland.”4 mrs

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clara minter weaver parrish (1861–1925) The Flower Garden Oil on wood panel, 45/8 x 71/8 inches One of the many transformative changes which swept the South in the aftermath of the Civil War was the rise of educational opportunities for women and the simultaneous emergence of a new generation of female artists and writers. While this development certainly parallels national trends of the day, such regional progress was especially noteworthy given the deep-seated “heritage of a strong class and caste system in the South,” a social order which had long narrowed the “range of roles for men and women” in the cultural arena.1 Certain early modern historians, such as C. Vann Woodward, believed that turn-of-the-century Southerners “were unprepared for the task” of cultural awakening. As “children of the cultural famine that blighted the land of their youth,” they came to maturity “bearing the marks of intellectual malnutrition.” To some degree, that dismal view of late nineteenth century Southern culture was perpetuated by a contemporary failure to truly see the visual arts of the South, considering the American tendency to historically look “northward for the standard of comparison.”2 Happily, over the last half of the twentieth century, the discovery—or rediscovery—of several Southern women artists of great achievement has been an integral part of writing an art history for a region thought to have none. One of the first women in the New South to defy that cultural famine was Clara Weaver Parrish. Having shown both talent and determination, she took advantage of her family’s financial resources and intellectual nurture to leave her native Alabama in pursuit of an art education with some of the finest American Impressionist artists of the period. She studied at the Art Students League in New York and made a lengthy study tour to Paris. While in France, she came to admire Impressionism and its practice of painting en plein air as a means of capturing “in a few broad brilliant masses the effect of the whole, giving an intense and vivid impression of a fleeting effect in nature.”3 Parrish returned to America and began exhibiting her work in New York, frequently showing at the National Academy of Design and other invitationals, as well as at prestigious national and international venues, including the Paris Salon, London’s Royal Academy, and world fairs. New York critics responded favorably to her art, praising its “surprising charm of color” and lauding her “exceptional talent.”4 Nor was recognition lacking from a Southern audience. A reviewer of Parrish’s 1921 exhibition at the Brooks Memorial Gallery in Memphis found the artist to be “classic in her subjects [and] a deep student fond of color, but never overdone.”5 The Flower Garden clearly confirms Parrish’s adoption of Impressionist compositional technique and reflects the movement’s revolutionary emphasis on creating form by brushstroke. The work’s sketchy quality, small scale, and wood support lend the work a certain immediacy, as if the scene had been glimpsed through the studio door or painted in the garden’s midst. Clara Weaver Parrish was more than a painter. As an associate of the Louis Comfort Tiffany studios, she was an accomplished designer of ecclesiastical stained glass windows during the high tide of the American Renaissance movement. Having lost her only child at a tender age and a widow by forty, Parrish may have found these windows’ religious themes, dramatic tonal contrasts, and refraction of light an appropriate outlet for somber grief and expression of renewed spirituality. She worked with Tiffany when the “firm developed Favrile glass, a blown glass known for its iridescent colors and satiny surface.”6 Clearly, her work in stained glass, as well as mosaic murals, affected her mature painting style, as borne out in a remarkably rich palette. In addition, the influence of Louis Tiffany’s Art Nouveau aesthetic can be seen in the sensuous and sinuous lines of the artist’s female figures—women who, like Parrish, seem to transcend stale cultural confines of region and gender. ecp

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paul albert plaschke (1880?–1954) Nocturne, 1915 Oil on canvas, 301/8 x 361/8 inches Throughout his life as a creative artist, Paul Plaschke maintained two pursuits—one, a job, and the other, a vocation. His job was that of an editorial cartoonist for several important newspapers, notably the Louisville Courier-Journal and William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago Herald-Examiner. His vocation—indeed, his calling—was that of a painter, a craft he honed in the winding river valleys of Kentucky and southern Indiana. Plaschke’s family arrived in this country from Germany in 1884, settling in New Jersey. By 1897, Paul had begun his artistic training with practical instruction in commercial illustration at the Cooper Union before proceeding to painting sessions at the Art Students League under George Luks. The period of study with Luks is significant. As a leading light of the Ashcan School, Luks rendered rather gritty subject matter in a somber palette laid on with vigorous brushwork. “Brash and independent are attributes ascribed to George Luks,” whose art was often “criticized for his lack of finish and coarse subject matter.”1 Plaschke was to develop a similarly dark palette, and, like Luks, he too painted a memorable boxing scene. From a practical perspective, it’s reasonable to assume that Luks introduced his student to journalistic caricature, having just concluded his own cartooning stint at the New York World, where Plaschke subsequently began work in 1898. Following his marriage to Ophelia Bennett of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1899, Plaschke moved to that area and began to draw a cartoon series with an impish figure called Monk. By 1905, he had set up a studio at his home in New Albany, Indiana, just across the river from Louisville. The landscape art Plaschke created reflected several distinct aesthetic influences: the New York avant-garde, the Indiana Impressionism practiced by the nearby Brown County artists, and the ephemeral plein air efforts of local Kentucky painters working under the patronage of John J. King at King’s retreat on the Kentucky River. One of the few collectors of that era in the commonwealth, King was a banker who also owned the Frankfort Hotel where Paul Sawyier and other artists would gather before their trips upriver by houseboat.2 During these formative years, Plaschke also shared studio space with John Bernard Alberts, Jr., a prodigy whose tonal contrasts and oblique compositional angles would come to figure in his own work. Plaschke’s steady newspaper income insulated him from the demands of gallery owners responding to popular taste, an independence that afforded him a wider range for experimentation. His early works feature rich, subdued colors, applied very heavily, with the kind of bold, virtuoso brushwork one might expect from a follower of Luks. Often rendered in red or terra cotta to create a solid ground over which Plaschke would then apply a textured surface, thereby creating subtle tonal contrasts between a heightened planar field and a monochromatic embedded preparation. After his exposure to plein air experimentation in the Kentucky River Valley he, like Paul Sawyier, adopted the Impressionist manner of dissolving form in light, a shimmering technique to be seen in many small paintings executed at this time. An appreciative posthumous tribute in the March 7, 1954 Louisville Courier-Journal reported that Plaschke’s “passion was painting . . . sunlight. No matter how humble the subject,” the artist’s use of bright light could turn it “into a thing of beauty, dappled with sunshine and shadows of leaves and branches.” Plaschke painted Nocturne in 1915, at a time when he was clearly aware of the late French Impressionist infatuation with tonal contrasts in blue, offset by rich shadings in mauve and grey. Among the paintings in his estate were canvases paying tribute to Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, both of whom were masters of the blue mood. The precise setting for Nocturne is uncertain. It could well be a point along the palisades of the Kentucky River, as the massive dark form on the right, relieved by a dash of silver light highlighting a rocky foundation left, suggests. The ethereal scene and abandoned boat hint at the same Symbolist preoccupations found in William Posey Silva’s various paintings alluding to the “Garden of Dreams,” as well as the idyllic Lowcountry visions of Alice Ravenel Huger Smith. If the setting is the palisades, then Plaschke joins the ranks of other Kentucky artists inspired by the river. “Through time, changing human conditions, and threats of corralling it, the Kentucky flows on. Its moods seem to be set by some mysterious electronic force that determines its reveries and behaviors.”3

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chauncey foster ryder (1868–1949) Gateway to North Carolina, circa 1920 Oil on canvas, 45 x 60 inches As an art student in Paris, Chauncey Ryder followed in the footsteps of countless Americans at the popular Académie Julian, where conservative tastes prevailed. His time abroad was fruitful, as evidenced by the recognition one of his Barbizon-inspired paintings won at the Paris Salon in 1907. Perhaps of greater significance, however, were the intervals Ryder spent further north at Étaples, the coastal art colony devoted to plein air painting. When Ryder returned to this country, he settled in New York City, but set out for more picturesque places during the summer. He was in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1910 and 1911, and participated fully in the art colony centered around Florence Griswold’s boardinghouse. By this time, he was a dedicated landscapist, often labeled a Tonalist because of his atmospheric effects. One contemporary critic praised his expansive aesthetic by noting that “Ryder paints with a freedom and a facility which is not deterred by quibbling details. He is always lyrical and poetic in his approach, and often achieved a certain luminous quality . . . transforming a whole scene into something of otherworldly loveliness.”1 Mountains were Ryder’s passion, and his purchase of property in Wilton, New Hampshire, provided him with stupendous views of Mount Monadnock, a site well known for its bare rock surface. He pursued other rugged scenery in the White Mountains, as well as the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He seems to have headed south about 1920 to explore the mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. Because he tended to generalize details, it is difficult to pinpoint the precise locations represented in his paintings. Indicative of his lack of concern for specificity, he once said: “I paint by feeling.”2 Compositionally, Gateway to North Carolina is very typical of Ryder’s oeuvre. A broad sandy road dominates the foreground, leading to hills and mountains in the distance that cut off the perspectival illusion of space. Bright highlights of intense color dot the lower ranges of the canvas. A clear green tone was a particular hallmark of his palette, leading commentators to cite “Ryder’s greens.” Beyond the majestic central mountain—rendered in blue tones suggestive of the Blue Ridge Mountains—is another, fainter peak whose shape is reiterative. The primary title of the painting, Gateway to North Carolina, conflicts with an alternate appellation for the work, Gateway North. The first indicates that the scene might be a view from any direction outside the state, while Gateway North clearly implies that the vista itself is northward. In either case, the “gateway” is the road that leads the viewer into the composition and, presumably, through the mountains beyond. Ryder cared little about titles, deferring to his New York dealer, William Macbeth, who frequently changed them to make the paintings more saleable. The profile of the main mountain and the paint handling—often remarked upon by critics—are reminiscent of Paul Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire in southern France. It is entirely possible that Ryder, while residing in Paris, saw the memorial exhibition of the French master’s work in 1907. Unlike Cézanne who tended to flatten his paintings, Ryder typically depicted airy light-filled vistas. In technique, however, there is greater similarity: both used obvious blocky brushstrokes to define forms such as rocks and bushes. One reviewer of the day summed up Ryder’s approach—“his paint is fresh, and every stroke of his brush tells”—qualities that are vividly apparent in Gateway to North Carolina.3 Significantly, another critic applauded Ryder’s ability to balance representation with abstraction: “Mr. Ryder . . . has sensed the right proportion between the real and the unreal, between detail and vagueness. Notable in all his paintings is the simplicity and balance of composition—a harmony of colors in which there is no disturbing note—a delicate adjustment of strength and tenderness.”4 Although best known today for his oil paintings, Ryder was also an accomplished watercolorist and printmaker. Estimates suggest that he created over one thousand art works during his career before passing away in 1949 in sight of his beloved Monadnock. mrs

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hattie saussy (1890–1978) Path with Mossy Trees Oil on canvas mounted on masonite, 18 x 26 inches The similarities, distinctions, and storied pasts of Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, are the stuff of Southern legend and lore. Each was a prosperous colonial port city, welcoming goods and travelers to coastal settlements which soon expanded westward into the bourgeoning Southern interior. Each enjoyed the harvest of economic boom days when rice and cotton filled their respective harbors’ warehouses, commerce that funded construction of impressive classical structures. And each suffered the loss of life and fortune when civil war ravaged the surrounding countryside, leaving behind a barren terrain. Still—whether in the densely packed urban neighborhoods south of Broad Street in Charleston or under the leafy green canopies sheltering the squares of Savannah—both cities were populated by determined, if impoverished, survivors. And both enjoyed an eventual and colorful renewal of their cultural fabric. Indeed, “each city stood belatedly at the entry of the twentieth century, while one could still see the Confederate gray phantom of the past retreating, looking over its shoulder longingly. It was like two weather fronts mixing—the cool gasp of the sepulchral past and the hot heady breath of the speakeasy—and an electric storm, of creativity, resulting.”1 While more has been written on the Charleston Renaissance, the rise and flowering of the arts in Savannah was no less ripe. There, in those early twentieth century days, two well trained women offered art instruction to local talent which, in turn, produced a remarkable body of work, much of it in a late Impressionist style. Emma Cheves Wilkins studied at the Académie Colarossi in Paris before returning to Savannah to paint in a manner which “stressed the primacy of color, composition, and brushwork over subject matter and content.”2 Lila Cabaniss studied at the Art Students League in New York and then became one of the decisive arts advocates in Savannah, a co-founder of the Savannah Art Club, and the guiding force in the establishment of an arts curriculum in the public schools. Among their most accomplished students was Hattie Saussy, an artist whose style was a “blend of Impressionism and realism” and whose subject, “the leisurely life of southern culture in the twentieth century . . . captured a genteel world of peaceful landscapes, vases of flowers and loving friends.”3 Though blinded in one eye as a child, Saussy showed a precocious talent for art and was encouraged by her widowed mother to pursue this inclination. In an interview published in the Savannah Morning News late in her life, Saussy noted that when she “was young and was learning about art, the teacher generally put emphasis upon producing something.” She had been “encouraged to copy other paintings and in essence was taught to paint by copying.”4 After a year at Mary Baldwin Seminary (now College) in Staunton, Virginia, Saussy and her mother spent four years in New York. There, Saussy studied under some of the leading teachers of the day, including the American realist Eugene Speicher. Speicher’s influence is most apparent in the simple, textured portraits Saussy painted of friends and relations, portraits in which minimal color contrast and muted background detail give full focus to the characters she so subtly portrayed. In reviewing the scant literature inspired by Saussy’s career, it is interesting to note the frequency with which her art is described as having a spiritual foundation. One early review remarks that her “painting has an intimate individual quality, due to the artist’s sincere approach to her subject.”5 Her principal biographer felt that Saussy’s “response to nature reflected the spiritual refreshment which she found in the out-of-doors, whether mountains, farm scenes, marshes, woods, tidal creeks, parks, gardens, or a single tree.”6 Path with Mossy Trees is a clearly inspired view of sunlight falling across a rustic sandy road passing back into a rough wood. Moss-hung trees are cast in those shades of mauve and grey, softening contrasts and welcoming the solitary viewer’s eye. “It’s a very personal thing when you’re painting,” Saussy once observed. “When you’re an artist you have to get very silent with what you’re doing. It’s an interior force that comes only through you, and it takes your mind, soul, and body. If it’s going to have meaning, it has to have all of you in it, and it has to have the effort of production. It has something in it for others, yet it will always have your presence in it.”7

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paul sawyier (1865–1917) Kentucky Fishing Scene, circa 1912 Watercolor and gouache on paper, 14 x 21¼ inches Until recent times, the art of Paul Sawyier has been little known outside of Kentucky, where his work has been faithfully admired and collected for over a century. Despite his Ohio birth and death in New York, Sawyier’s life and aesthetic legacy are inextricably intertwined with the commonwealth’s landscape, a scenic terrain he captured with delicate coloring and bravura brushwork in both watercolor and oil. Though often viewed through the lens of nostalgia and anecdotal episode, he was, in fact, quite well trained. Between periods of study in Cincinnati in the climate of taste nurtured by Thomas Satterwhite Noble and Frank Duveneck, Sawyier moved to New York City. Once there, he enrolled at the Art Students League and, based on the quality of his submitted sketches, was accepted into William Merritt Chase’s life drawing class. An eclectic talent himself, Chase evidently recognized the young man’s gift for both landscape and portraiture. In one of many apocryphal stories attached to Sawyier’s life, the distinguished master of American Impressionism bid him farewell with the encomium, “Be yourself Paul—be your individual self . . . be Paul Sawyier.”1 Upon his return to Kentucky, Sawyier began to experiment en plein air. The Kentucky River Valley—punctuated by farmsteads, covered bridges, and marine traffic—was his muse, inspiring a trove of impressionistic watercolors that would be the artist’s chief success. Sawyier had a remarkable facility with watercolor and used it to high effect to convey the more delicate and fleeting aspects of the moment. He “frequently combined a generous amount of gouache with his watercolor to highlight forms and lend them more solid appearance by the addition of opaque passages of color,” rarely allowing “the bare paper to play a great role.”2 His painterly approach revealed a seasoned understanding of the relationship between the viscosity of the watercolor medium and the absorbent nature of the paper support. “Paul Sawyier was very rapid in his work. He would deliberate some time before starting, then divide up a paper sheet 24 x 36 into three parts and, after a few quick sketches of outline” begin to paint. Typically, these on-site preliminaries were later finished in the studio, where the artist “stretched his paper on a frame and kept it wet from the back all the time he applied colors. This gave his work the aquatint characteristic so greatly sought by collectors and connoisseurs.”3 In works like Kentucky Fishing Scene, the solidity of the fishermen and riverbank in the foreground is countered by the loose form and mottled coloring of the foliage at the rear, a strategy that serves to enhance the luminous quality of the quiet stream flowing gently through the middle. It’s quite possible that the locale portrayed in Kentucky Fishing Scene is Elkhorn Creek, one of Sawyier’s favorite plein air destinations. The “aristocrat of the Kentucky’s branches,” the tributary flows through Scott and Franklin counties and “hitches on to the Kentucky just below Frankfort.”4 It is a watershed still popular with hikers and boaters, a place where the stream “continues swift and beautiful.”5 Novelist and native son James Lane Allen extolled the Elkhorn’s picturesque wonder—his print an eloquent parallel to Sawyier’s paint—reverently describing it as a place where the “chords of landscape harmony are very simple; nothing but softness and amenity, grace and repose, delicacy and elegance.”6 Paul Sawyier pitched his art to patrons who shared his nearly apostolic devotion to the beauty of the Bluegrass State. When his life ended far away in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, he was originally buried in a nearby cemetery. Six years later, his body was laid to rest in the family plot in Frankfort, not far from the cliffs overlooking his beloved river. On the occasion of this final homecoming, the state’s governor, Edwin P. Morrow, eulogized Sawyier as a “poet, artist, genius, loving son of the hills and streams of Kentucky—the Commonwealth receives him to rest forever in its soil with pride and love . . . him who greatly loved and beautifully wrought for Kentucky.”7 ecp

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dixie selden (1868–1935) The Blue Sail, Concarneau, 1926 or 1929 Oil on canvas board, 15 x 18 inches One of Dixie Selden’s favorite destinations for her summers abroad was the Breton fishing village of Concarneau, situated along the Atlantic coast in the northwest corner of France. She found the small town’s comfortable accommodations, charming people, and quaint scenery to her liking. It fulfilled her passion for rustic seaside communities, which she also indulged at Gloucester, Massachusetts; Boothbay Harbor, Maine; and Newport, Rhode Island. In recounting her time in Brittany, Selden told a newspaper reporter, “Concarneau is a marvelous place to paint. . . . You see pictures everywhere.”1 For most of her professional career, Selden divided her year seasonally: winters were spent painting formal portraits in Cincinnati, while summers were a time for travel to Europe and beyond, where she executed impressionistic outdoor scenes. This duality mirrors the two branches of her art training. Her first mentor was Frank Duveneck, a product of the Munich School with whom she studied at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Duveneck emphasized the figure, rendered with dark tonalities and ample pigment reflective of his training in Germany. The second important influence on her aesthetic was William Merritt Chase, whose 1913 summer course in Venice dramatically altered Selden’s approach. The charismatic Impressionist encouraged his students to paint quickly in order to capture the color and light of the city’s famed canals and piazzas. One of many spontaneously rendered sketches of fishing boats by Selden, The Blue Sail, Concarneau was executed on canvas board—a firm surface suitable to painting en plein air. A stamp on its reverse side, Lucien Lefebvre/Foinet/19, Rue Vavin & 2, Rue Bréa Paris, suggests that Selden purchased the panel in Paris. Selden referred to paintings like this as “One Go,” indicating that she completed them in a single sitting, a rapidity underscored by the broad, thick brush strokes.2 Upon her return to Cincinnati, she usually exhibited the fruits of her summer labors to great acclaim. The subject of The Blue Sail, Concarneau is a colorful thoniér, a tuna fishing boat typical of Brittany. In describing a similar painting, Selden commented: “There were literally hundreds of boats in the harbor that morning, and it was one of the most thrilling sights I have ever seen; it fairly dazzled me with its brilliancy.”3 Despite the fact that it was overcast the day she painted The Blue Sail, the painting radiates with the bright colors of the vessel’s hull and the masts of other boats in the background, which in turn are reflected in the water. In her assessment of the painting, Genetta McLean, the author of a definitive study on Selden and a catalogue raisonné of her work, dates the painting to 1926 or 1929, times when the artist was in Concarneau. Regrettably, Selden’s given title of the painting has been lost.4 The vivaciousness of this small scene is in keeping with the character of its creator. A statement in the brochure for a memorial exhibition of her work at the Cincinnati Art Museum recounts: “It would be difficult, even if one wished to do so, to disassociate the art of Dixie Selden from her rare personality. She saw life in terms of color yet with clarity of outline, and painting seemed for her a natural medium of expression. Honest and forceful in her art, as in her life, she gave of her best to every undertaking.”5 mrs

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william posey silva (1859–1948) Cabins, South Carolina Low Country, 1935 Oil on canvas mounted on masonite, 251/8 x 30 inches William Posey Silva took up professional painting rather late in life, following a long and successful career managing the family hardware and china business in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Like other creative dreamers before him, he threw off the bourgeois life in America for la vie boheme in Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian. After a successful French showing in 1909, Silva returned to America. At this juncture, Silva’s artistic trajectory begins to bear a certain resemblance to the travel patterns of antebellum Southern portrait painters. The artist started to roam about the Deep South in search of exotic locales for his series of ethereal landscapes, a set of works he variably titled Garden of Dreams. These expeditions—to New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston—produced a distinctly personal style. Silva worked with a consistently generous application of paint, which often covered the surfaces of his canvas with a spattered impasto intended to suggest both atmospheric moisture and that mysterious sparkle of lowlands light so admired by a previous generation of painters. Silva was a truly impressionistic colorist, employing high contrasts of primary shades of blues, yellows, and greens to great effect. It is unclear whether he was familiar with the paintings of Joseph Rusling Meeker, whose use of a misty rear-ground, which Meeker called an “area of repose,” would seem to be an inspiration for Silva’s vague passages of trees shrouded in a mauve-tinted light. As it was for other Charleston artists—such as Alfred Hutty (page 36)—one of Silva’s favorite plein air settings was Magnolia Gardens, situated just outside the city on the Ashley River, near Drayton Hall and Middleton Place. In the possession of the Drayton family since the late 1670s, the property was initially laid out in a very formal French fashion. A few generations removed, John Drayton began, in 1820, to introduce planting in the popular romantic English garden style, emphasizing the land’s natural lushness. Silva may have been struck by the garden’s wild naturalistic mood. “Long boardwalks lead the visitor into the mystical swamp, where time seems to stand still. A quiet stillness pervades, broken only by the shrill cry of a bird. Here one is abruptly reminded that formal gardens can only imitate the beauty that nature lavishly displays.”1 Charleston was good for Silva. In 1910, the Carolina Art Association gave his enchanted garden paintings a solo exhibition at the Gibbes Art Gallery. Still, twenty-five years separate Cabins, South Carolina Low Country from those halcyon earlier days. The romance of moonlight, magnolias, and symbolic Edenic gardens offering refuge from the realities of the new industrial state was fading. As the twentieth century marched forward, a renaissance in the arts and letters of the South inspired a more realistic look at the textures of the natural environment, as well as the customs and social constructs of the people. In South Carolina, the writers and painters of the Charleston Renaissance “tended to draw upon the Southern landscape and history as subjects” for their creativity, especially the “beauty of the low country’s natural environment.”2 As though evoking the spirit of Julia Mood Peterkin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Scarlet Sister Mary, Silva’s Cabins, South Carolina Low Country depicts a place where “loamy red fields are bordered by quiet woodlands. A cluster of ancient cabins near the river is sheltered by a grove of giant moss-hung live oaks.” Perhaps nearby, “a great empty Big House, once the proud home of plantation masters, is now an old crumbling shell.”3 Writing of Silva’s work, the critic Leila Mechlin observed that “he knows, what many do not, his own limitations. . . . He chooses his subjects with care, he makes many sketches, he works mostly out of doors in the face of nature; he is always on the outlook for compositions—arrangements.”4 In this particular arrangement, Silva’s well honed atmospheric techniques serve him admirably. The time-worn cabins, standing in close conjunction across the horizon line of the painting’s middle ground, are framed by hovering trees in the foreground and backed by a towering purple grove. Fully aware—and, at times, personally responsible for—interpretations of the South that were characterized by either “condescending pity or nauseous sentimentality,” here Silva departs from the idyllic garden to consider an altogether earthly and faded plantation view, seen beneath an unrelenting clear light.5 ecp

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alice ravenel huger smith (1876–1958) Moon in the Mist Watercolor on paper, 16 x 22 inches Although she rarely ventured beyond the Carolina Lowcountry—physically or thematically—Alice Ravenel Huger Smith can hardly be described as provincial. What she lacked in formal art education and worldly exposure, she compensated for with native enthusiasm and innate talent, ultimately emerging as a major figure of the Charleston Renaissance and an important regionalist. In her informal memoir titled “Reminiscences,” Smith explained her personal philosophy and deep commitment to her beloved birthplace: “Circumstances prevented me from going to a large city where Art Schools and Galleries might help the traveller on his way, and so I reasoned to myself that if I could not see the great art of the great cities I might follow the old fable of the young men who dug in their fields for treasure but not finding it they had made wonderful crops out of their spaded land. So I knew that my own lovely, flat country of rice-fields, of pinewoods, of cypress swamps, of oaks, and lotus, and all their attendant feathered folk would yield me a full harvest if diligently spaded.”1 Descended from venerable Charleston families, Smith became a force in her hometown’s revitalization in the early decades of the twentieth century. She produced architectural drawings of neighborhoods that inspired Charlestonians to institute a preservation ordinance. Drawing on the lessons she had absorbed from her study of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, she made wood block prints and etchings, and was a catalyst for the formation of a significant society of local etchers. But it was only in watercolor—especially her depictions of the Lowcountry landscape—that Smith found her true artistic voice. Swamp Scene (page 42) is typical of her Japonisme in its ethereal mood and vertical format. It exudes a reverence and deep appreciation of nature gained from many hours of study. She did not paint on site, but rather did “memory sketches”—a practice she learned from reading about Chinese art and endorsed by her mentor Birge Harrison who visited Charleston several winters. These inspired her when she returned to her studio and labored to represent “feathered folk,” details of grasses, and Spanish moss, the most challenging vegetation of all. According to a contemporary critic, “There was not a detail of the country, of cloud forms, trees, leaves, grasses, seedpods, flowers, birds in flight and at rest, that had not been studied in minutest detail. . . . These sketches, of course, serve a double purpose. They are memoranda, but they were primarily training of the hand. When the artist is ready to do her picture, she does not recall a particular place or scene. She does not assemble the data of her sketchbooks and create a synthetic landscape. None of her pictures is actually a picture of any particular place.”2 Despite minimal training, Smith became especially adept with watercolor. She took art lessons as a schoolgirl from a French instructor who “inculcated in me the rule that watercolour should always be transparent, and never, never to use opaque color.”3 Later, influenced by the recommendation of a visitor to her studio, she bought a large meat platter to serve as her palette; this allowed for greater fluency and liquidity. Moon in the Mist demonstrates Smith’s incredible facility with the finicky medium. Her technique was described by a friend: “When she painted she wet the entire surface of the board first—very wet—and literally rolled the board around with her hands as she added colors of the sky, water, etc. When she had the colors where she wanted them, she would ‘stop’ the remaining water with one of her large, blunt or pointed Japanese brushes. . . . You will note that a relatively small part of any painting is conventionally painted with a wet brush—only grass, birds, etc. in the foregrounds.”4 Not all of Smith’s paintings are as poetic as Swamp Scene and Moon in the Mist; in fact, her best-known body of work, A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties, incorporates narrative illustrations that describe what life was like on a typical Lowcountry plantation during the 1850s. Her goal in the thirty watercolors and the accompanying book was one of preservation, as she explained: “I threw the book back to the Golden Age before the Confederate War so as to give the right atmosphere because in my day times were hard, and the rice planters had to use some makeshifts.”5 mrs

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gladys nelson smith (1890–1980) The Three Muses, circa 1930 Oil on canvas, 38 x 28 inches Like many other American Impressionists, Gladys Nelson Smith took classes at two of the most prestigious art academies of the day: the Art Students League in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in the nation’s capital, however, that Smith’s lyrical aesthetic came to fruition. There, at the Corcoran School of Art, Smith studied portraiture and developed a considerable forte with her depictions of children. The school’s director, Boston Impressionist Edmund C. Tarbell, was one of her primary instructors, and—like his student Smith—he specialized in portrayals of women and young people out-of-doors. In contrast to the sunny, light-filled paintings of her mentor, Smith’s canvases have a greater range of rich colors, carefully layered in broad brush strokes. One of Smith’s passions was nature, which was not only a source of inspiration, but a quality ingrained since her childhood in Kansas. When she and her husband Errett Garrison Smith purchased a sixty-eight acre Maryland farm in 1936, she immersed herself in the cultivation of the land, growing vegetables and flowers, and tending her lily pond. Three years later, discouraged because her representational painting was not accepted for a juried exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, her reaction was conflicted: “My works simply have no chance till this madness [modern art] is over. . . . I really don’t feel as blue as my convictions should make me, partly because our seeds arrived along with the rejection slip. And surely laying seeds in the mellow waiting earth should tide us over both financially and otherwise. . . . But damn it. I could turn out ‘modern art’ with the best of them!”1 The Three Muses is a delightful synthesis of figure painting and landscape. Each of the three young women is in a state of reverie, apparently communing with the lush nature that surrounds them. None of them bears a distinctive attribute to distinguish her identity as one of the mythological muses. In ancient Greece, the muses were goddesses who inspired music, song, and dance. Regardless, the image of the trio is idyllic and dreamlike, enhanced by the flowing robes and glowing sunlight. The subjects do not engage one another and remain distant from the viewer, qualities that add to the aura of the painting. A sensitive introvert who suffered a lifelong stammer, Smith wrote little about herself or her work, but in a note for a lecture on the meaning of art, she offered the following: “To me, the very great reward in the work is the habit of seeing beauty and pattern in common things, though it’s only a scurry of dust on the sidewalk. I know this, that if, for some reason I can’t paint, say, for several months, I begin to lose something of that seeing.”2 Smith wavered at times, virtually abandoning painting in the 1950s in order to write poetry and short stories; she was reinvigorated a decade later when she and her husband built a new studio onto their Chevy Chase, Maryland, home. Sadly, within five years her health began to fail; she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and began to lose her sight. Yet, Gladys Nelson Smith’s work and writings give proof of a ceaselessly aspiring and indomitable spirit. Her verse, “The Gamut,” might well serve as her poetic autobiography: One full joy-draught I crave before my cup dashed yet from thirsty lips shall hustle me still curious into immortality. I’ve set no foot on porch of intoxicate star; But I have stood where basic sorrows are, crushed in half light by all of pain and more, swayed like some sea plant on the ocean floor. Quite strange and beauteous shapes of things are there . . . Yet ghostly meadow larks on morning air chant to my deep-plunged ears what winging up Into pure joy must be.3 mrs

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anthony johannes thieme (1888–1954) Rain in the South Oil on canvas board, 20 x 24 inches A native of the Netherlands, Anthony Thieme made his first trip to America when he was only fifteen. What most impressed him during his three-week stay in New York was “the extreme height of the buildings in contrast to the low buildings in Holland. . . . The proportion between buildings and humans made me feel like a mosquito.”1 Upon his return to Rotterdam, Thieme studied at that city’s art academy before advancing to the Royal Academy of Art at The Hague and the famed Düsseldorf Academy in Germany. It was in Düsseldorf that Thieme was mentored by the noted professor and stage designer Georg Hacker. The young artist’s innate talent in this practical skill would sustain him financially during lean years and provide him an entrance to the American artistic economy in 1917. Neither fiscal hardship nor aesthetic diversion could distract Thieme from his deep-seated desire to become a professional landscape artist. To that goal he was most devoted and acutely focused, working tirelessly and constantly seeking out new inspiration. He believed that “a landscape painter must paint fast to catch the light of any hour.”2 A certain panoramic sensibility may have been one of the legacies of Thieme’s formative years. Among his personal papers, there is a publication of aerial views he created depicting Dutch rivers and harbors. Clearly, the flat lands, low skies, and expansive watery vistas of his youth endured in Thieme’s imagination, finding parallels in the shoreline of Rockport, Massachusetts, and the South Carolina Lowcountry. By 1929, Thieme had settled permanently in the emerging art colony in Rockport and, for the rest of his career, was closely associated with the Rockport Art Association. The Rockport style is characterized by lavish brushwork and a consistent compositional format which tends to take in the entire landscape perspective in a broad, sweeping glance. Claiming that he had to “paint ten canvases to get a good one,” Thieme insisted on working en plein air, a practice that earned him the sobriquet of “Master of Sunlight and Shadow.”3 Thieme’s first visit to the South must have occurred at some point in 1928; his impressionistic canvas, Virginia Homestead, was exhibited in Boston later that year. A depiction of the portico of a Greek revival plantation house, the painting was praised as the epitome of “southern charm—tall white pillars, people on a porch, sun-flecked velvety turf,” the image was subsequently featured as the cover of the Literary Digest of October 5, 1929.4 Thieme returned to the South to paint in Charleston during the winters of 1946, 1947, and 1948, largely in search of fresh subject matter in the aftermath of a studio fire that destroyed a sizeable body of his work. While in Charleston, Thieme created several paintings which recall the resplendent interaction of semi-tropical rainfall and the relentless glare of sunlight upon the pavements of the colonial coastal city. This collection of paintings, including Entrance to Magnolia Gardens in Spring, Charleston, SC (page 37), was exhibited at Grand Central Art Galleries in New York in the spring of 1947. Charleston’s nostalgic charms seem to have resonated with Thieme, a man at odds with his own time. He repeatedly remarked that he had been “born fifty years too late. He disliked the rush and roar of the modern age” and had little regard for abstraction.5 Thieme’s dismissal of modern non-objective painting did not go unnoticed by contemporary critics. Writing in 1945, a correspondent for Art News refers to Thieme as “a romantic realist whose style belongs to yesterday. It makes his pictures seem honeyed, over-alluring, too utterly picturesque.” Now, looking back upon his work, it is those very qualities which served Thieme quite well as an Impressionist who captured the elusive South, a culture richly flavored with the scent of a past just ended. Not long after Thieme’s Charleston paintings were shown, the Southern essayist John Peale Bishop wrote that “it is always difficult in speaking of the South, not to seem to prefer the terms of the past, even when the real concern is the present. This country is backward; there are customs and attitudes that persist here which have long disappeared elsewhere; or, to put the matter in a more favorable phrase, one can say that in the Deep South, more than anywhere else in America, better than in many parts of Europe, the humane tradition of living has outlasted the many attacks upon it.”6 ecp

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helen maria turner (1858–1958) A Song of Summer, circa 1915 Oil on canvas, 301/8 x 401/8 inches Helen Turner’s childhood was haunted by the devastation wrought during the Civil War: the burning of the family home by Union soldiers, the demise of the family’s modest fortune, and the untimely death of her parents. By the time she reached the age of twenty, it was clear that unless Helen married well, which was not in the offing, she needed a pragmatic education. Accordingly, she trained as a teacher at the Louisiana State Normal School in preparation for a reliable career, while pursuing her passion for art in off hours. Her nascent training occurred at the school sponsored by the Artists’ Association of New Orleans, where she had been chosen as a scholarship student. One of her early drawings, A Country Road (circa 1893), provides an important visual document of the lessons learned from the Louisiana landscape school, verifying that even then, Turner knew how to define a strong foreground and lead the eye from a frontal encounter with the planar field to an ambiguous distant point by the use of vanishing perspective. Following a two-year tenure as a teacher in Dallas, Texas, Turner had saved enough money to move to New York. Arriving there in 1895, she began studies at the Art Students League. The climate of taste was ripe with the fruition of American Impressionism, a movement dominated by the dapper figure of William Merritt Chase. Turner followed him to Europe on several study trips between 1904 and 1911. While abroad, she visited the London studios of expatriate artists John Singer Sargent and Edwin Austin Abbey. She also met the Irish painter Sir John Lavery, whose work—“Impressionist landscapes and . . . images of women at leisure”— she especially admired.1 The ephemeral sense of peace that inhabited Lavery’s oeuvre would become one of the dominant themes in Turner’s own work. However, “among all the influences on Helen Turner’s personal life, and on her work, none could be considered more profound than her association with the artists’ colony at Cragsmoor, New York.”2 The summer colony catered to a broad mix of painters and applied practitioners of the arts and crafts movement. Her seasonal residence there lasted until 1941, and it became the setting for most of her best-known work. It was there that she created her nocturnal lantern-lit scenes and late afternoon sun-dappled reveries. In paintings like A Song of Summer, she returned again and again to what might be called genteel Impressionism. Her Impressionist moments, unlike those of her French contemporaries, were not filled with gay revelry carried on by urban working folk in flight from the crowded city. Instead, they convey the stillness and peace found outdoors in nature’s sitting room. Inevitably, the issue of gender comes into play when reviewing Turner’s achievements in the scant critical literature she has attracted. One of her most important patrons, the pioneering collector Duncan Phillips, felt she painted “from a woman’s point of view.”3 Certainly her subject matter—serene domestic settings coupled with a “relative lack of interest in socially problematic subjects”—aligns with some contemporary critics’ definitions of “feminine art.” Likewise, her “emphasis on surface [and] fluid color and brushwork” underscores stylistic assumptions about female artists of the day.4 More recently, Turner has been praised as someone who was “open-minded as she strove for new territory,” setting “a strong example of a successful professional artist, in a time when this was not the traditional path for a woman.”5 Are these gender dichotomies helpful? As an independent woman with no source of income other than the sale of her art and as an artist who so sensitively captured grace-filled moments in women’s lives, Turner transcended the debate. In 1921, she was elected a full academician of the National Academy of Design, becoming only the fourth female artist to achieve that elevated status. The honor was well deserved in critics’ eyes. “Seldom, indeed, in this country has a woman painter displayed such canvasses of charm, strength, and masterly handling, as does Miss Turner. . . . Hers are not works of quickness and dash, but expressions that have been dreamed over, lived with, and loved.”6 Perhaps, in the end, Helen Turner had a clearer vision of the human experience than her male counterparts, a truth she glimpsed from the ladies’ parlor, something the gentlemen in the smoking room could not see. ecp

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bror anders wikstrom (1854–1909) Spanish Colonial Garden, 1904 Oil on canvas, 20 x 311/8 inches After spending nearly a decade as a sailor on open waters, the Swedish immigrant-artist Bror Anders Wikstrom discovered New Orleans in 1883. Captivated by the city’s charm and limitless subject matter, he made it his home for the rest of his life. He became an active presence in the local art scene and was one of the founders of the Artists’ Association of New Orleans, an influential circle that promoted regional art through exhibitions and education around the turn of the century. He taught sketching at the association’s school without pay, regularly participated in its exhibitions, served on juries, and became the organization’s president in 1892; he was also the driving force and benefactor of the association’s short-lived literary publication, Art and Letters. Wikstrom was a versatile artist, having trained in the academic tradition at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and in Paris. Over the course of his career, he worked as a magazine illustrator, executed portraits, painted historical and genre scenes, and recorded his impressions of the open sea and the picturesque Louisiana landscape. Wikstrom’s greatest success, however, came as a designer of Carnival floats and costumes. Spanning a quarter century, his resplendent productions for the Rex and Proteus krewes were colorful and imaginative, their themes derived from exotic Middle Eastern literature such as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and The Arabian Nights. These Mardi Gras commissions, which began in 1885 and continued until his death, brought Wikstrom substantial wealth. Financial freedom, in turn, allowed him to enjoy regular European travel—frequently returning to his native Sweden and to France—as well as trips to the Caribbean, Mexico, and in America. The artist often drew inspiration from his journeys, as one critic described in 1905: “Wikstrom indulges in foreign views, all characterized by more or less of a wide sweeping treatment, with . . . vivid coloring.”1 Among his various subjects, Wikstrom was most highly regarded for his paintings of the ocean, as his friend and fellow artist Ellsworth Woodward pointed out in a posthumous tribute: “An artist of distinction has passed and the higher life of our community is by this poorer, but we of his craft have lost a tried friend. . . . As an artist, he will be chiefly remembered as a marine painter. He possessed a peculiar authority in his depictions of the sea. . . . In storm and calm, this sailor artist knew the deep sea as a horn-book. Few men have drawn it with such authority. It is possible that no artist ever drew a ship with so complete a knowledge of its mechanism.”2 But Wikstrom was equally enamored of his Southern surroundings, as Woodward also noted: “On shore he was lured by the mystery of deep swamps and lonely solitudes. With a houseboat he often penetrated to strange fastnesses and studied nature in her wild haunts. Grand Isle was to him a favorite retreat and he often spent months on end in that most beautiful of Louisiana’s coasts.”3 Spanish Colonial Garden may be a Louisiana scene or perhaps a locale in Florida, a favorite vacation destination for Wikstrom, who spent a year there soon after he arrived in the United States. The canvas portrays a lush garden setting replete with potted flowers, vines, and trees that obscure low profile stucco buildings. Light dances across structures and vegetation alike to create an image of quiet tranquility. Although not a “wild haunt,” Spanish Colonial Garden is a testament to Wikstrom’s profound appreciation of nature. mrs

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anna catherine wiley (1879–1958) Lady with Parasol, circa 1915 Oil on canvas, 251/8 x 201/8 inches Catherine Wiley was born, came of age, and flourished as an artist in a time when ideological concepts of a New South were a dominant theme in the cultural and intellectual life of the region. As articulated in a series of speeches and newspaper articles by the Atlanta journalist Henry W. Grady, the New South was to be a place where the proceeds from commercial endeavors would transform the ragged remnants of a cash-strapped plantation economy into a new industrial state teeming with energy and material prosperity. He phrased his vision in evangelical terms. “Through the ashes and desolation of war . . . the top has been reached, and the rest is easy! The desperate days of starvation are over. . . . And now the world will witness a change in the South, little less than magical. The ground has been prepared—the seed put in . . . and the day of the mighty harvest is here!”1 As the daughter of a Tennessee coal baron, Wiley reaped the benefits of that prosperity. Having attended the city’s public schools, she enrolled at the University of Tennessee in 1895, just four years after women became eligible for admission. Then, in 1903, Wiley moved to New York where she enrolled at the Art Students League and, like many of her Southern contemporaries, studied with Frank Vincent DuMond. Though far less well known than his illustrious Impressionist contemporaries, William Merritt Chase and Robert Reid, DuMond was a steady master of color, whose suggestive arrangements of pastel shades surely informed the palette of Wiley’s mature work. In subsequent studies with Chase and Reid, Wiley undertook the challenge of painting en plein air while mastering the technique of diminishing the sharp edges of linear design with broken brushwork and emphatic color contrasts. Catherine Wiley returned to Knoxville in 1905, steeped in the spirit of American Impressionism, whose “radical change in attitude toward the physical universe . . . and advance in the perceptive powers of the human eye” marked a departure in art not unlike that of the New South from the Old South.2 That same year, she began to teach art in the home economics department of the University of Tennessee, an effort which would eventually result in one of the first art departments in the state. She also became a member of the Nicholson Art League, a vibrant local organization of artists and patrons. In addition to regular lectures, the League was also responsible for a series of seminal art exhibitions held in Knoxville in conjunction with the Appalachian Expositions (1910 and 1911) and the National Conservation Exposition of 1913. These exhibitions featured stellar examples of American Impressionism; Wiley was awarded a gold medal for the best collection of oil paintings at the 1910 gathering. During these progressive years, Wiley’s art also progressed. One of her best early works—The Letter, painted in 1907—features a beautiful young woman deeply engaged in the act of writing, her soft, yet firmly-modeled features back lit by the radiant sunshine seeping through the diaphanous curtain behind her. As in many of Wiley’s paintings, indeed as in many paintings by Southern women working in the Impressionist style, the subject is a woman in a reflective moment. Wiley’s women idle in meadows, gaze pensively from beneath umbrellas, sit sewing with subliminal intensity, and, finally, stand stiffly before gardens staring dreamily into the distance. The visual record of Wiley’s progression as an artist has been interpreted by some scholars as a documentary of her descent into the mental illness which would lock her away from the world. Between 1907 and 1915, her compositional format became increasingly more abstract. Anatomical features taper off into nothing, and her brushwork becomes atypically expressionistic. Little is known about Wiley’s personal life during her last active years, though she continued to exhibit at important regional and national venues. What is known is that in 1925, she again failed to receive an invitation to associate membership to the National Academy of Design, a crushing disappointment from that prestigious organization and its member-artists. She also suffered a series of personal losses: the deaths of her parents as well as her mentor and friend, Knoxville artist Lloyd Branson. On the heels of a complete breakdown in 1926, Wiley’s sisters committed the artist to a mental institution in Philadelphia, where she remained hospitalized until her death thirty-two years later. ecp

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ellsworth woodward (1861–1939) Rock-ribbed New England, circa 1927 Oil on canvas, 167/8 x 217/8 inches Although he has been described as “a study in New England rectitude,” Ellsworth Woodward became the patriarch of the New Orleans art world and an impassioned advocate of Southern art. His commitment to parallel and practical women’s art education resulted in an outstanding program at Newcomb College, which he led for over forty years. With an eye to the marketplace, Woodward developed an applied arts curriculum that embraced the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement by offering courses in pottery, textiles, jewelry, and book design. His activism inspired Southern artists to create distinctly Southern art, a message he carried to wide audiences across the nation and abroad. A keen administrator, he served as director of the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art for fourteen years. While not as prolific as his brother William, Ellsworth Woodward found time in the midst of these varied responsibilities to make art: painting—most notably in watercolor, but in oil as well—etching, and drawing. A gentleman of “elegant tastes and fastidious habits,” Woodward cut quite a figure: “cool and erect, with a riveting gaze and a strong jawline ending in a goateed chin.” His devotion to his pupils was evenly matched by their admiration of him: “His outward dignity masked an energetic soul that awed his students. ‘God on roller skates,’ one recalled. . . . The work absorbed him, and he attacked it with a zealot’s singleness of purpose within the classroom and without. He was at once a teacher, practitioner, and promoter of art, a man with no hobbies to speak of, no favored diversions.”1 Woodward was fervently committed to the promotion of Southern art. A gifted writer and orator, he used a number of platforms to spread his gospel. For an article in The Art Bulletin, he rejected a Boston journalist’s claim that “the South is as dead and miasmatic as the Dismal Swamp.” While acknowledging the region’s economic and social collapse in the aftermath of the Civil War, Woodward asserted that the Southern “spirit did not suffer eclipse.” He continued by citing the significant progress in art education at all levels, the formation of art associations, and the 1921 establishment of the Southern States Art League. Woodward’s influence as a founder, president, and champion of the League cannot be overstated. From the outset, Woodward gave voice to its mission: “The movement is not centralized in any city or around any group of artists: it is of the South, for the South and by the South, and its ultimate aim is to form in the South an appreciation of what the South can and will create in the fine arts.”2 Yet, as a New Englander, Woodward had trepidations about his own ability to render the region effectively: “No Yankee artist, however skillful, can paint the South. He has never known the sights and sounds and scents in his childhood as you have. I have spent fifty years in the South . . . and when I make annual pilgrimages to various parts of the South . . . and wake up in a Pullman in the morning and see the lovely Southern scene with its incomparable trees and flowers . . . I think what masterpieces I could paint—if only I were a Southerner-born!”3 The artist’s protests aside, Woodward’s evocative watercolors of Louisiana flora—particularly moss-hung live oaks and tall St. Tammany pines—and picturesque streetscapes of New Orleans are testaments to his appreciation of his adopted locality. In the midst of his active schedule, Woodward found time to paint, even when traveling. He escorted student tours of Europe and returned to Massachusetts, his birthplace, regularly. Rock-ribbed New England appears to have been painted en plein air. With its strident diagonal brushstrokes and brilliant yellow palette set off by touches of violet, the canvas recalls the work of the Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh. In a 1929 lecture entitled “Technique in Painting,” Woodward pronounced: “When a high subject is presented by a master, technique and subject unite in a masterpiece, which is alike artistic and intellectually satisfying. . . . If we are to produce a work of art, we must select, arrange, eliminate, simplify and bend all we see to what we feel—this, I take it, is technique as applied to art.”4 Here in Rock-ribbed, with its passionately applied paint, Woodward seems to have achieved his goal. mrs

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Alexander Ernestinoff (1853–1945) was awarded the Academy’s prestigious Proctor Prize in 1914. He was elected an associate academician in 1921 and named a full academician in 1926.

adams, wayman elbridge (1883–1959) Wayman Adams was born on September 23, 1883 in Delaware County, Indiana, to Nelson Perry Adams (1861– 1917) and Mary Elizabeth Justice Adams (1858–1952). Previous reports of the early death of his father are not true, a fact which brings into dispute certain published accounts of the artist as a deprived youth with little formal education. Nelson Adams was a breeder of draft horses and an amateur artist who encouraged his son’s creative ambitions. Young Adams did evince a certain precocious talent for drawing the local livestock, resulting in prizes at the county fair; his painting of Gypsy Girl III was published in the local newspaper. In 1904, he enrolled in the recently established John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, where he eventually studied under William J. Forsyth (1854–1935). Forsyth was a member of the Hoosier Group, an informal association of Impressionist artists who had been instrumental in founding the Herron School and later fostered the Brown County art colony south of Indianapolis. Forsyth provided Adams with introductions to several important members of the flourishing Indianapolis cultural scene, including the poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Booth Tarkington (1869–1946). Adams’ portraits of these luminaries were well received and launched his career.

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With an eye toward advancing his skills, Adams participated in two study tours of Europe. He was in Florence with William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) in 1910, and with Robert Henri (1865–1929) in Spain in 1912. By 1914, the artist was back in Indianapolis where he established a studio in the Indiana Savings and Trust Company building, his base of operations for the next twenty years. One of the closest friends Adams made in Indianapolis was the singer and painter Johann Berthelsen (1883–1972), who served as best man in his wedding, a role Adams reprised for Berthelsen the same day. During that time, Adams steadily built up a national clientele, sending works to many East Coast exhibitions, especially those at the National Academy of Design in New York. His portrait of Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra Director

On the Italian excursion, Adams met a fellow artist, Margaret Graham Burroughs (1886–1964), whom he married in 1918. Their son, Wayman Elbridge Adams, Jr., was born in 1924. Following their marriage, Wayman and Margaret Adams moved to New York City, where he opened a studio in the Sherwood Studio Building on West Fifty-Seventh Street. During those first years in New York, he began to winter in New Orleans and held several exhibits of work created there upon his return north, most notably Portraits and Paintings of Old New Orleans, which took place at the Milch Gallery in 1921. That same year, he painted The Art Jury, a detailed group portrait of the artists T. C. Steele (1847–1926), Otto Stark (1859–1926), Ottis Adams (1851–1927), and William Forsyth as they consider works of art. His selection for the Benjamin Altman Prize by the National Academy in 1926 marked his elevation to the rank of portraitist of choice for leading figures in the world of American culture, politics, and high society. Over the following years, he recorded the likenesses of Presidents Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) and Herbert Hoover (1874– 1964), golfer Bobby Jones (1902–1971), writers Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) and Hamlin Garland (1960–1940), and artists Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872–1930), Hobart Nichols (1869–1962), and Jerome Myers (1867– 1940). In 1932, he launched the first season of an annual summer school at his Elizabethtown, New York, farm in the Adirondacks which continued until he moved to Austin, Texas, in 1948. Adams painted at a time when the tides of American Impressionism and the modern art movement ran in counter-currents. Rose Henderson, a critic writing in the American Magazine of Art in November 1930, warned the widely admired artist of becoming too facile. Henderson notes that Adams’ “greatest virtue has been also his great danger. The swift and vivacious skill by which he seizes a revealing moment, captures a salient mood and impales a personality, gives to his happiest achievement a transcending brilliance and convincingness. By the same token, if he fails to come up to the high mark he has set for himself his failure is more disastrous, in a way, than is the failure of a more leisurely performer.” After Wayman and Margaret Adams moved to Austin, their home, Encina Linda, became a center for the intellectual community in that university town. A lifelong Quaker, Wayman Adams died suddenly of a heart attack on April 9, 1959. Though he had lived away for many years, he retained the affection

of his native state. In remarks prepared for a memorial exhibition held at the John Herron Art Institute in December 1959, the Herron Museum’s director Wilbur D. Peat (1898–1966) wrote that two “characteristics seem to stand out most clearly about Wayman Adams and his work: a modest, lovable man and a brilliant virtuoso. Everyone who met him felt the warmth of his personality and the forthrightness of his character. No one failed to admire, to marvel at the magic of his paint-loaded brush.” ECP

Artist image: Wayman Elbridge Adams (1883–1959), Self Portrait, n.d., oil on canvas, 37 x 26 inches. From the collection of the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites (71.967.034.0002), Indianapolis.

aid, george charles (1872–1938) George Charles Aid was born in Quincy, Illinois, to Francis Anton Aid (1842–1914) and Louisa Huber Aid (1842–1924). George’s father was of French descent, the son of immigrants from the Alsace-Lorraine region who arrived in America via the port of New Orleans. After serving in the United States Navy during the Civil War, Francis Aid prospered in the coal business. By 1880, he had relocated his family to St. Louis, where they lived in a townhouse on Carroll Street in the fashionable Lafayette Park neighborhood. Once there, young George began to demonstrate a precocious talent for drawing. While still a teenager, he was employed as an illustrator for various St. Louis newspapers, including the Globe-Democrat and the Post-Dispatch, the latter under the editorship of the legendary journalist Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911).

While living in Paris, he met Mary Orr (1880–1977), a native of Anderson, South Carolina, who had come to France to study music. They were married in New York in 1910 and, upon their return to Europe, lived in Bordighera on the Italian Riviera. In 1914, they returned to America for visits in Boston and St. Louis, where Aid was being given solo exhibitions. When World War I broke out later that year, they were stranded in their native land and never returned to Europe. During the war years, the couple resided in South Carolina, New Orleans, and New York City, and also visited a North Carolina mountain lodge owned by Mary’s family. A love for that terrain and an interest in vineyards led to the purchase of property in Tryon, North Carolina, a village known for its vibrant arts circle which swelled each year with seasonal visitors. Settling in Tryon in 1920, Aid offered instruction in composition and drawing while managing the twentyacre vineyard. The family, which had grown to include a son, George, Jr. (1919–2005), remained there throughout the first years of the Great Depression. Despite economic hardships, Aid was soon in demand as a portraitist in French chalk and continued to cultivate a Southern audience for his etchings and lectures on art. Mary Aid became the librarian at the Lanier Club in Tryon, a well regarded private subscription library and cultural athenaeum. Aid’s studio became a gathering place for Tryon’s artistic and intellectual community. In 1924, Aid’s etchings were showcased in a one-man show at the prestigious Doll and Richards Gallery in Boston. Exhibitions in Tryon tended to be less formal and were often held at the Lanier Club or Episcopal parish house. The Washington Memorial Library in Macon, Georgia, hosted an exhibition in late 1931, and the artist’s work was also

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St. Louis was a vibrant community with high cultural aspirations, excellent schools, and impressive art institutions. From 1893 to 1897, Aid studied at the School of Fine Arts at Washington University. He then enrolled in the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, under the direction of Halsey Ives (1847–1911). When he became

a beneficiary of that school’s scholarship fund for foreign study, Aid departed for Paris in the spring of 1899. Aid’s biographer Michael McCue has noted that as a result of “his language fluency and personal charm, Aid was well regarded in French art circles as well as in the expatriate American community.” Although he studied painting at the Académie Julian, it was his work with Charles Cottet (1863–1925) and other artists of the Bande Noir which culminated in his first mature work. By 1903, Aid had won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon and sent work home to the Boston Art Club. His highly detailed etchings of European scenery in France and Italy achieved considerable success—receiving a silver medal at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair—and were bought from exhibitions organized by the Chicago Society of Etchers. Aid also received a bronze medal at the landmark 1915 PanamaPacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

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represented in exhibitions at the nascent Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the mid-1930s. An invitation to conduct art classes sponsored by the Junior League drew Aid to Charlotte in 1933, where he lived for two years and quickly earned a reputation as one of the city’s most significant artists. When local philanthropist Mrs. J. S. Myers pledged one thousand dollars for a large mural to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare’s baptism in the North Carolina colony, Aid received the lucrative commission. Despite recurring heart problems, he completed the massive five-by-eight-foot Baptism of Virginia Dare in 1937, when it was prominently installed at the Mint Museum. The work was subsequently lost when a high school to which it had been lent burned to the ground. The artist’s final project was a series of six highly-detailed architectural drawings of nearby Davidson College. Aid died at St. Luke’s Hospital in Tryon on May 12, 1938. ECP

Artist image: George Charles Aid (1872–1938), Self-Portrait, circa 1935, oil on canvasboard, 18.13 x 14.12 inches. Collection of the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina; Bequest of George C. Aid, Jr. (2006. 25.05.21).

brenner, carl christian (1838–1888)

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Carl Christian Brenner was born in Lauterecken, Germany, to Friederich Brenner (1811–1871) and Susanna Elisabetha Lang Brenner (1811–1880) on August 1, 1838. The family name—taken from the German word brennen, or one who burns—usually signifies the occupation of a distiller of spirits. The political allegiance of the town in the shifting tides of post-Napoleonic era Germany was often uncertain. Originally part of the Rhineland-Palatinate, it became part of the kingdom of Bavaria under the terms of the 1815 Treaty of Vienna and was subsequently acquired by the powerful Prussian state in 1834. Though noted as a wine merchant in some accounts, Friederich Brenner was a glazier, a craft which included the installation of windows

and ornamental glasswork. The younger Brenner studied at the local gymnasium where his drawing skills were nurtured by his teacher, Philip Fröhlich (also cited in texts as Philip Froelig). Based largely on his instructor’s recommendation, Brenner was accepted to the Royal Academy in Munich, but did not enroll due to his father’s insistence that he pursue a more economically viable line of work. The Brenners left Germany in 1853, arriving in New Orleans on January 17, 1854. The family soon departed for Louisville, Kentucky, traveling up the Mississippi River; along the journey, Carl made sketches of the scenery he encountered. In Louisville, the family became part of the thriving German immigrant community, which had swelled to approximately eighteen thousand by 1854. Friederich Brenner established a household paint and supply store offering glazier services, a skill he passed down to Carl. While Brenner did work with his father at the beginning of his residency in Louisville, by 1861 he had set out on his own as a house painter with a business address at 320 East Jefferson Street and a home at 638 East Jefferson, both locations in the prosperous downtown commercial area of the city. On August 2, 1864, he married Anna Maria Glass (1844–1936), whose family members were active participants in the local Germanic music scene. The couple had six children; each of Brenner’s three sons inherited his artistic inclinations. After studying abroad with his father’s blessing, Carolus Brenner (1865–1924) enjoyed some success as an artist and illustrator. He returned to Louisville after his father’s death at which time he painted the posthumous portrait of his father now in the collection of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville. Following his marriage, Brenner became a sign and ornamental painter while launching his career as a landscape artist. His work was first publicly shown at the Louisville Industrial Exposition in 1874, and he was regularly included in the Louisville Southern Expositions which took place between 1883 and 1887. Brenner’s composite identity—part old world romantic, part new world entrepreneur—served his chosen role as a painter of the local scene quite well and earned national recognition. In an article published in the Louisville Courier-Journal for December 17, 1878, Brenner posited that nature “is not always in its most beautiful moods even in the same spot. The artist must be subjective as well as objective. He must draw from memory and his heart experiences as well as from the scene before him.” In 1881, Brenner made his first important sale—a landscape featuring the artist’s trademark beech trees—to William Wilson Corcoran for his eponymous gallery in Washington, D.C. His work was exhibited at the National Academy of Design from 1877 to

1886 and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1881 to 1885. Plagued by kidney ailments, Carl Christian Brenner died on July 22, 1888, just before his fiftieth birthday. Long before that time, his great admirer, Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, had lamented that Brenner did not receive “the sympathy and support from men of means and supposed art appreciation of Louisville to which his talent entitled him.” The few surviving works from his last year indicate that he was moving towards the rapid, broken brushwork and brighter colors of the Impressionist movement. ECP

Artist image: Carolus Brenner (1865–1929), Portrait of Carl C. Brenner, circa 1888, oil on canvas, 29 x 24½ inches. The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky (1985.2).

carr, lyell edwin (1854–1912) Lyell Carr was born in Sandwich, Illinois, on November 8, 1854 to Linsley Herbert Carr (1822–1862) and his wife, Caroline Aldrich Carr (1820–1880). Mrs. Carr was a descendent of distinguished New England families, including that of John Hancock, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. While there are reports that Carr studied at the École des Beaux-Arts prior to 1880, verifiable details of his training remain vague. He is known to have established his first studio in Chicago prior to his move to New York in the early 1880s. From the earliest days of his career, Carr was involved in the applied arts, which included rendering illustrations for serial publications as well as decorative interior house painting.

At some point in the late 1880s, Carr became a frequent visitor to Haralson County in northwest Georgia; his first trip to the area seems to have occurred prior to 1891, the earliest date of a painting based on his residence there. By that time, the opening of the Lithia Springs Hotel in 1882 and other investments by Northern industrialists had created the same sharp dichotomy between local culture and urbanization which so inspired the Barbizon School. Over the next several years, Carr would mine the Southern setting for subject matter for genre scenes and landscapes, paintings that found favor with New York audiences. His work was regularly included in National Academy exhibitions beginning in 1890 and at the annual juried shows at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Carr was also represented at the 1883 Southern Exposition in Louisville, Kentucky; the 1890 Royal Academy exhibition in London; the 1896 Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh; the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York; and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. After 1898, Carr began to spend time in Cuba, painting works based on his observation of life in Santiago. Carr did publish one article in his lifetime, a fanciful reminiscence of the artist/photographer Napoleon Sarony (1821–1896). In “A Dream Painter,” featured in the autumn 1894 edition of the Quarterly Illustrator, Carr recalls Sarony’s visit to the West Indies where, “not knowing the language, when he wanted some particularly picturesque character to pose, he would hold up a dime in one hand and sketch-book in the other, and make use of the only Spanish phrase he knew, ‘Este quieto’ (keep still). This is possibly the most valuable expression that an artist can know.” Little is known of Carr’s personal life, although a listing in the Carr Family Records notes him as being married and living in New York in 1894. Lyell Carr died unexpectedly in his New York City studio on February 17, 1912. ECP

Artist image: Courtesy of http://www.deadfred.com/photos/77589.jpg.

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Carr spent the year 1884 in Paris, working with master practitioners Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911) and Gustave Boulanger (1824–1888) at the Académie Julian. When he returned to New York, he received a commission from Thomas Fortune Ryan (1851–1928), a tobacco and

transportation magnate who was then one of the wealthiest men in America. Ryan began to buy Carr’s art and introduced him to other men of means. Such associations led to Carr’s portraits of John W. Britton (1823–1886), president of the Union Dime Savings Bank, and Henry A. Wise (1806–1876), governor of Ryan’s native Virginia. It may well be that Ryan’s extensive connections to Southern capitalists and ventures in railway transportation brought the rural South to Carr’s attenti

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chadwick, william (1879–1962) William Chadwick was born in Dewsbury, England. His father, Day Chadwick (1840–after 1915), was a successful textile manufacturer whose offerings of a particular woolen plush velvet to the American market proved highly lucrative. Seeking refuge from restrictive American tariffs, Chadwick moved his entire factory and staff to Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1882. It was there that the young artist grew up in rather impressive genteel circumstances, the beneficiary of a family fortune which would sustain him for the rest of his life and stave off the grinding round of poverty which afflicts so many artists. He attended Holyoke High School, where he first began to draw and experiment with watercolor. Following his graduation in 1898, he moved to New York, enrolling in classes at the Art Students League taught by John Twachtman (1853–1902) and Joseph De Camp (1858–1923). Following a study tour to Europe in 1900, Chadwick returned to New York for the 1901–1902 winter term at the League.

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In the summer of 1902, Chadwick took a room in the home of Florence Griswold (1850–1937), whose venerable Greek Revival mansion in Old Lyme, Connecticut, became an outpost for American Impressionists. During those first summers in Old Lyme, Chadwick came under the influence of William Henry Howe (1844–1929), Howe’s nephew Will Howe Foote (1874–1965), and Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951), artists whose lingering affection for Impressionism insured a gentler, romanticized response to the demanding, iconoclastic elements then current in avant-garde American art circles. Thus began Chadwick’s extended cycle of residencies: summers spent painting in Old Lyme and winters spent teaching at City College in New York. Around this time, Chadwick also began to exhibit his work at important national venues, including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and the National Academy of Design, beginning in 1907 and continuing through 1928. Over the course of his career, Chadwick’s paintings would be included in annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

In 1910, he married Pauline Wolfe Bancroft (1885–1969), a Wilmington, Delaware, debutante and close family friend, who now joined in the annual commute between Old Lyme and the studio apartment at 257 West Eighty-Sixth Street. In the fall of 1912, Chadwick and his wife traveled to Italy. Although they made brief trips home, Italy was to remain their principal residence until the onset of war in September 1914. From his Roman base, Chadwick made painting excursions to the northern Adriatic, notably the picturesque medieval towns of Spalato (now Split, Croatia) and Ragusa. His work from that era captures the strong sunlight and faded colors of the old towns, even as his sketchy brushwork demonstrates a clear familiarity with contemporary French trends emanating from the circles of the Fauves and Pointillists. The couple arrived in Paris in April 1914, with plans to spend the summer there sightseeing and seeking fresh inspiration for Chadwick’s brush. Following the bombardment of the Place de la Bastille on August 30, 1914, the Chadwicks fled to England, leaving William’s Paris canvases behind. They soon found refuge in the art colony at St. Ives, Cornwall. Chadwick fit easily into the group of artists now known as the Newlyn School, always sustained by the loyal support of his wife. Late in 1914, Pauline Chadwick wrote to her parents that she would prefer that her husband “leave a name behind him like Rubens or Velasquez, and help advance art and the love of beauty than rule over any nation on earth.” Fearful for their safety abroad, the Chadwicks returned to America in May 1915 and purchased a house on Johnny Cake Hill in Old Lyme. After extensive renovations, the couple settled into the town where they would remain for the rest of their lives. Soon thereafter, Chadwick and his wife began to spend some winters in Bermuda where he painted beach scenes. In 1920, the couple’s first child was born, a daughter who died less than two years later, only a short time before their son, John Bancroft Chadwick (1922–1977), arrived. Once again seeking a warm weather retreat, Chadwick and his family spent the 1924–1925 season in Savannah, Georgia, where he taught art classes under the auspices of the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences for the following two winters. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 brought unwelcome changes to Chadwick’s life and career. While the family textile fortune remained intact, interest in his art—indeed, interest in the Old Lyme School altogether— declined sharply. After 1933, Chadwick was known primarily for his portraiture. When their son attended Princeton University, William and Pauline wintered there in the late 1930s. In the years following the Second World War, Chadwick slowly withdrew from the national

art scene, living quietly in Old Lyme and wintering in more hospitable climes. He suffered a stroke in 1959 and became bedridden prior to his death in Old Lyme in 1962. A memorial exhibition was held in 1963 at the Lyme Art Association, where the artist was praised for his “sensitive and subtle Impressionism. His color schemes are soft and muted within the framework of a fine pattern . . . and he evokes the mood of the shifting seasons, effects of sunshine and cloud shadows, the laurel of late summer and the snow of winter.” ECP

Artist image: William Chadwick (1879–1962), Self Portrait, 1899, graphite on paper, 15 1/8 x 11 1/8 inches (detail). Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut; Gift of Elizabeth Chadwick O’Connell (1995.9).

chant, elisabeth augusta (1865–1947)

A colorfully eccentric figure who inspired artists in the American Midwest and South, Elisabeth Augusta Chant was born on March 10, 1865 in Yeovil, Somerset, England. Her father, James Chant (1840–1908), was a sea captain active in the Asian spice trade. Between 1866 and 1872, he took his wife, Elisabeth Rowe Wills (circa 1836–1878), and their children on voyages to India, China, and Japan. The artist often claimed to have sailed the seven seas by the age of seven. In 1873, the family immigrated with other residents of Yeovil to Hawley, Minnesota, where they established a colony. James Chant initially worked for the Northern Pacific Railway before moving to Minneapolis after his wife’s death. He opened a meat and provisions market there and remarried. Minneapolis was experiencing a growth spurt at the time, which impacted its cultural aspirations.

Returning to Minneapolis in 1899, Chant began to take art seriously; she became actively involved in various art groups such as the Handicraft Guild and the Minneapolis Art League. She met and began to share a studio with fellow student Margarethe E. Heisser (1871–1908). Both women were active in the Arts and Crafts movement and supported themselves by painting murals and decorative panels, along with making pottery and prints. Their studio was a frequent gathering place for meetings of the Minneapolis Arts and Crafts Society. In 1901, Chant began a two-year sojourn in England where she reconnected with distant relatives and traced her family’s relationship to the court of King Arthur. From this time forward, she displayed a keen interest in Arthurian legends and tales of Camelot, which often emerged in her murals. Reveling in the experience abroad, she wrote enthusiastic travelogue-style articles for the Minneapolis Journal and studied at the Royal School of Art Needlework in Kensington near the Victoria and Albert Museum. She returned to Minneapolis in 1903 and immersed herself in exhibitions and activities there; local, as well as regional, commissions for residential murals—often Arthurian or pantheistic in theme—provided a steady income. Beginning in 1908, Chant suffered devastating personal losses. When her sister, father, and Heisser died in quick succession, she became emotionally unstable. Nevertheless, in 1911 Chant moved for a period of six years to Springfield, Massachusetts, where she worked as a muralist and designer for John Putnam Harding (1861–1923?), who ran a firm that specialized in cabinetwork, wallpapers, and interior decoration. Concerned about her emotional state, members of Chant’s family had her arrested and committed to the Minnesota Sanitarium in July 1917. Later that fall, she was moved to Rochester Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, where she was treated for manic depression. Shortly after her release in late 1920, she embarked on a lengthy trip to China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, destinations she had visited as a child. Estranged from her family and weary from travel, Chant left Minnesota

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The eldest of nine children, Elisabeth displayed an early interest in art, but was discouraged from pursuing an education in the arts. She instead enrolled at the Training School for Nurses at Northwestern Hospital for Women

and Children; a career in nursing, her stepmother insisted, was both practical and socially acceptable. She graduated in 1886 and, in 1889, was employed as a student nurse in Duluth. Between 1890 and 1893, she took painting classes with Douglas Volk (1856–1953), the first director of the newly founded Minneapolis School of Fine Arts, and received evening instruction from Burt Harwood (1855–1922). With the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Chant was sent by the Red Cross to work in various camps in Savannah and Albany, Georgia. She was discharged the following year.

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for good in 1922, at the age of fifty-seven, and settled in Wilmington, North Carolina, a city she selected for its temperate climate. Chant dreamt of establishing an art colony in Wilmington and boasted to local residents about the celebrated artists who would flock there to participate. When this hope never materialized, Chant—undeterred in the face of limited finances and compromised health—chose to invest her energies in the local community. She became an active force for the arts, establishing the Wilmington Art League in 1923, which led to the founding of the Wilmington Art Association. She taught design, painting, and batik in her own studio, at the arts center, and at the Wilmington Museum of Art, whose 1938 opening she had championed. The museum closed just four years later as a result of World War II. Throughout her life, Chant pursued an independent—and sometimes mysterious—course in response to her passions for art, myth, nature, and the pursuit of beauty. She dressed unconventionally—in vibrant flowing dresses of her own design—and arranged her hair in unusually coiled braids. At home in her whimsically decorated cottage, she welcomed learners at all levels and was also known to talk to “spirits.” Over her twenty-five years in Wilmington, Chant developed a loyal following among her students who later described her as an inspirational aesthete. She died there on September 21, 1947. MRS

Artist image: Henry Caliga (1857–1934), Portrait of Elisabeth Chant, 1925, oil on canvas, 26 x 28.675 inches (detail). Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina; Gift of Hester Donnelly (1972.2.28).

clark, eliot candee (1883–1980)

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The fourth of six children, Eliot Clark was born in New York City on March 27, 1883 to Walter Clark (1848–1917) and his wife, Jennie Woodruff Clark (1853–1922?). After

studying engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Walter Clark first gained notice as a sculptor before becoming a well regarded landscape artist specializing in atmospheric work in the Tonalist style. The senior Clark immersed his son in various esoteric theories of art appreciation, as well as the technicalities of art application. Clark’s mother had a mystic bent, and her interest in spiritualism and psychic phenomenon created an enthusiasm which would persist throughout her son’s life. Walter’s success afforded the family an elegant brownstone at 37 West Eighty-Fourth Street, where, Eliot’s widow later recounted, “Central Park was his playground.” Eliot attended Washington Irving High School prior to a brief period of study with Edward Potthast (1857–1927) and John Twachtman (1853–1902) at the Art Students League. His most enduring arts education, however, came in the countless hours spent in the company of his father and with Walter Clark’s artistic associates. In 1904, Eliot Clark made the obligatory study trip to Europe. He did not enroll at one of the established academies, but instead traveled extensively on his own, observing old master paintings and painting en plein air at various sites favored by the Barbizon artists. Arriving in London in 1905, he made a special point of viewing a memorial exhibition of the works of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) at the New Gallery. Afterwards, he wrote to his father that he admired Whistler’s “use of color, and subtle arrangement of line and balance of masses.” That influence, and his development of a personal understanding of close color harmonics, is the most identifiable characteristic of Clark’s art. In the spring of 1905, Clark met up with fellow artist Lee Randolph (1880–1956) in Amsterdam and soon embarked with him upon an ambitious walking tour of the Rhine River Valley and Swiss Alps. One of the photographs of Clark in the Archives of American Art features the artist in Tyrolean costume sitting on the ground, happily smiling at the camera while eating an apple. Not long after his return to New York in 1906, Clark opened a studio in the Van Dyke Studio Building where several other Tonalist painters also maintained spaces. From there, he began creating works with powerful light, minimal color differential, and an intentional focus upon the inherent grace of the passing moment. Deeply involved in the city’s art scene, Clark was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1917, an affiliation that would prove especially meaningful over the course of his career. He also began to write a series of monographs on his favorite artists, favoring the work of such Impressionist and Tonalist masters as Childe Hassam

(1859–1935) and Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) over his more modern contemporaries. During this same period, he taught classes at the Art Students League and exhibited widely. From 1920 to 1923, Clark served as president of the American Water Color Society. Clark’s enduring interest in Asian philosophy and spiritualism found a new outlet when he began lecturing at the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City. A Russian artist and mystic of international stature, Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) painted a series of rather stunningly vivid landscape views of Far Eastern sites intended to reflect his personal revelations of “peace in a fractious time.” Then as now, the Roerich Museum, at 319 West 107th Street, was a place for cultural exploration and collaboration. In 1922, Clark married Elizabeth Trowbridge Egleston (born 1881), a pianist with whom he built a home in Kent, Connecticut. The couple spent the winters of 1924 and 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, where Clark was engaged as a seasonal instructor at the Telfair Academy. However, the marriage was not a happy one and when they divorced in 1932, Clark suffered grave financial losses and experienced a deeply traumatic spiritual crisis, the effects of which can be seen in his brooding paintings of that era. In search of artistic renewal, he made a long desired trip to India in 1937, visiting rare temple sites he knew from his studies of Roerich’s paintings. Clark married a former student, Margaret Winslow Fowler (1906–1993), in 1944. That same year, he was elevated to full academician status at the National Academy of Design, an organization he served with great diligence as corresponding secretary, vice-president, and finally as president from 1956–1959. He also served as curator/ conservator of the Academy’s collection, stabilizing the large and disparate holdings and eventually publishing a comprehensive history of the institution in 1954. Clark’s strongest association with the South—specifically with Albemarle County, Virginia, and the city of Charlottesville— began in 1932. For the rest of his life, Clark maintained a residence there, finally making it his permanent home in 1959. Ronald Pisano has written that Clark was “an intellectual who truly understood and appreciated a wide variety of expression in art and philosophy” and “chose to communicate in representational and clearly recognizable terms the spirit of nature as he experienced it . . . [as] a mediator between nature and the common man.” ECP

Kate Freeman Clark enrolled at the Art Students League in 1894; her instructors there included Irving Wiles (1861– 1948), John Twachtman (1853–1902), and William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). During her first summer as an art student, she attended Wiles’ program at Peconic on Long Island. Enthralled by Chase and his pedagogy, Clark followed the popular teacher to his newly founded Chase School of Art (later the New York School of Art) in 1895, continuing there until 1902. Around this time, Clark did spend two winters in Washington, D.C., enjoying the elite social season. Between 1896 and 1901, she participated in six summer sessions at

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Artist image: Howard Logan Hildebrandt (1872–1958), Eliot Clark, 1947, oil on canvas, 321/4 x 25 7/8 inches (detail). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Gift of Mrs. Eliot Clark (1980.123.1).

clark, kate freeman (1875–1957) The only daughter of a prominent and prosperous family, Kate Freeman Clark was born on September 7, 1875 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, located near the state’s northern border with Tennessee. Her father, Edward Donaldson Clark (1845–1885), was a lawyer and cotton planter in Vicksburg, where the family lived until 1885. A frail child, young Kate spent summers with her maternal grandmother at the family homestead in Holly Springs to escape the annual plagues of cholera and yellow fever in southern Mississippi. In 1885, Edward Clark was appointed an assistant to the Secretary of the Interior in Washington, D.C., but before the family completed their move there, he died from pneumonia. Subsequently, Kate and her mother, Cary Ann Walthall Freeman Clark (1850–1922), took up permanent residence in Holly Springs with matriarch Kate Walthall Freeman (1829–1919), the artist’s namesake. They also spent some time in Memphis, a more socially active and cultured city. When the artist was sixteen, she and her mother moved to New York City where Kate attended the Gardner Institute, an exclusive finishing school located on Fifth Avenue. They spent summers at resorts in upstate New York and New England. Kate is known to have had one beau, Lewis Hamilton Foley (circa 1875–?), a West Point cadet who was later court-martialed in an embezzling scheme in Manila. In 1893, mother and daughter visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where they may have encountered French Impressionism for the first time.

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Chase’s Shinnecock Summer School of Art, located west of Southampton, Long Island. Under his tutelage, she learned to paint muted portraits and still lifes similar to Chase’s and impressionistic plein air landscapes. Chase was a father-like figure to Clark, and she valued his role in both the professional and personal aspects of her life. In homage to her teacher, Clark assisted in efforts to raise funds from fellow disciples to underwrite a portrait by the celebrated artist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). Chase was to be in London during the spring of 1902, and Sargent agreed to paint a likeness of his colleague for whatever amount the students could muster, not to exceed one thousand dollars. The large-scale, three-quarter length canvas is an animated study of Chase holding his brushes and a palette. Most contemporaries judged it a thoroughly successful representation of his forceful character. Clark, however, demurred, thinking it did not capture the warmth of his personality as a generous mentor, devoted husband, and tender father. In the realm of exhibitions, Clark gained a modicum of success, exhibiting frequently at the National Academy of Design from 1904 through 1917 under the name Freeman Clark to disguise her gender. Her work was also included in exhibitions at the Boston Art Club, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and she had several oneartist exhibitions at commercial galleries. She was proudest perhaps of her inclusion in the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. Despite this enviable visibility, Clark never sold a painting as her mother considered such commercial endeavors unladylike. This attitude was reinforced by the artist’s favorite uncle, Edward Russell Freeman, who, in a letter to his niece, posited that the “women of our land constitute the only true aristocracy we have, and therefore they are decidedly the superior sex in all that is cherished and refined. . . . They are only working to disturb this most desirable state of things when they seek to operate in spheres of life which belong to men.”

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When Chase died in 1916, Clark was devastated, and was simultaneously burdened by the care of her ailing mother and grandmother. For a short interval in 1917, she returned to classes at the Art Students League, but the teaching methods of the more modernist instructors were not to her liking. The death of her grandmother in 1919 followed three years later by the passing of her mother further demoralized the artist. She placed her paintings in storage in New York and retreated to the family’s home in Holly Springs, never to paint again. She spent the remaining thirty-five years of her life engaged in various genteel pursuits, including membership in organizations

such as the Colonial Dames of America and Daughters of the American Revolution. Upon her death on March 3, 1957, Clark bequeathed the entirety of her oeuvre, along with her house and sixty thousand dollars, to the city of Holly Springs. A codicil to her will directed that the funds be used to erect a small museum. The Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery was completed in 1963 and houses more than twelve hundred pieces of Clark’s art, as well as a selection of paintings by her beloved mentor, William Merritt Chase. MRS

Artist image: William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), Portrait of Kate Freeman Clark, 1902, oil on canvas, 25 x 30 inches (detail). Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery, Holly Springs, Mississippi.

cooper, colin campbell (1856–1937) Colin Campbell Cooper, Jr., was born March 8, 1856 into a comfortably well-off Philadelphia family. His father, Dr. Colin Campbell Cooper (1816–1890), was a surgeon with roots in Londonderry, Ireland, while his mother, Emily Williams Cooper (1818–1886), was an amateur watercolorist; both parents nurtured their son’s early enthusiasm for art. This interest was further stimulated by Philadelphia’s Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, America’s first World’s Fair, which Cooper attended when he was eighteen years old and was particularly taken by a number of academic French paintings. For several years in the late 1870s, he was active in business, including publishing and writing. Cooper joined the Philadelphia Sketch Club in 1878 and began to exhibit with the Philadelphia Society of Artists the following year. In 1879, he undertook a three-year course of study with Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Commissioned to paint the Red Rock Canyon near Colorado Springs, Cooper traveled to Colorado by train in 1881. He also visited Taos, New Mexico, one of the first East Coast

artists to do so; a painting of that locale was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1882. From 1881 until 1886, Cooper maintained his own studio in Philadelphia, before departing for a European sojourn. Throughout this period, he published a few short stories and did illustration work, which brought him into contact with Joseph Pennell (1857–1926), the noted printmaker with a penchant for architectural subjects. On Cooper’s first trip to Europe in 1886, he worked largely in Holland, a country he would visit repeatedly during subsequent visits. He would later spend nearly a year in Laren, a destination located twenty miles from Amsterdam that was favored by Americans. With its rustic lifestyle, rural setting, and inexpensive accommodations, Laren resembled Barbizon, a mecca for French artists fifty years earlier. In 1889, he went to Paris to pursue studies at the Académie Julian under William Bouguereau (1825–1905) and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911), two instructors popular with American students. He also furthered his education at a school conducted by Auguste-Joseph Delecluse (1855–1928), which was considered reactionary, and at the lesser known Académie Vitti. Cooper went to Spain during the winter of 1890 and to the coast of Brittany during the summer. Over the next decade, Cooper would lead something of a peripatetic existence, dividing his time between his primary residence in Philadelphia, East Coast art colonies on Nantucket and in Connecticut, and spending several summers in Europe. From 1895 until 1898, he was an instructor in watercolor at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia. In 1897, he married Emma Lampert (1855–1920), a painter from Rochester, New York; the pair frequently exhibited together until her death in 1920. Cooper’s whereabouts can be traced in his paintings, as they frequently portray cathedrals and civic monuments. In addition, he gained some success as a portraitist. In 1904, the Coopers settled in New York City, where they remained for nearly twenty years. Exhibition records are a testament to Cooper’s many talents. In 1890, a figure painting was accepted for the Paris Salon and, in 1903, he put a series of cathedral paintings on display at the Pennsylvania Academy. He consistently exhibited at the National Academy between 1904 and 1922, and several years subsequently, becoming an associate in 1908 and a full academician in 1912. In addition, he was regularly represented at exhibitions hosted by the Pennsylvania Academy and the Art Institute of Chicago, and was the recipient of important prizes.

Cooper was a habitual traveler; he visited the art colony in Étaples, France, the English countryside, French chateaux, southern Italy, and Spain. In 1912, Cooper and his wife were aboard the Carpathia, a Cunard Line steamship, when it assisted in the rescue of over seven hundred passengers from the wreck of the Titanic. During the spring of 1913, the South was his destination with stops in Annapolis, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. Later that year and into early 1914, he traveled to India via Italy and the Suez Canal, returning by way of France. His first trip to California was in 1915 in connection with the PanamaPacific International Exposition, which included six of his paintings. In 1921, he moved permanently to Santa Barbara, where he became a member of the faculty at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts and was a founding member of the Santa Barbara Arts Club. Cooper thrived in southern California, not only because of the climate, but also because of the resort hotels where rich tourists often patronized him. In addition, he returned to writing, with an emphasis on plays and theatrical reviews. Although successful during his lifetime, Cooper’s reputation, like that of most American Impressionists, was eclipsed with the rise of modernism and abstraction. His forte was the portrayal of the industrialized city, especially New York and its skyscrapers, and California gardens. In a 1906 article in the Brush and Pencil, Willis E. Howe captured his significance: “He settled in New York and quickly discovered that Manhattan Island had as much of the striking and the picturesque as the Old World towns among which he had been roaming. What was more, the monster buildings he saw around him, a distinctive New World product, offered an undreampt [sic] of field of opportunities with which the Old World had nothing to compare. They had not the flavor of antiquity, but they had . . . the suggestion of sublimity, the spirit of progress and promise, the manifestation of a merging, restless, all-attempting, all-achieving life essentially American.” Ensconced in Santa Barbara and somewhat removed from the New York art world, Cooper, nevertheless, was outspoken against the latest artistic trends, which he labeled “the cult of ugliness.” During the 1930s, he reduced both the size of his paintings and his prices. By 1935, both his health and eyesight were failing, but when he died two years later at age eighty-one, fellow artist John Gamble (1863–1957) paid him the following tribute in the Santa Barbara News-Press: he “saw beauty wherever he went and

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Beginning in late 1902, New York City’s tall modern buildings became his primary focus and won him great acclaim. Skyscrapers—known as America’s cathedrals—

were transforming urban environments, especially in New York where sixty-six skyscrapers dominated Lower Manhattan. He rendered architectural and urban scenes in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Pittsburgh.

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joyed in the endeavor to pass on to others through his work some of the pleasure which was his.” MRS

Artist image: Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937), Self Portrait, 1922, oil on canvas, 29 15/16 x 25 inches (detail). Collection National Academy Museum, New York.

couper, emma josephine sibley (1867–1957) Throughout her life, Emma Josephine Sibley Couper enjoyed the advantages of modest wealth. One of fifteen siblings, Josephine was born on February 23, 1867 in Augusta, Georgia, to Josiah Sibley (1808–1888) and his second wife, Emma Eve Longstreet Sibley (1826–1898). Her father, originally from Uxbridge, Massachusetts, was a successful textile industrialist and the owner of Sibley Mills. An abolitionist who educated and later freed his slaves— eventually arranging for their passage to Liberia—Josiah Sibley nevertheless supported the Confederacy financially, and five of his sons fought for the South during the Civil War.

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As a girl of only twelve, Josephine Sibley made a six-month tour of Europe, visiting museums and historic sites. Inspired by this experience, she asked to have art lessons. When she was eighteen, her father built a home studio and hired an associate of John Singer Sargent’s—whose name has not been recorded—as her private instructor. In 1886, she took classes at a Charleston, South Carolina, “art academy,” possibly a reference to the Carolina Art Association. Her real ambition, however, was to study at the Art Students League in New York, a plan to which her father objected. Following his death in 1888, Sibley sold some property, headed north, and enrolled at the League where she studied with J. Carroll Beckwith (1852–1917) and Herbert A. Levy (1857–1917?) during the spring of 1889 and again the following winter. She took a painting class in April 1889 with influential teacher and leading Impressionist William

Merritt Chase (1849–1916). Various accounts relate that she spent a summer in Lyme, Connecticut, with Chase, but he never taught there, although another League instructor, Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951), did direct the Lyme School of Art. Another possibility is that Sibley joined Chase at his Shinnecock School on Long Island during its inaugural session in the summer of 1891. In 1890, at the age of twenty-three, Sibley returned to Europe with her mother, visiting England, France, Germany, and Italy. While abroad, she sketched genre scenes and copies of the old masters. There is no record that she saw any work by the French Impressionists at this time. She continued her studies at the League that fall and into the spring of 1891. Soon after, she returned to her home state and married Butler King Couper (1851–1913). A widower whose first wife had died in childbirth, Couper and his family owned extensive property on St. Simons Island, Georgia. Henceforth, Josephine Sibley Couper dropped her first name, used Mrs. B. King Couper socially, and signed her paintings J. S. Couper, perhaps to disguise her gender. Her new husband managed a knitting mill in Marietta, Georgia, where the couple lived until 1901, when they moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina, and he established a textile mill. They had two children, a daughter and a son. Along with her duties as a wife and mother, Couper continued to paint, mostly family oriented subjects and portraits. In Spartanburg, she became actively involved in supporting the arts; in 1907, she and Margaret Law (1871– 1956) founded the Spartanburg Arts and Crafts Club. A native of the city whose brother was married to Couper’s niece, Law had also studied at the Art Students League with Chase. That same year, she and Couper tapped their New York connections to mount an exhibition of over one hundred paintings by such noted contemporary artists as Chase, Robert Henri (1865–1929), and Elliott Daingerfield (1859–1932). Couper and Law’s own work was displayed, as well as that of Anna Heyward Taylor (1879–1956), a Columbia, South Carolina, artist and fellow Chase student. During the exhibition’s tenure, visitors were invited to vote for their favorite painting, an honor that went to Henri’s Girl with Red Hair. The work’s purchase price of five hundred dollars was raised through the sale of coupons, and the lively portrait is now a centerpiece of the Spartanburg Art Museum’s permanent collection. Couper continued her studies after the death of her husband in 1913. She traveled to Blowing Rock, North Carolina, to study with Daingerfield and, in the 1920s, took summer classes with Hugh Breckenridge (1870–1937) at his Gloucester, Massachusetts, school. A longtime instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,

Breckenridge is recognized for his bold brushwork and bright colors. Under his influence, Couper’s painting became more impressionistic. In 1929 and 1930, Couper lived in Paris and studied with André Lhote (1885–1962), probably at the prompting of Law who had been his pupil in 1923. A prominent educator and early Cubist, Lhote pushed Couper toward abstraction, which she did not fully embrace. In the spring of 1927, Couper’s paintings were featured in a one-woman exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; in 1930, one of her more modernist experiments, Market Woman, was included at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. In 1924, Couper moved from Spartanburg to Montreat, North Carolina, a small village near Asheville, where the Presbyterian Church’s Mountain Retreat Association was located. Couper’s home there, Alta Vista, was the subject of a painting that appeared on the cover of the Literary Digest of October 31, 1931. In 1934, she settled in Tryon, North Carolina, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains directly south of Montreat. At the time, Tryon was emerging as an art colony in which Couper would play a significant role; her residence, known as the Rock House, became an exhibition venue for local artists. She frequently spent the winter months in Charleston, South Carolina. A member of the Southern States Art League from its 1921 inception, Couper was a regular participant in the League’s exhibitions throughout the 1920s and again in the early 1940s. She was also a member of the Boston Art Club, the League of American Pen Women, the National Arts Club, and the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, which exhibited some of her work. On October 25, 1957, at the age of ninety and after suffering a fall, Josephine Sibley Couper died in Greenville, South Carolina. MRS

Artist image: Emma Josephine Sibley Couper (1867–1957), Self portrait, circa 1935, oil on canvas, 20 1/8 x 24 1/8 inches. Permanent Collection, Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, Georgia.

daingerfield, john elliott parker (1859–1932) A true son of the South, Elliott Daingerfield emerged as a respected figure in the New York art world. He was born on March 26, 1859 in Harper’s Ferry, which was part of Virginia at that time. His mother, Mathilda Wickham De Brua Daingerfield (circa 1830–1898), was of Huguenot descent; his father and namesake, Captain John Elliott Parker Daingerfield (1817–1889), was held prisoner during John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. In 1861, Captain Daingerfield was transferred to Fayetteville, North Carolina, to oversee the Confederate arsenal, which was seized four years later by Sherman’s army. During this invasion, federal troops burned the family’s home, an event witnessed by five-year-old Elliott and later recounted in his autobiography. The Daingerfield family experienced deprivation following the war, and young Elliott was forced to leave school around 1871 in order to help in his father’s store. He soon became a sign painter and took lessons copying prints from a Mrs. McKay. When he was about eighteen, Daingerfield was an apprentice in a local photography studio and shortly afterward set himself up as a photographer. His artistic aspirations remained unquenched, however, and so in January 1880, he took a bold step and relocated to New York. In his autobiography, Daingerfield describes his meager existence—living frugally and suffering from the cold. Fortunately, Walter Satterlee (1844–1908) took him on as a studio assistant, student, and, eventually, as an instructor for women. In the spring of 1880, Daingerfield enrolled in three classes at the National Academy of Design. He also studied at the Art Students League and under the academic muralist Kenyon Cox (1856–1919), who became a friend and professional colleague.

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In 1884, Daingerfield married and moved to the Holbein Studios on West Fifty-Fifth Street, where landscape painter George Inness (1825–1894) rented the space next door. Inness quickly became the young artist’s mentor and greatly influenced his development toward a poetic and

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Tonalist style. Daingerfield later wrote a monograph about him. Seeking a cure from a bout of diphtheria, Daingerfield made his first trip to Blowing Rock, North Carolina, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in 1886. He returned four years later to build a studio and spent summers there for the rest of his life, finding endless subject matter in the hazy vistas, rolling hills, and hardworking farm workers. His early landscapes with rural laborers earned him the sobriquet the “American Millet,” in honor of the French Barbizon painter Jean-François Millet (1814–1875). Daingerfield’s wife, Roberta Strange French Daingerfield (1858–1891), died in childbirth in 1891. The grief-stricken artist turned to painting allegorical and religious themes more frequently. He remarried four years later and his second wife, Anna Grainger (1868–1939), modeled for many of his paintings of the Madonna. The couple traveled to Europe in 1897, visiting Italy to see religious art, touring Paris, and going to Millet’s village near Barbizon. Two years into the new century, Daingerfield began executing a pair of chapel murals, The Magnificat and The Epiphany, for the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York, where he was a communicant; the commission was not completed until 1907. Daingerfield was elected an associate of the National Academy in 1902—the same year he received the institution’s prestigious Clark Prize—followed four years later by full membership. He exhibited there regularly, as well as at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago. He wrote significant essays about artists whose work he admired most—Inness, Millet, Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), and Albert Blakelock (1847–1919)—as well as an extensive first-person autobiography, a brief third-person memoir, and a treatise titled “Nature Versus Art,” which was published in the widely circulated popular magazine Scribner’s. In addition, he penned poems, often religious or ethereal in tone—to accompany his paintings.

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Daingerfield taught at the Art Students League and for twenty years (1895–1915) at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art), an institution established to prepare women to work in such fields as textile, interior, and wallpaper design. Many of these women—known as the “painting ladies”—followed him to Blowing Rock where he conducted a summer art school, the first in the western mountains of North Carolina. Under the influence of Inness, Daingerfield developed his own technique for alternating layers of varnish and paint on his canvases, which gives them a thick, rich tonality. For this reason, Daingerfield is frequently categorized as a Tonalist, as well as a Symbolist, given his subjective and often mystical themes.

In November 1910, Daingerfield was invited by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad to join four other painters on a visit to the Grand Canyon. His companions were Thomas Moran (1837–1926), who had already painted the area several times, DeWitt Parshall (1864–1956), Edward Potthast (1857–1927), and Frederick Ballard Williams (1871–1956). The group was charged with making images the railroad could use to promote tourism. They traveled in luxury on private rail cars, stayed at the renowned El Tovar Hotel, and were taken upon arrival to Hopi Point to witness the sunset. For Daingerfield, the experience was transformative, and from his many sketches and drawings, an impressive new body of work evolved. He returned to the Grand Canyon three years later on a family trip. Daingerfield’s predilection for Symbolist art was affirmed upon seeing a large selection of works by the noted French artist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) at the famed Armory Show of 1913. In 1917, Daingerfield built his third studio and home in Blowing Rock; a Colonial Revival structure with an imposing classical portico, it was the embodiment of a Southern plantation. Set overlooking a valley, he called it Westglow. Daingerfield returned to Europe in 1924, where he was inspired by the light and reflections of Venice. Although his aesthetic was somewhat superseded by modernism, Daingerfield remained a respected artist. In October 1924, an article titled “Elliott Daingerfield, Idealist,” appeared in Art World Magazine and described his space at New York’s Gainsborough Studios: “It is a studio splendidly appointed and richly furnished in warm old tapestries and rugs, with perhaps a portfolio of reproductions of his wonderful paintings resting on an antique carved chair.” It was there that Elliott Daingerfield died of a heart attack on October 22, 1932. MRS

Artist image: Photograph of Elliott Daingerfield, by George Rockwood, undated. Center for the Study of Southern Art, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia.

1887. The following year, another ambitious work, David and Goliath, was shown at the Paris Salon, where Dodge would continue to exhibit throughout his tenure in France.

When the family returned to Paris, Dodge began drawing classes at the Colarossi Academy in preparation for taking the entrance exam for the venerable École des BeauxArts. Admission standards were quite stringent, and it took Dodge three years and six attempts before he was finally admitted in 1885. During those years of study, he worked with Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), the history painter who also taught Kenyon Cox (1856–1919), Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), and Douglas Volk (1856–1935). Dodge’s first monumental painting, The Death of Minnehaha, based on William Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha, received critical acclaim when it was awarded a gold medal at the Prize Fund Exhibition in New York in

Such notable assignments, combined with portrait commissions and the sale of studio work at important venues like the Paris Salon, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago, afforded Dodge a rather grand lifestyle. In 1897, he married Frances (Fanny) Bland Pryor (1863–after 1935) with whom he was to have two children, Roger Pryor Dodge (1898–1974) and Sara Pryor Dodge Kimbrough (1901–1990). The family divided their time between trips to Paris and Giverny, an apartment on New York’s Park Avenue, and an elaborate summer house at Setauket, Long Island. Dodge, who designed the Greek Revival mansion and painted all its interior decorative schemes, named the home Villa

dodge, william de leftwich (1867–1935)

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William de Leftwich Dodge was born on March 9, 1867 at Liberty (now Bedford), Virginia, to William Miner Dodge (1826–1908), an insurance agent from New York, and his wife, Mary (Mamie) Lucinda Leftwich Dodge (1838–1928). Mamie Leftwich was a scion of an old Virginia line who added de to the family name upon discovering possible aristocratic connections among various Anglo-Norman tombstones in ancient English churchyards. The Dodges moved to Chicago when young William was only two and later relocated to Brooklyn in 1879. It was shortly after this move to New York that Mamie Dodge, an aspiring artist, took her three young children abroad, leaving her erstwhile husband behind, never to be reunited with his family. By her granddaughter’s account, Mamie Dodge was an eccentric who wore a “black velvet beret cast at a very rakish angle” and “worked very hard at her mediocre painting.” Sailing on the Holland-America line, the Dodge family lived first in Munich, where Mamie studied art for two years. In 1881, they departed for Paris, where William was enrolled in the Christian Brothers School in order to learn French. When a lethal cholera epidemic threatened Paris in 1884, Mamie Dodge took her family to Berlin, where Dodge matriculated at what is today the Akademie der Künste. The drawings he submitted for admission were so accomplished that many professors thought them forged until a week’s supervised efforts were judged prodigious.

Dodge returned to America in 1889, taking studio space with George Bridgman (1865–1943) at 6 West Fourteenth Street in New York. His recent successes led to paintings being accepted in 1890 at both the National Academy of Design and the American Art Association. He also made illustrations for popular magazines, including Collier’s, Scribner’s, and the Century. In 1891, Dodge traveled to Chicago in search of work at the building site of the World’s Columbian Exposition, scheduled to open in 1893, the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World. After serving as an assistant on a mural depicting the Great Chicago Fire, he returned to New York. Upon hearing that one commission for the fair remained—a dome mural in the Exposition’s huge administration building—he audaciously entered the offices of architect Richard Morris Hunt (1828–1895) to apply for the job. Dodge recalled that “the old man started to cuss me out and laughed at the gall of a kid of my age thinking I could paint his dome.” His project funds nearly depleted, Hunt relented and gave Dodge the commission for three thousand dollars, “hardly enough to pay for the paint.” This work launched Dodge’s career as one of the premier muralists of his day. In the following years, he received commissions to paint murals for the Library of Congress (Ambition, 1896), the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, Canada (The History of Canada, 1903), the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, the New York Capitol (The State of New York, 1928), and the Buffalo City Hall (1931), among others. The mural he created in 1903 for the King Edward Hotel in Toronto became the subject of a landmark lawsuit when Dodge sought to prevent the hotel’s architect, E. J. Lennox (1854–1933), from altering his original installation. Dodge won the case, one of the first in international intellectual property rights law.

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Francesca. The artist reveled in the social swirl of New York City during the Jazz Age, creating original costumes for exclusive galas. He also taught, serving on the faculties of both the Art Students League and the Cooper Union. Between 1900 and 1910, Dodge made multiple visits to the coastal Georgia area just south of Savannah. The saltwater marshes and deciduous woods that surrounded his host’s home—the lavish Lorillard-Livingston mansion in Harris Neck—provided endless subject matter for plein air landscapes. Following his daughter’s marriage to Hunter Southworth Kimbrough (1900–1994), he visited her in Greenville, Mississippi, in 1933, completing several oil sketches of the local African American community. Dodge’s mural work was physically taxing, requiring him to climb towering scaffolding and adhere to strict timelines. In the years after World War I, he began to slow down, often “taken desperately ill from overwork.” In the 1920s and 1930s, he made several restorative trips to Italy, Mexico, and the American Southwest. His Mexican efforts resulted in an exhibition of scenes of Mayan ruins at the Brooklyn Museum in 1931; two years later, a selection of these watercolors was displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1934, Dodge’s final entry to the Paris Salon, Madonna of the Oleanders, was exhibited. After that, he was largely incapacitated by a heart condition and died on March 25, 1935 at his home in New York. At his death, Dodge’s longtime friend—the sculptor Frederick MacMonnies (1863–1937), whom he had first met when both were fledgling artists in Paris and who had been a constant presence in Dodge’s life—wrote that Dodge was the “salt of the earth as a man, a friend and an artist—a real genius in his way but withal so human and entertaining. With a loyalty rare indeed. We will miss so terribly his bubbling enthusiasm, his humor and his fine zest for living—and the example of a courage I have never seen equalled. How I wish he might have lived longer . . . but his great undaunted spirit will go on I’m sure.” ECP

Artist image: William de Leftwich Dodge (1867–1935), Self Portrait, oil on metal (tin), 28 1/8 x 20 3/4 inches. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Gift of Mr. Leftwich Dodge Kimbrough. Photo: David Stover © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

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donoho, gaines ruger (1857–1916) A Southerner by birth, Gaines Ruger Donoho spent most of his life far from his native region. He was born December 21, 1857 in Church Hill, Mississippi, a plantation community on the bluffs of the Mississippi River, eighteen miles north of Natchez. His father, Robert Donoho (1822–1860), was a Virginian, and his mother, Julia Sophia Ruger (1828– 1889), was from New England. Following the death of her husband in 1860, Julia Donoho was determined to leave Mississippi; family lore recalls a dramatic rescue of young Gaines Ruger Donoho and his mother by United States cavalrymen in 1864. Under orders from Julia’s cousin, a Union general, the pair was transported to relative safety in Vicksburg. Shortly afterward, they settled in Washington, D.C., where Donoho enrolled at the Emerson Institute, a private preparatory school. He attended State Normal School in Millersville, Pennsylvania, from 1874 to 1876, and for a short while was employed by the Office of the Government Architect. He also may have studied painting with Robert Swain Gifford (1840–1905). In 1878, Donoho’s mother wrote to Jervis McEntee (1828– 1891), a second-generation Hudson River School painter. She indicated that her son was sketching in the Catskills and asked McEntee to take him on as a student in order to prepare him for his enrollment at the National Academy of Design. Ruger Donoho—as he came to be known—moved that fall to New York, but selected the newly founded Art Students League over the more traditional National Academy. In all likelihood, Donoho studied painting under William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) and composition with Walter Shirlaw (1838–1909), both of whom became lifelong friends. Donoho remained in New York only one year before leaving to study in Paris at the Académie Julian, long favored by American students. His instructors followed a conventional curriculum that emphasized figure drawing and included Gustave Boulanger (1824–1888), William Bouguereau (1825–1905), and Tony Robert-Fleury (1837–1911). Donoho developed close friendships with fellow students Kenyon Cox (1856–1919), Willard Metcalf (1858–1925), John Twachtman (1853–1902), Frank

Benson (1862–1951), and Edmund Tarbell (1862–1938), all of whom practiced a form of American Impressionism. Donoho remained affiliated with the Académie Julian for seven years, but each summer, he ventured away from Paris and went to both Étaples on the northern coast and the Barbizon area. One of his favorite destinations was Grez-sur-Loing, about ten miles south of the forest of Fontainebleau. Like many artists, he delighted in the rustic agricultural setting and the inexpensive accommodations. Donoho seems to have thrived during his years in France; his paintings were regularly accepted for the Paris Salon from 1881 through 1886. After paintings were shown in Paris, he often shipped them to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy, and, in 1885, to the International Cotton Exposition in New Orleans where he was awarded a prize. He also joined the Society of American Artists, an upstart group that was dissatisfied with the policies of the National Academy. Though he returned to New York in 1887, Donoho continued to exhibit in France; his painting La Marcellerie won a silver medal at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. Maintaining his studio space in Manhattan, he moved in late 1890 to East Hampton on Long Island, about one hundred miles from the city. At the time, the railroad did not extend that far, making it necessary to travel by coach for the last few miles. East Hampton—dubbed “The American Barbizon” in the press—was attractive to painters as it still retained its quaint colonial flavor with shingled saltboxes, windmills, a sandy beach, and acres of farmland. Donoho purchased sizeable acreage on Egypt Lane, a short distance from Main Street, and near Greycroft, an estate with extensive gardens built in 1901 by Emma (1848–1908) and Lorenzo Guernsey Woodhouse (1839– 1903). These gardens, which Donoho painted repeatedly, resembled Claude Monet’s sanctuary in Giverny, France, complete with Japanese bridges, reflecting pools, and lushly planted pathways. Rendered in rich colors with broken brushstrokes, Donoho’s paintings of the Woodhouse property garnered the praise of influential critic Royal Cortissoz, who wrote: “He painted that garden over and over again in the same spirit in which he pottered over its flowers and hedges, loving it all and understanding it.”

In 1901 and 1902, a European sojourn took Donoho to Venice, Italy, and, in France, to Pont-Aven and BourronMarlotte, near where he had painted twenty years before. Three of his paintings were included in the 1913 Armory Show exhibition where modernist work from Europe was seen by large numbers of Americans for the first time. Donoho’s pictures, however, represented a more conservative tradition. He received a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, and died the subsequent year, on January 28, in New York City. In November 1916, the Macbeth Gallery in New York hosted a memorial show accompanied by a small brochure written by Hassam. In 1919, Matilda Donoho sold Willow Bend, a cottage on her East Hampton property, to Hassam. Always interested in nature conservation, she gave a large tract of land in honor of her husband to the village for a wildflower sanctuary in 1934. MRS

Artist image: Gaines Ruger Donoho (1857–1916), Self-Portrait, 1886, oil on canvas, 32 x 27 inches (detail). Collection of Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson. Gift of the Gallery Guild (1979.001).

drysdale, alexander john (1870–1934) The only son of Alexander Irvine Drysdale (1837–1886) and his wife Mary Davidson Drysdale (1839–1896), Alexander John Drysdale was born in Marietta, Georgia. His father was an ordained Episcopal priest whose ministry required frequent moves to parishes across the Southeast, including rectorates in Atlanta and Athens, Georgia, as well as in Mobile, Alabama, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1883, he accepted the call to become dean of Christ Church Cathedral, New Orleans, and was later elected a bishop.

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Ensconced on the eastern end of Long Island, Donoho flourished. He built a large house, married Matilda Ackley (1862–1939) in 1894, and continued to paint. His subjects included area farmland and cultivated gardens. Two of his paintings garnered honorable mention at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Five years later, he introduced a fellow student at the Académie Julian, Childe

Hassam (1859–1935), to East Hampton and under his influence, Donoho’s palette lightened and his brushwork became decidedly impressionistic.

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Alexander, thirteen years old when the family settled in New Orleans, began his art studies under the instruction of Ida C. Haskell (1861–1932), a California-born artist who later taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Haskell was on the faculty of the recently established Southern Art Union, a local academy founded by several leading artists, including Andres Molinary (1847–1915), William Henry Buck (1840–1888), Marshall J. Smith (1854–1923), and Paul Poincy (1833–1909). A native of New Orleans, Poincy proved the most influential to Drysdale’s development, providing personal instruction and encouragement over a number of years. As early as 1889, Drysdale exhibited at the Artists’ Association of New Orleans, earning a reputation as a painter of “landscape scenes of the highest order.” All the while—and especially after the death of his father—Drysdale worked as a bookkeeper to support his widowed mother and sisters. Buoyed by his success in local exhibitions, Drysdale, now thirty-one, left Louisiana in 1901 to pursue advanced art studies in New York City. Enrolling at the Art Students League, Drysdale took classes from esteemed artists—including Charles Courtney Curran (1861–1942) and Frank Vincent DuMond (1865– 1951)—and was exposed to the Impressionist aesthetic of William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). During his three years in New York, Drysdale continued to submit work to exhibitions in New Orleans. He also befriended fellow pupil Helen Turner (1858–1958), whose career would far eclipse his own. Drysdale later championed female artists, once very publicly in response to a newspaper interview given by the painter Wayman Adams (1883–1959), who had roundly dismissed the artistic achievements of women. Drysdale’s rebuke, printed in the June 24, 1929 issue of the New Orleans States, called Adams’ professionalism into question and offered the opinion that “within the next century, there will be more women artists than Wayman Adams can throw a stick at, that will outrival him and outdo him.”

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Drysdale returned to New Orleans in 1903 and opened a studio, initially advertising himself as a portrait painter, though landscapes remained his subject of choice. He referred to his studio as an “open house,” and the guest book he maintained there recounts a steady stream of visitors, including artists, patrons, business leaders, and friends. In 1909, he was awarded a gold medal by the Artists’ Association, securing his place in the local art scene. A frugal man, Drysdale proved to be a shrewd self-promoter who worked without an agent or gallery representation. On July 6, 1913, an article in the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported that “he went to work to find out the names of people who were in the market” for art. “If he discovered

that a wealthy woman was building a new home, he telephoned, asking permission to call and exhibit a few of his canvases which he thought would look well on her walls. . . . If a cotton broker had made a successful coup on the exchange, Drysdale was on hand to explain why he ought to invest his winnings in a picture or two.” Late in his life, Drysdale received two important mural commissions, one from the D. H. Holmes Department Store in 1927 and one for the administration building of the Shushan Airport in 1933. His visible presence at work at the Holmes Store on Canal Street may account for the legend of his having worked in department store windows. In 1916, the artist married Adele McIntyre (1890–1954), who later gave birth to their only child, Walden Alexander Drysdale (1917–1988). Alexander Drysdale died in New Orleans on February 9, 1934. Some accounts estimate that he created ten thousand works of art over the course of his career, paintings once described as “misty blue and green landscapes seen through tears or soft rainfall.” ECP

Artist image: Robert Bledsoe Mayfield (1869–1934), Portrait of Alexander John Drysdale, between 1892–1932, graphite on paper, 11 ¾ x 9 inches. Roger H. Ogden Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana.

gaul, william gilbert (1855–1919) William Gilbert Gaul was born in Jersey City, New Jersey on March 31, 1855 to George W. Gaul and Cornelia A. Gilbert Gaul (1834–1899). He was educated in Newark, New Jersey, before graduating from Claverack Military Academy in New York’s Hudson River Valley. The education at a military academy was meant to prepare him for a career in the United States Navy, but the ill health which would plague him throughout his life prevented his enlistment. At seventeen, Gaul moved to New York and enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where he studied with John George Brown (1831–1913) and Lemuel Wilmarth (1835–

1918); his work was first exhibited at the Academy in 1877. Brown’s influence on the young artist can be seen in Gaul’s sentimental Victorian genre scenes. Gaul’s decision to become a painter and illustrator of military scenes was inspired, in part, by an 1876 trip he made to the American West, where he toured the Dakota Territory. One year after his 1880 marriage to Susie A. Murray (died 1889), Gaul’s maternal uncle, Hiram Gilbert, died, bequeathing a sizeable farm in Van Buren County, Tennessee, to his nephew. As required by the terms of the will, Gilbert Gaul and his wife took up residence on the property for the next four years, 1881–1885, and the farm remained an occasional home for the rest of the artist’s life. Though he was far removed from the art market during this time, Gaul’s work was regularly included in National Academy exhibitions. In 1882, he was accorded the status of full academician, making him, at age twenty-seven, the youngest artist to attain that high honor. That same year, he received a gold medal for his battle scene, Holding the Line at All Hazards, from the American Art Association. Soon after his return to New York, Gaul was selected as one of the artists to provide illustrations for Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, published by the Century Publishing Company in 1887. He was then part of a group of artists who traveled west in 1890 on a commission from the federal government. On this trip, he made the preparatory sketches for the illustrations he contributed to Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed, an exhaustive census report published in 1894; he also painted the famed Sioux chief, Sitting Bull, from life. Subsequent sketching expeditions took Gaul to Central America and the West Indies, where he developed travel illustrations which appeared in the Century. Illustration commissions would be an important source of income for the artist, and he regularly contributed to popular periodicals such as Cosmopolitan, Harper’s and Scribner’s. Following the tragic death of his wife in 1889—the result of a fall from a high window in their New York boardinghouse—Gaul remarried in 1898, wedding Marian Halstead Witten (1863–1921), an English divorcee with three young children.

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Artist image: Photograph of William Gilbert Gaul (detail). Courtesy of the Tennessee State Museum, Nashville.

gay, edward b. (1837–1928) Although his grandson and biographer Richard G. Coker cites April 25, according to his tombstone Edward B. Gay was born on April 23, 1837. His birthplace was near Mullingar, Ireland, the principal town of County Westmeath, an area located fifty miles from Dublin. His father, Richard Gay (1813–?), was a middle-class farmer,

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The turn of the century brought a change in the climate of taste, and Gaul’s once-popular military narratives were faced with a diminished audience. Gaul returned to Tennessee around 1904, where he attempted to make a living as a teacher. He gave private art lessons and was a member of the faculty of the Watkins Institute in Nashville, where he kept a home and studio above a dry goods store at 610½ Church Street. For a brief time, Gaul, who was in poor health, and his wife relocated to Charleston, South Carolina, living with Mrs. Gaul’s adult daughter.

In 1907, a group of Nashville investors formed the Southern Art Publishing Company with the intent to manufacture and sell a portfolio of chromolithographic prints paying homage to Confederate soldiers. Gaul was commissioned to produce the series’ twelve original paintings, which ultimately included previously executed and new works created between 1882 and 1911: Leaving Home, Holding the Line at All Hazards, Waiting for Dawn, The Picket, Between the Lines, Tidings from the Front, Glorious Fighting, Nearing the End, Return Home, Taps, The Forager, and To the End. Sadly, sales of With the Confederate Colors did not go well, an indication of waning interest in the Civil War. When Gaul left Nashville, the paintings were displayed in the lobby of the Hermitage Hotel in hopes of attracting a buyer. The paintings were eventually sold to hotel magnate Robert Randolph Meyer (1882–1947); Meyer’s son John later gave the works to the Birmingham Museum of Art, where they remain. His prospects dimmed and in declining health, Gaul was once again living in New Jersey by 1913. He died from tuberculosis in Ridgefield on December 21, 1919. In a companion catalogue to a 1975 exhibition of the artist’s work, James Reeve wrote that the artist’s great achievement “was to create a highly personal style to express his interest in America and the people and events that shaped the country.”

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as well as a capable builder and stonecutter. He and his wife, Ellen Kilduff (1811–1887), were natives of Mullingar and of the Roman Catholic faith. Like many of their countrymen, the family immigrated to America in 1848, a decision motivated more by Richard Gay’s nationalist sentiments than the devastating potato famine. Settling in Albany, New York, Richard eventually met with some financial success. Nevertheless, it was still necessary for young Edward, the eldest son, to work a variety of jobs: in a bowling alley, as a page at the state capitol, and as a waiter in a wine bar. Edward Gay displayed an early interest in art, and with the support of his employer, Narcisse Rémond (circa 1812– 1855), he began lessons with James McDougal Hart (1828– 1901). Both James and his older brother William (1823– 1894) were Scottish-born immigrants and are considered members of the second generation of Hudson River School painters. Their preferred subject matter consisted of forests and meadows, often accented with cattle. As a youth, Gay spent at least one summer sketching at Lake George, and later recorded scenery in the Catskills, a favorite destination of earlier American landscapists. While still a student of the Harts, Gay taught at the Albany Female Academy. There, he met his future wife, Martha Fearey (1842–1928), who had emigrated from England in 1844. The 1862 Albany directory lists Gay as “landscape painter” with his own studio.

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on to Canajoharie, where he found a number of patrons, including Bartlett Arkell (1862–1946) and William J. Arkell (1860–1930). Two years later, Gay organized an excursion for twenty-two members of the New York Artists’ Fund Society that took them to Niagara Falls by way of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal. Joining the group were the painters Alfred Bricher (1837–1908), Jasper Cropsey (1823–1900), and J. C. Nicoll (1847–1918), all of whom were associated with a late phase of the Hudson River School. In 1881, Gay took a trip abroad that would significantly change his aesthetic direction. Upon his arrival in London, Gay spent hours at the National Gallery, absorbed in the landscape paintings by the English master John Constable (1776–1837). Constable’s naturalist approach, low horizons, sweeping skyscapes, and painterly handling of oils greatly influenced Gay’s future work. In an informal memoir, Martha Gay recalled how “they had been all day in the National Gallery standing most of the time before the Constable canvasses, which seemed to the artist the finest observation of nature. He [Gay] was to do it afterward, to paint just such sweeping clouds touched with light. To devote his brush to the simple beauty of green fields or growing grain until those who looked at the canvas would seem to themselves to be walking the little wandering path through remembered fields. This gamut of color, cool, clear green and blue and delicate prismatic gray, wiped from his mind all the harsh insults of his German study.”

At the recommendation of James Hart, Gay proceeded to Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1862 to study with Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (1807–1863) and Karl Friedrich Lessing (1808–1880). Both men were products of the academy in Düsseldorf, known for its emphasis on realism and historical narratives; in Karlsruhe, they promoted landscapes. Gay remained in Germany for two years and then returned via Ireland to Albany, where he married and resided for about four years. He painted landscapes in the area, and, in 1868, two of his canvases were included in the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York. The following year, his large Suburbs, Albany, N.Y., was favorably received, which led to his election in 1869 to the rank of associate of the Academy. However, it was not until 1907 that Gay was accepted as full academician, a lengthy interval that perturbed Gay.

Gay accompanied his wife to her birthplace in Bedfordshire and also to Brighton. In Paris, they saw the latest exhibition at the Salon in the company of George Boughton (1833– 1905), a landscape painter who had grown up in Albany but later moved to London. The artists were impressed by the work of Barbizon painter Camille Corot (1796–1875). The Gays extended their trip further and went to Norway, where the artist was enthralled by the fjords and the light. Two years later, he returned to Europe, visiting London and Paris once again, and toured Ireland, taking in Dublin and popular tourist destinations such as Blarney Castle and Killarney. His most distant journey was to Egypt in 1890, the result of a commission to illustrate a magazine article. En route, he made stops in Paris, Nice, Rome, and Naples. His final voyage, at the age of 82, was to Athens.

Gay left Albany for New York City in 1868, but lived there only two years before putting down roots in Mount Vernon, sixteen miles north of Manhattan in Westchester County. This move was prompted by lower property costs and the healthier environment for his ten children. He purchased an old farmhouse and used an upstairs room for his studio. In 1878, he and two sons hiked 150 miles to Albany and

During this period, Edward Gay met with critical and commercial success; his canvases typically sold for $250, and his work appeared on a regular basis at exhibitions hosted by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Academy of Design. To underwrite his first trip to London, he had an exhibition at New York’s Townsend and Evans, followed

by an auction of eighty-two paintings and eighteen watercolors at nearby Barker and Company. In 1885, he won a medal in an exhibition in San Francisco. His landscape entitled Broad Acres was awarded two thousand dollars at the 1887 Prize Exhibition of the American Art Association and, in turn, was donated by several gentlemen to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the 1901 PanAmerican Exposition in Buffalo, he won a bronze medal and, four years later, received the George Inness Gold Medal at the National Academy of Design. In the 1890s, he was affiliated with the William Macbeth Gallery in New York City, a leading promoter of American art. Gay was represented at the 1925 Centennial Exhibition of the National Academy at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York. Around the turn of the century, Gay began to spend his winter months in Florida, frequently stopping off in Hartsville, South Carolina to visit his daughter Vivien (1869–1952) who had married James Coker (1863–1931) in 1889. Gay was unimpressed with the local landscape, but did appreciate the warmer climate. At a nearby swamp fed by the Black Creek, he inscribed a pencil sketch with the following: The River Styx, S.C., Dec. 30, 1898. Warm as an early June day. E. Gay. In 1905, Gay joined the art colony at Cragsmoor, New York, which was frequented by Edward Lamson Henry (1841– 1919), George Inness, Jr. (1854–1926), and Helen Turner (1858–1958). Edward Gay died at his Mount Vernon home on March 21, 1928. His gravestone is inscribed with the final line of John Milton’s elegiac poem Lycidas: “To fresh woods and pastures new.” MRS

Artist image: Edward Gay, 1907, unidentified photographer (detail). Macbeth Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

harrison, lovell birge (1854–1929) Lovell Birge Harrison had an impressive lineage. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Apollos Wolcott Harrison (1821–1885) and Margaret Louise Belden Harrison (1830–1898), one paternal forebear, Thomas Harrison (1606–1660), served as a major-general with Oliver Cromwell’s forces during the English Civil War and was a signatory to King Charles I’s death warrant. Oliver Wolcott (1726–1797), a colonial governor of Connecticut and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was another ancestor. Harrison’s mother was the beneficiary of the substantial fortune of Thomas Belden (died 1841), a prosperous Hartford, Connecticut, businessman and land speculator. Though originally based in New Haven, his parents had moved to Philadelphia prior to his birth. Once there, Apollos Harrison led the life of a cultivated man of letters. He was a writer and well known amateur horticulturist, active in the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society which he served as treasurer. When the future artist was ten years old, his mother was declared insane and confined to a nearby mental hospital where she spent the rest of her life.

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Like his brothers Thomas Alexander (1853–1930) and Samuel Butler (1857–1897?), Birge Harrison expressed an interest in the visual arts from an early age. In 1874, he began to take classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), only ten years his senior. Most accounts report that he met John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) in 1876, the year of Sargent’s first trip to America during which he visited the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Their encounter is said to have inspired Harrison to travel to Paris to study art. Although the circumstances and exact dates of their meeting remain murky, Harrison did indeed depart for France later that year where, like Sargent, he became a student in the famous atelier of Carolus-Duran (1837–1917). He then spent four years, from 1878 to 1882, at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he worked with Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889). Neither Carolus-Duran, a portraitist in the tradition of Diego Velásquez (1599–1660), nor Cabenel,

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an academic fantasist who painted lush female nudes, seem to have had any impact on Harrison’s subsequent style. Instead, he was inspired by his experience working en plein air in Brittany and Normandy in the early 1880s. While there, he painted with Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884), a late Barbizon artist whose images of peasants toiling at sundown foreshadow Harrison’s subsequent interest in the atmospherics of light. Harrison’s painting in that style, November, was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1882 and became one of the first paintings by an American artist acquired for the French national collection. In 1883, Harrison married Australian artist Eleanor Henderson Ritchie (1854–1895) in London. Harrison had earlier contracted a severe case of malaria, the lingering effects of which sent him in search of more hospitable climates. From 1883 to 1893, Birge and Eleanor Harrison traveled extensively: living among Native Americans in the Rocky Mountains and New Mexico; painting in Sri Lanka, South Africa, and India during the high noon of the British Empire; and spending two years in Melbourne, Australia, prior to a return to Europe. Over the course of these excursions, Harrison submitted illustrated travel accounts for American magazines such as Harper’s, Scribner’s, and the Atlantic Monthly. They settled in Santa Barbara, California, in 1893; from there, Harrison sent entries to national and international exhibitions, including the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Tragedy struck in 1895 when the couple’s first child died at birth, and Eleanor Harrison succumbed just days later. Birge Harrison moved back to the East Coast in 1896, residing in Plymouth, Massachusetts. On November 28, 1896, he married his uncle’s stepdaughter, Jennie Seaton (1865–1932).

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Throughout these years, Harrison had often worked as a teacher, and in 1904 he was invited to join the Byrdcliffe colony in upstate New York, part of the Woodstock art community, as head art instructor. He would subsequently help establish the Art Students League outpost in Woodstock. While suffering from the effects of lead poisoning, Harrison briefly retired from painting. Seeking a warm convalescent climate during the winter months, he first visited Charleston, South Carolina, in 1908, after which he became a regular visitor at the legendary Villa Margherita boardinghouse, home base to several itinerant artists and writers involved in the Charleston Renaissance. In 1909, Harrison issued Landscape Painting, a collection of essays (based on lectures delivered at Woodstock) detailing his aesthetic philosophy and technical strategies; the book was more broadly published the following year to great acclaim. Also in 1910, he was made a full academician of

the National Academy of Design. He went on to publish several more important theoretical articles, making him “the leading writer in America on contemporary landscape painting.” Though he continued to paint for the rest of his life, Harrison slowly withdrew from the academic world in the years after the First World War and died at his Woodstock home on May 11, 1929. In considering Harrison’s career in 1911, artist and writer Arthur Hoeber (1854–1915) noted that he “has labored seriously, according to his endowments, and has brought to all his work a fine intellectuality, for the man has a well-trained mind and his associations have been with the leading thinkers of the age, native and foreign. . . . His greatest delight . . . is yet before his easel. The glory of creation is still his dearest joy.” ECP

Artist image: Photograph of Birge Harrison, artist, unknown photographer (PD-1914).

herring, james vernon (1887–1969) James Vernon Herring was on born March 5, 1887 in rural Clio, South Carolina, near the North Carolina border. His mother was Alice Carol Herring, an African American whose family members were farm laborers. In a 1950 interview for the Howard University student newspaper, Herring identified his father as William Culbreth, a white Jewish merchant, who appears to have played virtually no role in the future artist’s life. At a young age, James Herring was sent away to school, first in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then in 1908 to Washington, D.C., to attend Howard Academy, a college preparatory school that readied students for enrollment at Howard University. An English instructor there took him to the Corcoran Gallery of Art where he encountered his first original work of art. In 1914, he journeyed to Canada and London on scholarship before matriculating at Syracuse University in

upstate New York, also as a scholarship student. Before graduating in 1917 with a bachelor of pedagogy in art degree, Herring conducted art classes over two summers at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the oldest private black college in the country. He also taught for one year, 1917– 1918, at Haven Institute in Meridian, Mississippi, before serving as an education secretary for the YWCA in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and at Camp Lee, near Richmond, Virginia. His job required that he travel extensively throughout the South and into the lower Midwest. By the fall of 1918, he was back in the classroom, teaching first at Straight College in New Orleans and then at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1921, Herring was hired to teach in the architecture department of Howard University and, by year’s end, had persuaded the administration to establish an art department where courses in design, life drawing, composition, and watercolor were offered. Over the following decade, the program grew with the addition of faculty members such as James A. Porter (1905–1970), who held classes in painting and freehand drawing, and Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998), who taught design. Noted abstractionist Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891–1978) was the first major to graduate in 1924. In an annual report for 1926, Herring wrote that the department of art’s mission was “to offer the broadest foundation in art, through practical and intellectual training in aesthetics, resulting in a breadth of view, rendering the student capable for professional careers as painters, illustrators, and teachers of art.” By 1940, a major in art history was added, followed five years later by a master of art degree program.

Herring was active in professional circles, having become in 1924 a member (and later board member) of the College Art Association and the American Federation of Arts. Between 1928 and 1935, he served as adviser and occasional juror for the Harmon Foundation’s annual Exhibit of Fine Arts by American Negro Artists. He also maintained contacts with several New York dealers, including Antoinette Kraushaar (1902–1992) and Edith Halpert (1900–1970). In the field of art education, Herring was generous with his time and advised small colleges throughout the South. With a 1948 grant from the Carnegie Foundation, he developed the College Art Service which sent traveling exhibitions to other black universities. He came out of retirement in 1962–1963 to teach in the one-person art department at Talladega College in Alabama, replacing Driskell who had taken a position at Howard. Given the breadth of his varied commitments, Herring’s own artistic output was understandably limited; his few known paintings and watercolors are impressionistic landscapes. Herring died in May 1969 at the age of eighty-two. MRS

Artist image: Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Washington, D.C.

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The Howard University Gallery of Art was approved by the Board of Trustees in 1928 and opened two years later with a donation of one thousand dollars from Queene Ferry Coonley (1874–1958), the philanthropist wife of the late industrialist Avery Coonley (1870–1920). The purpose of the new facility was to exhibit a broad selection of contemporary art and crafts from a variety of different cultures. Herring made a point not to limit the shows to African American artists or African art, and included selections of European, Latin American, and Asian art, which he had studied several summers at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. The gallery not only showed changing exhibitions, but also began to incorporate a permanent collection that was enhanced in 1955 by a collection of African and European art bequeathed by faculty member and art theorist Alain Locke (1885–1954). In 1961, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation donated twelve Renaissance and Baroque paintings to the gallery.

Complementing the educational function of the Howard University Gallery was the Barnett Aden Gallery, the earliest longstanding private gallery of African American art in the country. The establishment was co-founded in 1943 by Herring, an avid collector, and his life partner, former student and employee, and fellow South Carolinian Alonzo J. Aden (1906–1961). Named in honor of Aden’s mother, Naomi Barnett Aden, and headquartered in the row house the two men shared at 127 Randolph Place, the Barnett Aden Gallery brought together artists of all races, as well as an integrated audience. The premise of the gallery’s five to eight annual exhibitions—which Aden, as curator, organized—was art for the home. Accordingly, works of a manageable scale were displayed to advantage in Herring and Aden’s living spaces. As a not-for-profit enterprise, artists received the entirety of their sales revenue, although they were expected to donate a piece to the Barnett Aden Collection, which included examples by Henry O. Tanner (1859–1937), Edward Bannister (circa 1828–1901), and Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968). The roster of exhibiting artists was equally impressive: Romare Bearden (1911–1988), Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), Hale Woodruff (1900–1980), Jack Perlmutter (1920–2006), Morris Louis (1912–1962), and David Driskell (born 1931). While selections of sculpture and prints were exhibited, Herring and Aden eschewed folk and so-called outsider art.

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hoffman, harry leslie morris (1871–1964) Harry Leslie Morris Hoffman was born in Cressona, Pennsylvania, on March 16, 1871 to George Elijah Hoffman (1835–1905), a successful merchant, and his wife, Anna Rebecca Morris (1838–1923), an amateur artist. Cressona is located at the headwaters of the Schuylkill River in the industrial eastern part of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. For many years, the artist consistently gave his birth date as 1874 in order to appear younger. He attended the Ashland, Pennsylvania, high school before enrolling in the freshman class at Gettysburg College in 1891. Two years later, he transferred to Yale University— once again at freshman status—and began his art studies under John Ferguson Weir (1841–1926), the distinguished painter of historical recreations. Weir placed considerable emphasis on traditional academic drafting skills. While at Yale, Hoffman also honed skills in other areas, including “physical training,” music, and dance. He was proclaimed “top gymnast” during his final year at the university.

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By 1899, Hoffman was living in Montclair, New Jersey, where he taught physical education classes at the local high school and enrolled in classes at the Art Students League in New York. Within the year, he was deeply immersed in studies at the League, working with Henry Siddons Mowbray (1858–1928), George De Forest Brush (1855–1941), and Howard Chandler Christy (1872– 1952), instructors whose interest in murals and history painting give little indication of Hoffman’s budding interest in more avant-garde forms of art. During these same years, he also spent his summer busking with “The Argonauts,” a group of artist-friends who performed minstrel routines. Most significantly for his development as an Impressionist, Hoffman came under the influence of Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951), following him from the League classrooms to its summer outpost in Old Lyme, Connecticut, beginning in 1902. His return to Old Lyme the following year marked the beginning of an enduring association with the town and the burgeoning art colony headquartered in the home of Miss Florence Griswold.

Hoffman spent 1904 and 1905 abroad. He visited London and undertook a sketching expedition through Italy before taking up residence in Paris, where he enrolled in the Académie Julian. He also continued to perform in musical theater, taking a turn as “Chiaroscuro Snafflebait” at the American Art Association in Paris. By 1906, he was back in Old Lyme, painting and exhibiting his work in the annual showings of the Lyme artists at the local library. It was at this point that he met Beatrice Amanda Pope (1885– 1957), to whom he became engaged and then married in 1910. The bride’s parents gave the young couple land upon which to build a house—later christened Chuluota, or beautiful view—on Sill Lane in Old Lyme. Perched on Harding Hill, the home was a place of respite between the frequent journeys the Hoffmans made in search of creative inspiration. The year 1910 was significant to Hoffman’s professional advancement as well. Boston’s Copley Gallery, the most prestigious venue of its type in the region, began to represent the artist. After 1911, Hoffman’s work was shown at the most important annual exhibitions held in this country, including frequent showings at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the National Academy of Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. An impressionistic landscape titled A Mood of Spring was awarded a gold medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. In recognition of his many artistic achievements, Hoffman was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1930. The Hoffmans made their first visit to the South in 1914, visiting Savannah, Georgia, and St. Augustine, Florida. Not long afterwards, Hoffman embarked on a unique aesthetic adventure. Using a glass-bottomed boat or bucket, Hoffman studied underwater life—particularly coral reefs and tropical fish—and then painted aquatic scenes. These works proved to be very popular in Art Deco New York, and he painted scenes in Nassau, Grand Bahamas, the Galapagos Islands, and British Guinea. In 1923, the esteemed naturalist William Beebe (1877–1962) invited Hoffman to accompany him on several scientific expeditions in the Caribbean. Harry and Bea Hoffman had only one son, John Leslie Hoffman, born in 1920. Bea was a talented textile artist who frequently created tapestries based on her husband’s drawings and paintings. The couple returned to Savannah in 1939 for an exhibition of Harry’s paintings at the Telfair Academy. Though he remained an active artist, Hoffman’s output declined in the years following World War II, time spent divided between Lyme and the rustic farmhouse the

Hoffmans had renovated in Chester, Vermont. Beatrice Hoffman, who had founded the Old Lyme Guild of Artists and Craftsmen, died from a heart ailment in 1957, after which Harry Hoffman ceased to paint. His legacy is still deeply cherished in Old Lyme where the museum and local art association he nurtured continue. His most vital contribution to the Old Lyme School may have been the assistance he lent to Florence Griswold during the 1930s, working with other artists to guarantee her an annual income. After her death in 1937, he served as treasurer of the drive to convert the legendary boardinghouse into a museum, which many regard as the very heart of American Impressionism. Harry Hoffman died in Old Lyme on March 6, 1964. ECP

Artist image: Howard Logan Hildebrand (1872–1958), Portrait of Harry Leslie Hoffman, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches. Collection National Academy Museum, New York.

hutty, alfred heber (1877–1954)

In 1912, Hutty and Bessie purchased an eighty-five acre farm near Woodstock, restoring the existing residence, creating an artist’s studio, and maintaining horses, which Hutty rode enthusiastically. Situated on Ohayo Mountain, Hutty exalted in the land—which became the family’s permanent primary residence—writing that it brought “out the best in a palette as the best in one’s interpretive mood.” A year later, one of Hutty’s paintings was included in the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design; he also exhibited with the New York City coterie of artists known as the Blue Dome Group and established a relationship with the prestigious Macbeth Gallery. After a brief stint as a camouflage artist for the United States Shipping Board during the closing years of the First World War, Hutty sought to enhance his earnings by teaching. Inspired once again by the example of his mentor Harrison, in late 1918 he applied for a position with the Carolina Art Association, the parent organization of the Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston. A frequently quoted local tradition has him arriving there in 1919 on a return trip from Florida and immediately wiring his wife, “Come quickly, have found heaven.” In fact, he began his teaching responsibilities in February 1920. From his first days in

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The fourth of six children, Alfred Hutty was born on September 15, 1877 in Grand Haven, Michigan, to Joseph William Hutty (1841–1893) and his wife, Susan Browning Squier Hutty (1847–1947). The name Hutty is most likely of Scandinavian origin and is a reference to a farm laborer, or one who worked from a hut. Hutty’s father was a native of Canada who immigrated to Michigan and became a druggist in the small lumber town on Lake Michigan. When J. W. Hutty purchased the Western Mineral Soda Water Works in 1883, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. The venture was short-lived, and the Hutty family soon moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, where the senior Hutty died in 1893. At this point, Alfred Hutty returned to Kansas City, where he worked odd jobs to help support his widowed mother and attended classes at the Kansas City School of Fine Arts.

From the beginning of his career in the arts, Hutty pursued practical as well as idealistic goals in his training and craft. He first worked as a glazier and, later, as a designer with the Campbell Glass and Paint Company in Kansas City, which manufactured stained glass windows. In 1902, girded by his regular income as well as money earned through part-time work as an illustrator for the Kansas City Star, he married Bessie Burris Crafton (1880–1963). The couple had one son, Warren Crafton Hutty (1904–1979); shortly after Warren’s birth, the young family moved to St. Louis, where Hutty was able to continue working for the Campbell organization and matriculate at the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts. It was there, in the winter of 1907, that Hutty first encountered the work of Birge Harrison (1854–1929), an American Tonalist painter. Harrison was a subtle painter whose sensitive use of light and shadow endowed his paintings with a quiet reverie. Hutty was so taken with Harrison’s work that he followed him to the burgeoning art colony in Woodstock, New York, in 1908, in order to take the summer classes he offered under the auspices of the Art Students League. Hutty also enrolled in League classes in New York in 1911, where he studied under George Bridgman (1865–1943), a master draftsman whose drawing class was the most influential of its day, and with Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951) in 1912. From 1908 through 1916, Hutty worked by commission for Tiffany Studios’ stained glass window department.

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Charleston, Hutty became a member of the inner circle of artists and preservationists striving to preserve the historic fabric and boost the local economy. That first winter, he rented a room in the eighteenth century Miles Brewton House from Susan Pringle Frost (1873–1960), one of the prime movers behind the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings. In 1923, Hutty became a founding member of the Charleston Etchers’ Club, a group of nine artists who shared a printing press, materials, and expertise. Hutty’s etchings proved to be highly popular with tourists and provided a steady source of income, insuring the family’s ongoing presence in the city. While he resigned his position as director of the Carolina Art Association School in 1924, Hutty continued his seasonal residency in Charleston, living in the home he and Bessie had bought in 1928. Their restoration of the house—located at 46 Tradd Street in the very heart of the city—defied most of the principles of accurate historic preservation, as they added architectural features and adapted an outbuilding for a studio. Once complete, they spent at least half the year there for the rest of their lives, arriving in November and departing for Woodstock in late May. Hutty’s Charleston prints became well known in this country and abroad, and, in 1926, he was elected to membership in the British Society of Graphic Art, which prompted a tour of the British Isles, his only trip outside the United States. His forte was drypoint, a form of etching that produced rich tonalities. Though he continued to paint, and even took up portraiture during his later years in Charleston, Hutty’s exhibition and sales records indicate that his primary focus was on printmaking. From his first exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1922 until his last at Kennedy and Company in New York in 1952, Hutty was a prominent participant in as many as eight to ten exhibitions held across the country each year. He remained a vigorous and productive artist well into his later years. In 1949, at the age of 72, he painted a monumental mural, Attack on Fort Sumter, for Charleston’s Fort Sumter Hotel. Alfred Hutty died on June 27, 1954 in Woodstock, where he was buried. In 1955, Bessie Hutty presented 125 of her late husband’s prints to the permanent collection of the Carolina Art Assocition; the following year, those works were included in a large memorial retrospective at the museum. ECP & MRS

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Artist image: Alfred Heber Hutty (1877–1954), Self Portrait, pencil, 7 5/8 x 9 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the South Carolina State Museum, Columbia.

ingerle, rudolph frank (1879–1950) A native of Vienna, Austria, Rudolph Ingerle was born on April 14, 1879, the son of Joseph and Fannie Ingerle. Joseph, a shoemaker, is described as coming from either Bohemia or Moravia, in an eastern section of Czechoslovakia, while Fannie was of Austrian descent. As a child, Rudolph spoke German and studied music. The family immigrated to Burlington in the southeast corner of Wisconsin in 1890, eventually settling in Chicago. The artist became a naturalized citizen in 1895. During World War I, Ingerle responded to the draft, but did not serve, perhaps because he had married Marie Vasut in 1904, and they had a young son. Census records indicate that Ingerle’s schooling did not extend beyond the eighth grade. He attended the J. Francis Smith (sometimes referred to as Schmidt’s) Art Academy of Chicago, established in 1895, which emphasized a drawing curriculum modeled on Parisian art schools. The Smith Academy offered anatomy classes and employed live models. Ingerle also took an “evening antique class” at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1894–1895 and studied independently with Walter Dean Goldbeck (1882–1925), whose specialty was illustration work. Ingerle joined the Cliff Dwellers, a group of literary, artistic, and cultural leaders spearheaded by noted author Hamlin Garland (1860–1940). An advocate for regional American artistic expression, Garland was an important voice who had endorsed Impressionism in his 1894 collection of essays entitled Crumbling Idols. Ingerle was a member of the Palette and Chisel Club, which provided space for aspiring artists to work with nude models during daylight hours. In addition, he participated in the activities and exhibitions of the Bohemian Arts Club, the Association of Chicago Painters and Sculptors, the North Shore Art League, and the Municipal Art League of Chicago. At the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago, his work was featured more than thirty times and was occasionally shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and, later in his career, at the National Academy of Design in New York.

While Ingerle’s primary residence was initially Chicago— and later Highland Park, a northern suburb—he went elsewhere in pursuit of inspiring landscape imagery. Only his paintings for the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, commissioned by the Westinghouse Corporation, relate to his place of residence. He painted in Brown County, Indiana, a south-central part of the state celebrated for its picturesque rolling hills and valleys. T. C. Steele (1847–1926) had founded an art colony there in 1907 and became a leading figure of the Hoosier Group of painters known for their Impressionist landscapes. Around 1913, Ingerle explored the Ozark Mountains of Missouri with Carl R. Krafft (1884–1938), a fellow Chicagoan and a friend from the Brown County art colony. The pair formed the Society of Ozark Painters, which soon attracted other artists from Chicago and St. Louis. In the early 1920s, Ingerle discovered the Cumberland Mountains of western Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Accompanied by Otto Hake (1876–1965), another Chicago artist of German descent, Ingerle first visited the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina in 1926. Soon thereafter, he became known as the “Painter of the Smokies” and exhibited paintings with titles that referenced specific Smoky locales: The Tuckaseegee River, Pisgah, and Oconolufty. Ingerle believed that he played a modest role in the movement to establish the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934. Typically, he worked in a studio from visual notes, reconstructing nature from memory. In addition to colorful and somewhat stylized landscapes, Ingerle painted some of the residents of Appalachia. His best known painting of this type, Salt of the Earth, is an unromanticized portrayal of a couple sitting on porch steps; it was the second most popular painting in an exhibition at Chicago’s Art Institute in 1932. In sentiment, it is close to the more famous painting, American Gothic, painted two years prior by Grant Wood (1891–1942). Ingerle traveled abroad in 1935, apparently for the first time since his immigration forty-five years earlier. He returned to the mountains of Moravia where he had visited family as a child. A proponent of traditional art, in 1938 he was recognized by the Chicago-based Society for Sanity in Art (later called the Society of Western Artists), which was opposed to such forms of modern art as Cubism and Surrealism. Ingerle died in Highland Park in 1950. MRS

Wilson Henry Irvine was born near Byron, Illinois. His father, Edwin A. Irvine (1843–1911), was a farmer, and his mother was Malinda Underwood Irvine (1847–1915). Young Wilson attended public school in Byron and graduated in 1888 from Rockford Central High School. While still in his teens, he may have worked as a newspaper reporter; he also learned the airbrush technique—using a hand-operated compressor to apply paint—from Liberty Walkup (1844–1922), a local inventor. At age nineteen, Irvine moved to Chicago and began work as an airbrush artist. His expertise led to his employment four years later by the newly founded Chicago Portrait Company. He worked there until 1913, retouching photographs to achieve highly realistic results. In 1891, Irvine married Lydia Weyher (1869–1941). Although he visited the Art Institute of Chicago shortly after his 1888 arrival, he waited seven years before enrolling. He joined an evening life class with the academically trained Charles E. Boutwood (circa 1856–1941) in 1895, and continued his studies with him until 1902, when he enrolled in an evening class on illustration taught by Walter M. Clute (1870–1915). The Art Institute was noteworthy for both its commitment to evening classes and its course offerings in design and illustration. In 1895, Irvine and a group of fellow artists founded the Palette and Chisel Club of Chicago. Members met on Sunday mornings at the studio of noted sculptor Lorado Taft (1860–1936) to draw from the model during daylight hours. Irvine served first as treasurer and then as club president, regularly participating in the group’s exhibitions which were held at the galleries of Marshall Field’s eponymous department store. Beginning in 1900, his landscape paintings appeared in forty-one exhibitions hosted by the Art Institute, and soon his work was seen at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery, and the National Academy of Design. Irvine was awarded a silver medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

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Artist image: Photograph of Rudolph Frank Ingerle (detail). Frank Hohenberger Photograph Collection, Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. (#688).

irvine, wilson henry (1869–1936)

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Irvine was clearly a respected member of Chicago’s art community. In 1907, he was one of the founders of the Cliff Dwellers Club, spearheaded by noted author Hamlin Garland (1860–1940); other early members included architects Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) and Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), and the collector Arthur Jerome Eddy (1859–1920). He was also active in the Artists’ Guild, which merged into the Arts Club, and the Chicago Watercolor Club. In addition to his activities in Chicago, Irvine traveled to the Northeast, specifically, to Boston and Gloucester, Massachusetts; Monhegan Island and Camden, Maine; and New Hampshire. From time to time, he explored rural sites near Chicago and, in 1907, spent two weeks at the emerging art colony in Brown County, Indiana. The following year, Irvine went to France and painted scenes in Brittany at Pont-Aven and St. Malo. His paintings from this period demonstrate his keen interest in the effects of light and a tendency toward color contrasts. His application of paint was decidedly impressionistic, perhaps influenced by paintings he could have seen at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. In addition, his fellow Cliff Dweller Garland wrote an exegesis on Impressionism entitled Crumbling Idols in 1894, a collection of essays that called upon American artists and writers to depict their own surroundings. In terms of proportions, Irvine tended to follow the ratio of 2:3 for his compositions, a fact documented by several sheets in a sketchbook.

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In 1914, Irvine began to spend time in Connecticut, the home of several Impressionist art colonies. After three summers in Hamburg, Irvine purchased a hillside property there in 1918 and made it his primary residence until his death. The proximity of his friend Bessie Potter Vonnoh (1872–1955), a Chicago sculptor, and her husband Robert, who began visiting there in 1905, may have influenced his choice. Hamburg is the town center of Lyme, located inland about five miles from Old Lyme, where a distinguished group of painters had been gathering since the late 1890s. Florence Griswold’s boardinghouse in Old Lyme was the center of activity for artists such as Childe Hassam (1859– 1935) and Willard Metcalf (1858–1925) who gravitated there in the first decade of the twentieth century. By the time Irvine arrived in the area, Impressionism and plein air painting were well established, culminating in the organization of the Lyme Art Association in 1914.

That Irvine had achieved considerable success at this point in his career is documented by a hefty exhibition schedule. His paintings appeared regularly in Chicago, at the Art Institute and at commercial galleries; in Atlanta in a 1925 exhibition organized by the Grand Central Art Galleries; and at shows mounted by the Lyme Art Association. He was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1926, where he exhibited watercolors every year from 1921 to 1936. Irvine traveled increasingly in his middle age. In 1923, he spent ten months abroad, painting in Cornwall, Wales, and on the Outer Hebrides; he also visited London, Glasgow, Paris, Giverny, Avignon, and traveled through Italy. In North America, he ventured to Quebec, New Orleans, Virginia, and Vermont, and then returned to Europe in 1929, going to Paris, Marseille, and various places in Spain. He was in Charleston, South Carolina, three years later. The extent of Irvine’s travels suggests a certain restlessness, which is also underscored by the artist’s experimentation with several techniques and media. As early as 1913, he produced monoprints, later modifying his method to create aquaprints around 1927. These works were likely devised by introducing pigments to a water-gum solution in a shallow pan on to which thin paper was floated, much like marbleizing. Accents such as trees were manipulated to suggest a kind of abstracted landscape. About the same time, Irvine started viewing his subjects through a prism, which resulted in a halo effect around the edges of objects revealing green tones against a light background, and red ones against a dark one; the optical results have been equated to color printing when slightly off-register. These technical investigations may have been Irvine’s response to the rise of modernism. Nevertheless, he remained an avowed and prolific Impressionist until his death of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 21, 1936. MRS

Artist image: Photograph of Wilson Irvine (1869–1936), Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

joiner, charles harvey (1852–1932) Charles Harvey Joiner was born on August 8, 1852 in Charlestown, Indiana, northeast of Louisville, Kentucky, to Oscar Dunreath Joiner (1817–1864) and Elizabeth Tophouse Joiner (born 1830). Oscar Joiner was a metalsmith who soon moved his family to nearby Memphis, Indiana. Previous reports have noted that when but a youth of sixteen, Harvey Joiner, who had displayed a childhood affinity for art, left home for work in Louisiana, sketching and painting along the way. Other accounts suggest that Joiner in fact moved to a city in Missouri, where his father may have had a metalworking concern. Placing him there makes his subsequent move to St. Louis, in 1874, less unusual. Once in St. Louis, he made the acquaintance of a German portrait painter, David Hoffman, from whom he learned the basics of portraiture and copying from photographs. Unlike his landscape art, which he created in a uniquely personal formula, Joiner’s portraits have a stilted quality, likely resulting from overly earnest attempts to replicate the life-like images produced in photography—a frequent shortcoming in late nineteenth century art. His most impressive extant accomplishments in the area of portraiture are the large, grand manner pendant portraits of Russell M. Hughes (1819–1914), a successful vinegar manufacturer, and his wife Lillian Bell Allen Hughes (1862–1926) in the rococo revival taste. Joiner also recorded the likeness of Louisville songwriter William Shakespeare Hays (1837–1907).

Apart from a brief sojourn in Pittsburgh in the early 1880s and some abbreviated travel in the American West, Joiner worked from his Louisville studio for the rest of his career. His patrons hailed from around the country. He eventually moved on from portraiture to landscape painting, perhaps in response to “the call of beeches and sunlight,” as a contemporary newspaper account suggests. Following the exhibition of a painting entitled Wild Flowers in Louisville’s 1884 Southern Exposition, Joiner became one of the most popular artists in the area. A 1907 studio fire destroyed nearly one hundred paintings, as well as vital documentary records. In a late-career tribute to Joiner’s accomplishments, the Louisville Times of March 6, 1929 reported that he was thought to have created over five thousand works. Joiner died on May 30, 1932 in Port Fulton, Indiana, and is buried in Jeffersonville’s Walnut Ridge Cemetery. ECP

Artist image: Photograph of Harvey Joiner, “Notable Men of Kentucky at the beginning of the 20th century (1901–1902)” by La Bree, Ben (Benjamin), ed., page 119, (K37L). The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.

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Joiner’s eventual return to the Louisville area is documented by his marriage, on November 11, 1878, to Helen Annette Kane (1858–1896) in Jeffersonville, Indiana. The couple had two children: a daughter, Vinnie Ream Joiner, born in 1879, and a son, Harvey Joiner, Jr., born in 1884. His daughter’s name suggests that Joiner may have known the legendary female sculptor Lavinia Ream (1847–1914). Joiner began to participate in the Louisville art scene in 1875, using it as a base from which to work as an itinerant portraitist and occasional painter of church interiors. In this latter pursuit, especially popular in the German and Italian Roman Catholic communities, he

painted in southern Illinois and Utica, Indiana, where his Ruth Gleaning in the Fields of Boaz remains intact at the local Church of Christ. After his marriage, Joiner established a permanent home in Port Fulton, Indiana, which has since been annexed by the nearby municipality of Jeffersonville. The 1883 Louisville City Directory lists him as having a portrait studio in the Courier-Journal building. The flamboyant artist Clarence Boyd (1855–1883), who painted subliminal scenes of lounging ladies bathed in a golden aura, had an adjacent studio. Joiner himself would mimic that lounging composition in a painting of his wife dated 1885.

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key, john ross (1837–1920) John Ross Key was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, on July 16, 1837 to Virginia Ringgold Key (circa 1818–1930). His father, John Ross Key (1809–1837), was an attorney who died before young John’s birth, and the future artist spent much of his youth with his grandparents at the Key home on the Potomac River, near the site of the current Francis Scott Key Bridge. Key’s great-grandfather and namesake, John Ross Key (1754–1821), was a Revolutionary War general and jurist. His grandfather, Francis Scott Key (1779–1843), famously penned the lyrics to the national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” after witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814. Despite this illustrious lineage, Key’s early life and education were constricted by the financial limitations of his widowed mother, and he is not known to have received any formal art training. Displaying some artistic talent and skill as a self-taught draftsman, Key found employment with the United States Coast Survey in the winter of 1853, a position he held until 1856. Among his fellow draftsmen was James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). In an article for the April 1908 issue of the Century, Key recalled with great admiration Whistler’s ability at character sketches of soldiers and civil servants, and he kept Whistler’s likeness of him for the rest of his life.

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In 1859, Key traveled west as a cartographer with the Lander Expedition and was responsible for charting trails in Nevada and Wyoming. When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted with Confederate forces in 1861 and was made a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. In that position, he was stationed at Charleston from 1863 to 1865 and witnessed the Union bombardment of the harbor and city. Sketches he made of that incident became the basis for one of his most famous paintings—once misattributed to Albert Bierstadt (1830–1903)—Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Siege of Charleston Harbor, 1863. From 1869 to 1873, Key again went west and maintained a studio in San Francisco.

Key spent 1873 through 1875 in Munich and Paris; while abroad he married an English woman named Mabel Thayer (circa 1853–1897). The Boston Evening Transcript for March 2, 1875 locates Key’s Paris studio at “9 Rue Chaptal,” noting that he “is honored by having a picture in Goupil’s window . . . near the opera house.” Upon his return to the United States, Key settled in Boston and often made frequent sketching trips to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Between 1878 and 1908, the Keys moved several times, living in Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and Baltimore. One of the artist’s greatest triumphs during this era was the gold medal awarded to his painting of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Strait at the 1876 Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. He also created a body of work based on the buildings at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which were reproduced as chromolithographs. After the death of his first wife, Key married Ellenore Dutcher (1873–1930) in 1902; shortly afterward, they moved to Washington, D.C., remaining until 1917. During those years, Key was active in the Society of Washington Artists and continued to exhibit his work at such important venues as the National Academy of Design and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Towards the end of his time in Washington, Key sought the permission of William Henry Holmes (1846–1933), director of the National Gallery of Art, to bring his paintings to the gallery on the mall and hang them next to the work of great masters so that he might judge their color acuity. In a letter now in the Smithsonian Archives, Holmes consented with the observation that while “this is a novel request . . . I see no reason why the Gallery should not be made useful to this old gentleman.” In 1917, Key returned to Baltimore, where he died in 1920. Following his death, he was given a memorial exhibition at the National Gallery. In a review of that exhibition, his longtime friend Charles Edwin Fairman (circa 1854–1943), curator of the United States Capitol, wrote that Key’s “deep love for the beautiful has been a marked influence. He was fond of the sunlight, and like the motto on the sun-dial, he recorded only sunny hours. His work shows a rugged respect for the most beautiful phases of nature, painted with a sincerity and a truthfulness which withal has been governed by that love for the beautiful so apparent in all his works.” ECP

Artist image: Photograph of John Ross Key, 1914, Harris & Ewing (detail). Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-DIG-hec-04369), Washington, D.C.

the arts communities in San Francisco, Monterey, and Santa Barbara. One of the women Malone befriended, a Mrs. B. Rothrock of Philadelphia, invited the artist to accompany her to Japan. After a six-week voyage, Malone arrived in Yokohama in March 1903. In the year she spent there, Malone began to work en plein air and recorded the city’s beautiful gardens; few of her paintings from this time are extant.

malone, blondelle octavia edwards (1877–1951) Though she was born in the country outside Bostwick, Georgia, the municipality of Columbia, South Carolina, would become Blondelle Malone’s hometown, sanctuary, and, at times, despised citadel. Her parents, Miles Alexander Malone (1850–1930) and Sara Glenn Jones Malone (1847–1915), welcomed their only child on November 16, 1877. After a brief residence in Augusta, Georgia, by 1883 they had settled in Columbia, where Miles opened Malone’s Music House, specializing in the sale of pianos and sheet music. A successful enterprise— one of the largest of its kind in the Southeast—Miles Malone’s business would necessarily support his daughter’s artistic and social ambitions for the remainder of his life. In an effort to advance her music education, Blondelle Malone matriculated, at the age of fifteen, at Converse College, a fertile incubator for church organists, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Over the course of her time there, 1892 to 1896, her passion and talent for visual art eclipsed her musical studies. Accompanied by a female chaperone, Malone departed in 1897 for study at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, a practical endeavor, even as she also enrolled at the Art Students League. Her instructors there included John Twachtman (1853–1902), William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), and Robert Blum (1857–1903); she later followed Twachtman to the art colony in Cos Cob, Connecticut, in the summer of 1899. These experiences marked the beginning of a recurring pattern in the fledgling artist’s life: periods of study and work outside Columbia, followed by returns to the parental nest in search of financial aid.

The years abroad saw the beginnings of her participation in important exhibitions in France and the United States. At Cassatt’s suggestion, she showed with the Society of Independent Artists and the Lyceum Club in Paris, was represented in the 1911 Salon d’Automne, sent works to the New English Art Club in London, the New York Water Color Club, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and found representation in commercial galleries in Holland and Great Britain. She traveled throughout the continent, England, and Ireland, and was often in the company of other artists including Jacques Blanche (1861–1942), Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), and Frederick MacMonnies (1863–1937), among others. She also sought out the patronage—social and financial—of aristocrats and frequently took advantage of such hospitality. Back in South Carolina, Malone was indisposed to remain in Columbia with her ailing father, who levied increasingly tight restrictions on the artist’s funds. In 1916, she purchased a home she named Bagatelle, located in the equestrian community of Aiken, South Carolina. Four years later, she moved to New York, living at 27 Beekman Place. The next six years were the most active and successful of Malone’s career as a painter. Her floral landscapes received glowing reviews in the New York Times and New York Post, earning the admiration of art critics Lula Merrick and Mary Taft who endowed her with the moniker “garden artist of America.” Around 1926, she relocated to Washington, D.C., where she became active in the local art scene and worked in her studio located in the Wardman Park Hotel.

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Malone soon experienced some success on her own. Her book cover designs were shown at the Architectural League of New York in 1900, at which time Charles Scribner’s Sons, the noted publishers, purchased two. Ever resourceful, she convinced her parents to allow her to travel to California as part of an Episcopal missionary group, a cause she abandoned once she arrived in 1901. Instead, she set about painting and making herself acquainted with

In February 1904, Malone set sail for Europe, traveling by way of Hong Kong, Singapore, and India before arriving in Venice that May. By autumn, she was in Paris, where she made the acquaintance of Camille Pissarro’s (1830–1903) widow, Julie Vellay Pissarro (1838–1926), corresponded with Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), and famously painted in Claude Monet’s (1840–1926) garden at Giverny. She remained in France until 1905, when she was again summoned home by her parents to Columbia. Malone returned to Europe in 1909, where she eventually took up residence in Paris in 1910, remaining until 1915 when the death of her mother prompted a final return to America.

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Miles Alexander Malone was killed while crossing a street in downtown Columbia in September 1930, after which his daughter’s access to funds was slightly enhanced, largely as a result of her litigious nature and willingness to engage various bankers and trustees. In 1930, Malone moved to Alexandria, Virginia, and eventually purchased the eighteenth century Wayles House. She became an ardent supporter of historic preservationist efforts in Alexandria and Georgetown, and pursued her enduring interest in garden design. She was active at the Washington National Cathedral and a fixture in elite social circles; she also indulged a fascination with astrology. In failing health, she gave up the Wayles House in 1947 and moved to the George Mason Hotel, a semi-invalid at age seventy. At the last, Columbia called. She returned there in early 1951 where she died in a nursing home on the twenty-fifth of June. Though she had many suitors during her lifetime, Blondelle Malone never married, having once written to her mother that “the more I see of married life, the gladder I am that I am single for the minute a girl is married, she gets into a rut and never advances an inch.” An interview published in the April 23, 1922 edition of the New York Times once quoted her as saying “painting is in many ways like love; there is more pain than pleasure.” Without heirs, she bequeathed her papers and memorabilia to the University of South Carolina Library and her paintings to the Columbia Museum of Art. ECP

Artist image: College age portrait of Blondelle Malone, Condon Photography, Atlanta. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

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mazzanovich, lawrence (1871–1959) The circumstances of Lawrence Mazzanovich’s birth on December 19, 1871 were most unusual: he was born on board a ship off the coast of San Francisco. Because of the dearth of tangible records, the actual year of his birth is disputed; some sources indicate 1872, while his death certificate cites 1871. His father, Lorenzo Mazzanovich (circa 1820–after 1878), was a musician from Hvar, Croatia, who had been a member of the Louisiana First Company of Slavonian Rifles during the Civil War. The artist’s Venetian mother, Lena Grimaldi (sometimes given as Lisa Crimaldi) Mazzanovich, died when Lawrence was still an infant. Mazzanovich’s childhood was unsettled: at age thirteen, he worked at a silk factory in Boonton, New Jersey, followed by time in Baltimore spent stripping tobacco, and later tending bar in New Orleans. Around 1886, he landed in Chicago, where he apprenticed under a sign painter and took night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, studying lithography, design, and illustration. At the time, the school was dominated by women and emphasized the pursuit of the practical arts. From January through April 1900, he studied illustration with Howard Chandler Christy (1872– 1952) at the Art Students League in New York. In Chicago, Mazzanovich shared a studio with colleague William Wallace Denslow (1856–1915), an illustrator who worked on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and his wife Ann Holden Denslow (1872–1949?). Under Denslow’s tutelage, Mazzanovich spent portions of several years in East Aurora, New York, working in the Roycroft Print Shop, part of a guild community highly regarded for its emphasis on craft and design. At Roycroft, Mazzanovich worked alongside other artists to create medieval-inspired illuminations for an 1898 reprint edition of Oliver Goldsmith’s book The Deserted Village. The Denslows ultimately divorced and, in 1903, Ann Denslow married Mazzanovich. The couple went to Paris shortly thereafter and remained abroad for six years. They lived simply, renting a house at Moret-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau, a destination favored years before by several French Barbizon painters. He also visited Giverny, the village made famous by Claude Monet

(1840–1926), and spent time in Paris. The bucolic French scenery helped Mazzanovich transition from illustration to landscape painting—at first Barbizon-inspired, then gradually more impressionistic. Despite this shift away from illustration work, he agreed to provide several images for His Own People, a 1907 novella by Booth Tarkington (1869–1946), who had purchased a number of paintings and had invited the Mazzanoviches to visit him at a rented villa on the Isle of Capri. Mazzanovich’s paintings gained meaningful recognition in the new century’s first decade. His work was included in the Paris Salons of 1906 and 1909; in 1908, three paintings were shown in Antwerp at an exhibition sponsored by the Paris Society of American Artists. In 1909, Mazzanovich contributed paintings to exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design. While still in France, Chicago publisher John Adams Thayer (1861–1936) befriended Mazzanovich and arranged for the sale of a dozen paintings to a Boston collector. Thayer also urged Mazzanovich to return to America and to settle in Westport, Connecticut, which the artist did in 1909. Situated on Long Island Sound less than fifty miles from Manhattan, Westport was a picturesque community dependent on truck farming. Less than an hour’s train ride from New York City, the town was also in the process of being discovered by artists as well as wealthy city dwellers. Located midway between two well established Impressionist art colonies—Cos Cob and Old Lyme— Westport never fully attained their stature, although it did appeal to a variety of artists, including illustrator and noted modernist Arthur Dove (1880–1946). From 1909 until 1923, Mazzanovich prospered in Connecticut, painting scenery along the Saugatuck River and surrounding flat farmland. He occasionally made summer trips to Tamworth, New Hampshire. His style was a fully developed, but individualized form of Impressionism with an emphasis on seasonal tonalities. A methodical and relatively slow painter, he regularly exhibited at the W. Scott Thurber Gallery and O’Brien Galleries in Chicago, the Macbeth Gallery in New York, and the Vose Galleries in Boston.

Mazzanovich’s production of paintings declined during his time in Tryon—perhaps because he was so meticulous, or because his first wife, who had served as his business manager, was no longer prodding him. He was also known to occasionally barter his paintings. He stopped exhibiting in Chicago after 1929, though he made a painting trip to northern California the following year. The artist died of pneumonia at the state hospital in Morganton, North Carolina, on May 11, 1959. MRS

Artist image: Photograph of Lawrence Mazzanovich. Center for the Study of Southern Art, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia.

newman, willie betty (1863?–1935) Despite the pervasive contemporary bias against professional female artists, Willie Betty Newman managed to support herself through painting. Willie Betty was born January 21, at Maple Grove, a plantation belonging to her grandfather, Benjamin Rucker (circa 1890–1866), near Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Discrepancies exist, however, regarding Newman’s birth year: her death certificate states 1865, while her tombstone is inscribed 1864, and an article written in 2002 with the assistance of her granddaughter gives 1863. Her mother was Sophia Burrus Rucker Betty (1839–1866) and her father, William Francis McClanahan Betty (circa 1829–1902/1903), served the Confederacy as a Second Lieutenant in the TwentyEighth Regiment, Tennessee Infantry, from 1862 until 1865. It seems that Willie was named as a tribute to him. Following the death of her mother in 1866, she lived with

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Mazzanovich left Westport and his wife in 1923, relocating to Tryon, North Carolina, a small community nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the western part of the state. Replete with picturesque views of Piedmont foothills and nearby orchards, Tryon was an emerging tourist destination that offered excellent rail connections, especially to the Midwest, and a more moderate climate than coastal Connecticut. During Mazzanovich’s residency,

a fledgling arts group engaged visual artists, musicians, and performers. About 1927, he married Kathleen Muriel Harrington (1882–1985), a music teacher from England; the couple often participated in local productions in which Mazzanovich sang, including performances by the male chorus of Spartanburg.

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various family members and attended school in Middleton, Tennessee, before matriculating at Soule College, a female academy in Murfreesboro, which offered instruction for the primary grades through college. She was also enrolled at Greenwood Seminary for Young ladies near Lebanon, Tennessee. Willie Betty showed an early talent for drawing and discerning colors. In 1881, Willie Betty married Isaac Warren Newman (1861–1947?), sometimes identified as J. Warren Newman, a pharmacist in Alexandria, Tennessee; the following year, she gave birth to a son. Three years later, she left Tennessee and her family to study at the Art Academy of Cincinnati for the next five years, 1885–1890. One of her mentors was Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907), an important history painter and portraitist. He became the head of the McMicken School of Drawing and Design (later the Art Academy) in 1869, teaching there for thirtyfive years. During Newman’s time as a student, the school was affiliated with the Cincinnati Art Museum. Newman thrived under Noble’s tutelage and even earned a threeyear scholarship to study in Paris. Newman (who continued to use her husband’s name despite their separation) enrolled at the Académie Julian in 1891, an atelier popular with Americans and welcoming to women. Once again, she did well under her instructors, primarily Benjamin Constant (1845–1902), and others, including William Bouguereau (1825–1905), Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921), Tony Robert-Fleury (1837–1911), and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911). Their approach was thoroughly academic, with an emphasis on drawing from live models and casts of antique sculpture. Newman excelled in drawing and gained early recognition at the Paris Salon, where she regularly exhibited between 1891 and 1900. That year, she earned an honorable mention for her portrait of Fanny Alice Gowdy (1870–1937), the daughter of the American consul. Typically, Newman’s paintings were of genre subjects, sometimes with a moralistic tone; they are frequently compared to the work of Barbizon painter Jean-François Millet (1814–1875). Stylistically, they demonstrate the influence of Impressionism in the visible brushwork and interest in colored light.

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During her years abroad, Newman often departed Paris for other locales, visiting Brittany several times, as well as Venice in 1896. She traveled to Nashville twice—once after the death of her sister and again because her father’s health was failing—but each time returned to France. Finally, in 1902, she settled permanently in Nashville. Newman herself was at times in ill health and frequently frustrated by rumors that she was to marry George Zolnay (1862/1863–1949)—a Hungarian sculptor who had

worked on the Parthenon built for Tennessee’s Centennial Exposition in 1897. In returning to Nashville, Newman was forced to make a number of adjustments, if not concessions. Patronage in general was lacking, although the Centennial Club—a women’s civic organization—did exhibit her work. In 1915, the group purchased a major painting, Passing the Holy Bread, which had been exhibited at the 1894 Paris Salon. Reflecting conservative Southern taste, portraiture was an accepted avenue, especially for a woman, so Newman made a career painting likenesses of area politicians and local residents with means. Indulging in a degree of vanity, one patron ordered ten portraits of himself—one for each of his children. In 1903, she exhibited fifty-four works, largely from her days in France, at the Strauss Studio in St. Louis; the following year, another painting was included at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (known as the St. Louis World’s Fair). For a time, Newman served on the executive committee of the Nashville Art Association, which awarded her the 1910 medal for distinction. In addition, she showed her paintings at Tennessee state fairs. Newman opened the Newman School of Art in Nashville in October 1905, modelling it after the Académie Julian. In addition to drawing, she encouraged romanticized genre scenes like those she had done in France. Classes were offered free of charge, leading to inevitable financial difficulties that culminated in the school’s closure. In 1919, Newman visited her son who was living in Utah and contemplated relocating there. However, she returned to Nashville, where she spent the remainder of her life, much of it in poor health. She died on February 6, 1935. MRS

Artist image: Photograph of Willie Betty Newman. Courtesy of Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville.

in Birmingham, another center of New South growth, returned to New York. Their only child, a daughter, lived less than two years after her birth in 1888.

parrish, clara minter weaver (1861–1925) Clara Minter Weaver was born on March 16, 1861 at Emerald Place, the Weaver family plantation located outside of Selma, Alabama. Her parents, William Minter Weaver (1829–1898) and his wife Lucia Frances Minter Weaver (1839–1886), were cousins, both descendants of early Alabama families who had founded Selma. At the time of Clara’s birth, her father was considered to be the wealthiest man in south Alabama, a wealth which, though significantly diminished, would seem to have survived the Civil War somewhat intact. Although frequent mention of Emerald Place is made in biographical references to the artist, her later home, known as the Castle, in Selma is rarely referenced. Built by William Weaver in 1868, the brick mansion featured Gothic pointed windows, stained glass, handcrafted walnut woodwork, and furnishings and art in the emerging Aesthetic Movement taste. The presence of artists and craftsmen in her life at such an early age was a manifestation of her family’s creative interests. She was one of three sisters who pursued the arts: Rose (1873–1954) became a sculptor and Lucia (1866–1834) a writer.

In 1901, William Parrish, who suffered from heart disease, died on the train from Washington to New York, leaving the artist a widow at the age of forty. By this time, she had become an associate of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s (1848– 1933) company, specializing in stained glass windows for homes and churches. As one of her first important assignments for the Tiffany studio, Parrish collaborated on the design of seven windows for St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in New York City. Arranged in a semi-circle above the high altar, the series of soaring arched panels celebrates the victory of St. Michael in heaven; composed of multiple layers of reflective glass and installed in 1895, the windows are considered one of the studio’s masterpieces. Parrish’s stained glass windows can also be found in several Alabama churches, including St. Paul’s, Selma; Christ Church, Tuscaloosa; Church of the Holy Cross, Uniontown; and the First Baptist Church in Selma. Louis Tiffany’s Art Nouveau influence can be seen in Parrish’s own aesthetic. During this time, Parrish maintained a Paris studio, located at 83 Boulevard du Montparnasse. She visited the city often and, when abroad, studied under Gustave Courtois (1852–1923) at the Académie Colarossi and with the decorative painter Raphaël Collin (1850–1916). It was Collin who encouraged Parrish to work en plein air. Heeding her teacher’s advice, Parrish posed models outdoors for portraits and figure studies, and recorded the charming gardens in nearby villages. She also toured the great cathedrals of Europe. At the outbreak of World War I, Parrish returned to New York, but made frequent trips home to Selma as a vigorous proponent of the arts. Plagued by declining health, Clara Weaver Parrish died in New York on November 11, 1925; her body was then returned for burial to Live Oak Cemetery

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Encouraged by her parents, Clara Weaver went abroad in the early 1880s, studying in Paris and recording her experiences in travel vignettes she sent home to the Selma newspaper. Upon her return to America, she enrolled at the Art Students League in New York, where she studied under William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) and Harry Siddons Mowbray (1858–1928), both leading lights of art education. From Chase she absorbed the elements of American Impressionism, while Mowbray’s dual interest in painting and the decorative arts may have impacted her later career in stained glass. Another instructor, Kenyon Cox (1856–1919), would influence Parrish’s portraits, which were often somber and contemplative. New York is also where she met, and became engaged to, William Peck Parrish (1860–1901), a fellow native of Selma and a highly successful venture capitalist who promoted Alabama commercial interests on the New York Stock Exchange. They were married in 1887 and, after spending two years

Clara Weaver Parrish boldly pursued a creative life in the visual arts, keeping a studio in the Van Dyke Studio Building, serving as an officer in the Woman’s Art Club of New York, and entering her work in numerous national and international exhibitions, including the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, the 1910 Appalachian Exposition, a 1910 exhibition of American art at London’s Royal Academy, and annual invitationals at the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Academy of Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Parrish’s pastel portrait of her aunt, Evening, was included in the 1900 Exposition Universalle in Paris, an experience that renewed the artist’s love of that city and led to a later, longterm residency.

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in Selma where she rests with her parents, husband, and daughter. Her memorial stained glass windows to them at St. Paul’s Church remain a lasting tribute to her talent and persistence as an important figure in the history of women artists in the South. Through her estate, Parrish established a charitable trust that continues to benefit Selma’s needy and provides college scholarship funds to local students. ECP

Artist image: Photograph of Clara Weaver Parrish (detail). Courtesy of the Weaver-Parrish Charitable Trust, Selma, Alabama.

plaschke, paul albert (1880?–1954) Paul Plaschke was born in Berlin, Germany to Emil Johannes Plaschke (1852–1936) and Augusta Amalia Schnabel Plaschke (1853–1930); the year of his birth is given on a number of official records as 1877, 1878, and 1880. A commercial lithographer by trade, Emil Plaschke brought his family to the United States in 1884 to accept an offer of employment with the American Lithographic Company in New York. The family settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Paul later studied engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology and then took art classes at the Cooper Union in New York City. By 1897, Plaschke was enrolled at the Art Students League, where George Luks (1867–1933) was one of his instructors. Luks was fresh off his one-year stint as the cartoonist for the New York World’s popular “Yellow Kid” comic series, an experience that surely influenced Plaschke’s development as a commercial artist and subsequent employment at the same newspaper in 1898.

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Following his 1899 marriage to Ophelia M. Bennett (1881– 1975) of Louisville, Kentucky, Plaschke moved to that area, establishing a residence in New Albany, Indiana, located just across the Ohio River from Louisville. He took a job as an editorial cartoonist with the Louisville Commercial that same year; in 1902, he was hired away by the Louisville

Evening Post. In 1913, Plaschke joined the staff of the Louisville Courier-Journal, where he would remain until 1937. His first editor at the Courier-Journal was the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Henry Watterson (1840–1921), one of the founding fathers of the New South movement during the Reconstruction era. It was during his first days at the Courier-Journal that Plaschke shared a studio with John Bernard Alberts, Jr. (1886–1931), who painted a portrait of him working at his easel. As World War I was coming to a close, Plaschke drew a series of cartoons mocking the Bolshevik party in post-revolutionary Russia. Plaschke’s cartoons—sharply composed with strong black highlight lines—featured stinging, pithy statements delivered by an impish character named Monk, a caricature reminiscent of the Germanic “Max and Moritz” comics. While work as a commercial artist supported Plaschke’s family, which had grown to include two children, the artist pursued fine art in his personal time. His impressionistic landscapes captured the beauty of the surrounding terrain, infused with light and broken color. He also painted several portraits of various family members. In the late 1920s, he painted realistic works in warm colors with a certain Cubist-inspired tilt in composition, often flattening his human subjects (including his parents and his son Emil) against a minimal modernist backdrop. Throughout his life, Paul Plaschke was a generous man who nurtured other artists in the Louisville community. Along with his friend and fellow artist John T. Bauscher (1890–1951), Plaschke helped establish the Louisville Art Academy and taught night classes at the local YMCA, where his students included Dean Cornwell (1892–1960). He was a founding member of the Louisville Art Association and active in both the Wonderland Way Art Club in New Albany and Chicago’s Palette and Chisel Club. A frequent participant in exhibitions throughout Indiana, including the Herron Art Institute, Plaschke was also represented at annual invitationals at the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Academy of Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Collector and philanthropist Hattie Bishop Speed (1858–1942) greatly admired Plaschke’s work and bought it for the J. B. Speed Memorial Art Museum’s nascent permanent collection; Plaschke would later serve as a trustee at the institution. In 1937, Plaschke left the Courier-Journal and Louisville to work for William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago HeraldExaminer. The decision was undoubtedly a strategic career move, but one which reduced Plaschke from “one of the major figures in the art world of Louisville” to a “rather minor figure in the metropolis of Chicago,” according to some scholarly thought. While in Chicago, he often

exhibited at the John H. Vanderpoel Art Association, which championed representational painting during the high tide of the non-objective movement. Upon his retirement from the newspaper business around 1948, Plaschke returned to Louisville, where he died on February 12, 1954. ECP

Artist image: Paul Albert Plaschke (1880–1954), Self Portrait of the Artist with Pipe and Paint Brush, oil on canvas, 36¼ x 30 inches. Courtesy of Clifton Anderson.

ryder, chauncey foster (1868–1949) A prolific artist in many media—oil, watercolor, etching, and lithography—Ryder was born in Danbury, Connecticut, on February 29, 1868, but moved to New Haven as a child. His father, Benjamin Ryder (1831–1900), was in manufacturing; his mother Esther was born about 1830. Having demonstrated a precocious interest in art as a tenyear-old, Ryder attended high school for only two years before leaving in 1891 for Chicago, where he studied at the Art Institute and at J. Francis Smith’s Academy. He supported himself with illustration work and by teaching at Smith’s Academy, which emphasized anatomy and drawing from live models. He married Mary Keith Dole (1868– 1951) in 1891 and, ten years later, the couple moved to Paris. There, Ryder enrolled at the Académie Julian, attending classes conducted by Jean-Paul Laurens (1838– 1921), an academic and realistic painter of historical and political subjects. Ryder also studied privately with Raphaël Collin (1850–1916), who was on good terms with the French Impressionists. He spent time in the atelier of Max Bohm (1868–1923), an expatriate American who led an art colony in Étaples on the north coast of France. The emphasis there was painting en plein air.

Ryder explored various parts of America, largely on the East Coast, and especially New England, but also western North Carolina. He participated in the art colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut, during the summers of 1910 and 1911. By then, it was a well established community of artists devoted to Impressionist landscape painting headquartered at Florence Griswold’s boardinghouse. About this time, Ryder transitioned to landscapes rendered in an individualized form of Impressionism, which some have even labeled Post-Impressionist because of his use of broad brushwork. As was the custom, he painted a panel in the dining room of the Griswold house. In 1910, Ellen Axson Wilson (1860–1914), and her husband Woodrow (1856– 1924), the future president of the United States, bought one of Ryder’s paintings to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. As Ellen was an aspiring artist, the Wilsons were frequent visitors to Old Lyme. Their painting, Valley of Assisi, is a vertical landscape, rife with bright kelly greens—a signature color for Ryder. The composition depicts two rows of trees defining a path that leads toward a mountain, another motif characteristic of his work. The Wilsons purchased Valley of Assisi from the prestigious Macbeth Gallery, where Ryder exhibited for years, an indication of his increasing success. He showed both oils and watercolors at the National Academy of Design every year between 1907 and his death in 1949, sometimes twice a year. In 1913 (often incorrectly given as 1915), he was made an associate before being elected a full academician in 1920. In 1915, a painting by Ryder was awarded a silver medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. He exhibited his Whistleresque etchings with the Chicago Society of Etchers and the American Society of Etchers, and was a member of exclusive New York art organizations, including the Salmagundi Club and the National Arts Club. With income from the sale of paintings and prints, in 1910 Ryder acquired acreage on Abbott Hill in Wilton, New Hampshire. The property offered a magnificent view of Mount Monadnock, and mountains soon became the artist’s forte. Summers were spent in the south-central part of the state, which afforded ample access to the White Mountains; Ryder also visited the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Along the coast of Maine, Ryder sought out popular artist

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Ryder’s French ouevre was decidedly academic and figurative, which explains its inclusion at the Paris Salon four times between 1903 and 1906. That last year, his submission

was That Which the Sea Gives Up, a dramatic scene of peasant women looking over detritus left on shore, for which he won a medal. Ryder took on students as a source of income, but teaching was not to his liking. Although he maintained a studio in Paris for several years, he returned to the United States in 1907, settling in New York. He traveled abroad later in his career, in 1928 and 1932.

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destinations such as Monhegan Island and Ogunquit. Sometime about 1920, he ventured farther afield to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and the nearby mountains of Tennessee. Ryder defies easy categorization, although he is often associated with Tonalism, a particular form of Impressionism practiced almost exclusively by American artists. Tonalists tend to represent shapes with soft edges, and their canvases are often marked by haziness. The most distinctive aspect of Ryder’s work, however, is his technique: a thick application of paint in blocky brushstrokes. It is estimated that he produced over one thousand paintings and prints before dying at Wilton in 1949. MRS

Artist image: Photograph of Chauncey Foster Ryder (1868–1949), Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

saussy, hattie (1890-1978)

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Hattie Saussy was born on March 17, 1890 to Joachim Radcliffe Saussy III (1862–1904) and his wife, Rachel Louise Shivers Saussy (1865–1946). Both families were longtime Savannah, Georgia, residents with roots extending back to the colonial era. As a fifth-grader, Hattie attended the first art class taught in the local public school; her teacher was local artist Lila Cabaniss (1875–1969). Saussy also received private art instruction from another local painter, Emma Cheves Wilkins (1870–1956). During her youth, she frequently attended exhibitions at the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Savannah, whose director, Carl Brandt (1831–1905), was a German academic painter. At that time, the Telfair collection arguably held the most sophisticated group of paintings available for public viewing in the South, and it was there that Saussy first saw works by the leading American and European Impressionists of the day.

Following her father’s unexpected death in 1904, Saussy’s mother devoted herself to nurturing her daughter’s art education. Hattie attended Mary Baldwin Seminary (now College) in Staunton, Virginia, for the 1906–1907 academic year. In a 1974 article in the Savannah Morning News, Saussy recalled that “Ken[neth Hayes] Miller was one of the instructors, and we had a very interesting life class. But I soon learned to like the out-of-doors. When you paint outside, you don’t have to pay a model.” At the end of her year there, she received an award as the most distinguished art student. The Staunton newspaper noted her accomplishments, proclaiming her “proficient in painting from life. Her work is mainly in oils and includes portrait studies and a large number of quick sketches of schoolmates. She has the ability to grasp personal character and express it with breadth and surety of brush work.” Some of that work was exhibited at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition. In hopes of advancing her burgeoning skills, Saussy and her mother moved to New York City in 1908; over the next four years, Saussy studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now known as Parsons School of Design), the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League. Among her illustrious instructors were George Bridgman (1865–1943), Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951), Eliot O’Hara (1890–1969), and Eugene Speicher (1883–1962). Bridgman was a drawing master whose book on drafting the human anatomy was the standard text of the day, while DuMond was an Impressionist whose color theories influenced the work of several Southern artists, notably Helen Turner (1858–1958) and Catherine Wiley (1879– 1958). In 1913, Saussy departed for Europe and enrolled at the Shearling Atelier in Paris, the academy of Scottish painter and stained glass designer Ernest Archibald Taylor (1874–1952). She traveled extensively; correspondence and sketchbooks attest to her visits to Innsbruck, Lucerne, Luxembourg, Montreux, Munich, Verona, Florence, and Venice. During this time, Saussy worked in watercolor, sketching the local scenery and reveling in the architecture she described as “simply one dream after another.” These adventures were cut short by the outbreak of war in 1914. Saussy had difficulty booking passage home, but once on United States soil, she devoted herself to painting, both in New York and Savannah. A year later, her only sibling, a beloved younger brother named Joachim Radcliffe Saussy IV (1892–1915), drowned. Thereafter, she became her mother’s constant companion and caregiver. During World War I, Saussy worked in a government office in Washington, D.C. After the war, she taught art for a year, 1920–1921, at Chatham Episcopal Institute (later

Chatham Hall), a school for girls in southwestern Virginia. A devout Christian, Saussy was a communicant of St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church, Savannah, and a tireless member of Episcopal welfare efforts and ladies groups. At the end of her tenure at Chatham, she returned to Savannah, where she often taught local art classes and continued her own study. When Adolphe Blondheim (1888–1969) spent a year as artist-in-residence at the Telfair Academy in 1923, Saussy was one of his students. Thetis Rush, Saussy’s biographer, has noted that Blondheim was a follower of William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), whose influence may be seen in her more impressionistic landscape work. Those years in the mid-1920s were also the time when she designed and built a house in Savannah; the attic, lit by several large windows, served as her studio. Saussy frequently made sketching expeditions to favored scenic sites in the South, working in upcountry South Carolina, the Georgia mountains, and, between 1947 and 1952, in New Orleans. She was an active arts advocate, a co-founder of the Savannah Art Association, the first president of the Association of Georgia Artists, and a recurring exhibitor with the Southern States Art League. A fall in the north Georgia mountains in 1972 resulted in a broken hip, after which she was confined to her home until her death on January 13, 1978. Only four years earlier, Saussy remarked that though she had tried to paint in the studio, she “had never been able to be really happy unless I’m outdoors with the sun and the breeze and the trees and the flowers.” ECP

Artist image: Hattie Saussy (1890–1978), Self Portrait, oil on canvas mounted on board, 20 x 16 inches. Photograph courtesy of the Charleston Renaissance Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina.

sawyier, paul (1865–1917) Paul Sawyier was born on March 23, 1865 in Madison County, Ohio, to Dr. Nathaniel Isaac Sawyier (1832–1910) and his wife, Ellen Wingate Sawyier (1839–1908). The farm where the future artist was born was one of several properties his father had inherited, and it provided the young family with a refuge from the conflicts of the Civil War, in which Kentucky was often a dangerous middle ground. The social isolation of country living and the limited number of potential patients for Dr. Sawyier’s medical practice spurred an 1870 move to Frankfort, Kentucky, Mrs. Sawyier’s hometown. An amateur artist who enjoyed making sketches of the family in his leisure hours, Dr. Sawyier encouraged Paul’s early interest in drawing by engaging an instructor to provide private lessons. Following his graduation from high school, Paul Sawyier matriculated at the McMicken School of Drawing and Design (later the Art Academy of Cincinnati), where, from 1884–1885, he studied life drawing under Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907). During this time, Sawyier—along with fellow artist Avery Sharp—opened a studio in downtown Cincinnati, specializing in commercial portraits after photographs, typically executed in pastel and charcoal. In 1886, however, he succumbed to his parents’ wishes and returned to Frankfort to assume a sales position in Dr. Sawyier’s successful hemp mill. Wholly unsuited to the job, the artist resigned less than a year later.

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By the fall of 1889, Sawyier was living in New York City with his married elder sister, Lillian Sawyier Hill, and attending classes at the Art Students League, where William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) led the men’s life drawing class. Chase was a compelling teacher with a manner as effusive and flamboyant as his vibrant colors and dashing brushwork, and Sawyier basked in his encouragement. Upon his return to Cincinnati around 1891, Sawyier began studies with another legendary master, Frank Duveneck (1848–1919), at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Duveneck’s warmly paternal approach nurtured Sawyier, and the two remained friends long after their formal association had ended. Sawyier’s Cincinnati residence was once again short-lived,

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and he returned to Frankfort. Though he worked steadily at his art on sketching tours in the Kentucky River Valley and on the city’s streets, he was also responsible for his parents’ care. The steady decline in their health and financial resources had serious repercussions for an artist seeking to make his way in an area with scant interest in the patronage of a contemporary artist. After visiting the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Sawyier resumed his efforts as a portraitist, a pursuit which sustained him through the early days of the twentieth century. One of his most accomplished works, a pastel portrait of Frank Gregory Stagg (1873–1942) was exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Sawyier also had some success selling his work in department stores in Lexington, Kentucky. When his mother died in 1908, the Sawyier family home was lost and its contents sold at public auction. Sawyier began to live on a houseboat moored at High Bridge in Jessamine County, on the palisades of the Kentucky River. But he continued to frequent Frankfort, especially in the company of his wealthy patron John Joseph King (died 1961), whose property on Elkhorn Creek inspired many of Sawyier’s watercolors. Throughout these years, Sawyier—consistently described as a poor money manager with a penchant for drink—struggled to make ends meet. Periods of great industriousness were offset by extended times of idleness.

He died from a heart attack on November 5, 1917 and was buried in Fleischmanns, New York. His body was reinterred in the Frankfort Cemetery in 1923. An account of Paul Sawyier’s life and work published in a Frankfort newspaper addresses the artist’s attachment to his homeland, describing Sawyier’s work as “a true product of Kentucky, untainted and untouched by foreign influences. It carries with it the savor and the flavor of the soil—homelike and lifelike.” Though Sawyier was indeed able to transcribe the Kentucky landscape with tremendous sensitivity, his aesthetic was unquestionably advanced by the training he received in Cincinnati and New York. The artist’s definitive biographer to date, Arthur Jones, comes nearer to an accurate assessment. Sawyier, he felt, “had to face a conflict between the traditional American preference for the romantic qualities of subjects and the real issues of the age of modernity in which he worked.” Faced with that dichotomy, he brought a lyrical quality to a terrain he obviously adored. Jones notes that Sawyier’s enduring popularity rests on his Bluegrass images, “scenes that appeal to Kentuckians—nostalgic glimpses of their own state.” ECP

Artist image: Photograph of Paul Sawyier by H. G. Mattern, circa 1905 (detail). Margaret M. Bridwell Art Library, University of Louisville, Kentucky.

In pursuit of a wider audience and more sophisticated environment, Sawyier moved to New York in 1913. Living once again with his now-widowed sister in Brooklyn, he recorded the scenery of Prospect Park, Jamaica Bay, and Central Park. He also maintained a healthy trade producing oil paintings of Kentucky scenery, much of it based on photographs he solicited from King and others. On March 3, 1917, Sawyier wrote King, asking “if you have any photographs of your various camps and outings on the river or any material of this description you would care to use as motifs for paintings, I would be glad to try my hand at them.”

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Sawyier returned to Kentucky for his last visit in 1916. By 1915, he had moved to Highmount, New York, living at the Catskills estate of art patron Mrs. Marshall L. Emory. There, he was given comfortable lodging and studio space in a converted chapel. He was also entrusted with the care of Edward P. Buyck (1888–1960), a Belgian artist in exile from World War I. From this point forward, Sawyier’s personal health and living conditions deteriorated. Though his work continued to find an appreciative audience and buyers in his home state, it was not enough. Unable to transfer his virtuosity of the bucolic Kentucky landscape to the more demanding New York art world, Sawyier struggled with alcohol and often couldn’t cover his boardinghouse rent.

selden, dixie (1868–1935) Dixie Selden was the pampered daughter of a prosperous couple who indulged her interest in art, taking her on two trips to Europe before she was fifteen years old. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 28, 1868. Her father, John Roger Selden (1835–1908), held a position with Hamilton County, Ohio, before becoming bookkeeper of the Bradford Mill Company, a machinery manufacturer; later in life, he was a deputy collector of the

Internal Revenue Service. Successful investments in local industries allowed Selden to provide comfortably for his wife, Martha Peyton McMillen (1838–1907), an amateur painter, and their only surviving child Dixie. During the Civil War, he served briefly in the Ohio Infantry and in the Ohio National Guard. While the Seldens had roots in Cincinnati—and even further back in the Northeast—they favored the South and its culture, an affinity underscored by naming their daughter Dixie after the famous song. Their allegiance to the region was further solidified by their move to Covington, Kentucky, when Dixie was two. The proximity of the two waterfront cities—connected by a bridge spanning the Ohio River—enabled Dixie Selden to initially attend private schools for girls in Covington, before transferring to Cincinnati’s Bartholomew English and Classical School for Girls. Her education, however, was greatly enhanced by a grand tour in 1878, which found the ten-year-old budding artist sketching in London, Paris, Munich, and Rome. The family returned to Europe four years later, and Selden was enrolled in a school in Brussels, where she became bilingual in French and studied arithmetic, botany, geometry, drawing, and calisthenics. When not abroad, she was an active and early member of the Covington Art Club. Starting in 1884, Selden furthered her art education at the McMicken School of Drawing and Design, which was conservatively led by Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907) and one year later became the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She studied there for six years and also at the Cincinnati Art Museum with Frank Duveneck (1848–1919). A native of Covington and an exemplar of the Munich School, Duveneck emerged as her primary mentor. For several years between 1890 and 1912, she was a member of his classes at the Cincinnati Art Museum and at the Art Academy, and received private instruction from him in 1903. His tenebrous approach to figure painting influenced her portraiture, which sustained her financially throughout her career. She is thought to have painted several hundred bankers, businessmen, and society women. One of Selden’s most powerful likenesses commemorated Duveneck’s 1917 honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Cincinnati. The portrait is a sensitive and loving depiction of an aging artist dressed in academic regalia highlighted by crimson slashes of color. Soon after its completion, the canvas was shown at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Cincinnati Art Museum.

The year 1913 marked a stylistic turning point for the artist. As a student in William Merritt Chase’s (1849–1916) summer school course in Venice, Selden became more comfortable painting outdoor scenes, her palette lightened considerably, and her brushwork grew increasingly impressionistic. She applied this fresh approach to the many rapidly executed land- and seascapes she made on her extensive travels, both in this country and abroad. She gravitated to seaside locales such as Gloucester, Newport, and the coast of Maine, as well as Concarneau in Brittany, and Venice. The onset of World War I interrupted the course she was taking with the New Hope, Pennsylvania, Impressionist Henry Snell (1858–1943) in St. Ives on the Cornish coast in 1914, but she continued with him the following summer at Martha’s Vineyard, as travel abroad was restricted. During the last twelve years of her life, the ever-energetic Selden journeyed to Venice and Chiogga in Italy, Yugoslavia, France, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, the Middle East, Japan, China, Denmark, and Germany. Selden’s European scenes found an appreciative audience at home, and she enjoyed a loyal patronage among her social peers. While many of the exhibitions were local—taking place at the Woman’s Art Club or the Art Academy— prestigious national venues such as the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Detroit Institute of Art also showed her paintings. In addition, her work was included in the 1915 PanamaPacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Selden kept careful records, diaries, and maintained extensive

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In many respects, Selden lived a double life. Defying convention, she was an independent, unmarried female whose paintings were exhibited at the all-male Cincinnati

Art Club in 1891 and on occasion was the sole woman represented in commercial shows. On the other hand, she was a charter member of the prototypical Woman’s Art Club, which began its exhibitions in 1893. No suffragette, Selden was basically conservative, but fully enjoyed her independence. Following the death of her parents when she was forty, Selden began to share studios and travel with other women artists from Cincinnati, including Emma Mendenhall (1873–1964) and Annie Sykes (1855–1931). They frequently visited fellow Ohioan Elizabeth Nourse (1859–1938) when in Paris. Further proof of Selden’s dualism is reflected in her annual routine: during the winter months, she painted portraits in Cincinnati, while in warmer weather, she traveled and studied abroad. In addition to this busy schedule, she illustrated several children’s books: Santa Claus’s New Castle (1896) by Maude Florence Bellar (1877–1932); The Child’s Song Treasury (1909) by Mary Bartholomew Ehrmann (1862– 1937); and Aunt Hope’s Kitchen Stove and the Girls Around It (1911) by Lillian Clarkson West (1927–2011).

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correspondence, all of which has proved useful in reconstructing her career. After entertaining artist friends at her home on the evening of November 14, 1935, Selden suddenly collapsed and died. The following spring, the Cincinnati Art Museum exhibited sixty of her paintings. In 1937, the Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society paid homage to the artist and her work: “Hers was a vivacious and joyous personality which gave great pleasure to her associates. Much of her joyous, sunny mood is painted in her floral pieces and those of southern Europe. Her natural buoyancy of spirit seemed inexhaustible.” MRS

Artist image: Portrait of Dixie Selden in her studio, 1913 (detail). Photo: Goldman Archives.

silva, william posey (1859–1948)

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William Posey Silva’s family was part of the large Portuguese community in Savannah, Georgia, many of whom were engaged in fishing and import concerns. His father, James Sylvester Silva (1832–1918)—who had served as a member of the Chatham Artillery for Confederate forces— and his mother, Margaret Susan Askew Silva (1831–1919), eventually moved their family to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where James ran a prosperous wholesale mercantile enterprise, specializing in hardware and china. The Silva firm was the principal supplier for the materials genteel ladies used for china painting, a hint that young William may have matured in a more artistic environment than previously surmised. Silva attended Chatham Academy in Savannah prior to the family’s relocation and then went on to study engineering at the University of Virginia. By his early twenties, he had returned to Chattanooga, where for thirty years he assumed his obligatory role in the family business. In 1884, he married Caroline Walker Beecher (1858–1940), with whom he would have one son, Abbott Beecher Silva (1885–1958).

During those years, art critic Leila Mechlin noted, Silva painted only in his spare time; “he was not a dreamer, however . . . but a worker—a hard headed business man with a keen love of beauty and a fine sense both of honor and values.” His first serious art studies occurred during the summers of 1900–1905, when he worked with the American painter and printmaker Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) at Ipswich, Massachusetts. In 1906—at the age of forty-seven and with his son registered at Yale University—he left the mercantile world and sailed for France, accompanied by his wife who has been described as “practical and sympathetic, a good comrade” who “willingly . . . pulled up stakes and started on a new adventure.” Once in Paris, Silva enrolled at the prestigious Académie Julian, where he studied for two years. He also undertook instruction with fellow American painter Chauncey Foster Ryder (1868–1949) in Étaples. After launching his professional painting career with a 1909 one-man show at the fashionable Georges Petit Gallery in Paris, he returned to Chattanooga in 1910. For the next three years, Silva visited familiar Southern cities, experienced the rustic bohemian life in New Orleans, and wintered in Washington, D.C., where he was active in the Society of Washington Artists. These travels were a quest for source material for the ethereal garden landscapes that were quickly becoming Silva’s trademark. In 1910, he was honored with a one-man exhibition at the Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina, and received a silver medal at the Appalachian Exposition held in Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1913, Silva went west, ultimately settling in the picturesque seaside community of Carmel, California. Dubbing it their “land of promise,” the Silvas purchased a bungalow and built a studio in the sand dunes behind Carmelita Street, which would serve as the artist’s base of operations for the next thirty-five years. Happily ensconced on the Pacific seaside, Silva remained, nonetheless, a peripatetic and engaging artist, painting and exhibiting his work at the Salmagundi Club in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, among many other notable venues in this country and abroad. And he remained particularly interested in and loyal to Southern art organizations, particularly the Southern States Art League based in New Orleans. Silva’s hometown museum, Savannah’s Telfair Academy, hosted an exhibition of his work in 1917 and again after his death. Silva appears to have been an accommodating artist, striving to meet the wishes of his clientele. Fragments of correspondence once in the files of the Robert Powell

Coggins Art Collection offer a glimpse of one particular commission. In the transcript of a letter dated May 4, 1944, the sender writes that “Silva was exhibiting his pictures of ‘Magnolia Garden’ in Buffalo in May, 1923, where he received ‘Honorable Mention.’ I had some correspondence with him about painting a picture of ‘Magnolia Garden’ for me, as I had never seen a picture of the garden which was quite what I wanted. He finally met me in Charleston in June, and we went thoroughly over the garden and selected two sites: one to be painted in sunshine, the other on a cloudy day.” William Silva died in Sacramento, California, in 1948. In his landmark text Art Across America, esteemed historian William Gerdts praised Silva as “the finest artist at the turn of the century.” ECP

Artist image: Photograph of William Posey Silva (detail), Silva Family Papers. Courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society, Savannah.

smith, alice ravenel huger (1876–1958)

In 1916 and 1917, Smith worked with visiting printmakers Helen Hyde (1868–1919) and Bertha Jaques (1863–1941), who shared their knowledge of wood block prints. It was also during this time that Smith’s cousin, Motte Alston Read (1872–1920), made available his extensive collection of Ukioy-e Japanese prints which she catalogued for him. She also pulled several impressions from an authentic Japanese wood block. Along with her protégé Elizabeth O’Neill Verner (1883–1979) and Woodstock artist and part-time Charleston resident Alfred Hutty (1877–1954), Smith was one of the nine founding members of the Charleston Etchers Club in 1923. In its heyday, the group shared expertise, exhibitions, and the use of a press, which was housed at the Charleston Museum. Throughout her long life, Smith used her art and publications to champion her birthplace and its heritage, fueling the Charleston Renaissance, an early twentieth century cultural and economic renewal of the city. In 1914, she issued a portfolio of reproductions illustrating the distinguished Palladian house erected for Miles Brewton in the 1760s: Twenty Drawings of the Pringle House on King Street, Charleston, S. C., so titled because the Pringles were the current residents. She collaborated with her father on an influential book, The Dwelling Houses of Charleston, South Carolina, which was published in 1917. Smith created sixty drawings of notable local residences to accompany his text, which consisted more of ownership provenance than architectural history. These publications, along with an article Smith wrote on doorways that appeared in a national art magazine, helped to fuel Charleston’s nascent preservation movement. From the early 1920s forward, Smith concentrated on watercolor, the medium that would define her oeuvre. She also began to exhibit beyond Charleston, participating in Southern States Art League touring exhibitions, as well as at the esteemed Knoedler’s Gallery in New York. Between 1921 and 1930, forty-two exhibitions of her work circulated throughout the region and further afield—to Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Milwaukee, and Newport. Smith herself

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Descended from French Huguenots, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith was born in Charleston, South Carolina on July 14, 1876 to Daniel Elliott Huger Smith (1846–1932) and his wife, Caroline Ravenel Huger (1844–1889). Both her maternal and paternal lineage was of local prominence, and one of the artist’s ancestors, Arthur Middleton (1742– 1787), was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Throughout Alice Smith’s life, the history and heritage of Charleston sustained and inspired her art. Her father was a cotton broker who had spent much of his own youth on the family rice plantation, Smithfield; he was also an antiquarian of considerable renown. Following her mother’s death when Alice was twelve, the most dominant force in her life was her paternal grandmother, Eliza Carolina Middleton Huger Smith (1824–1919). A resourceful and compelling person who survived early widowhood and the devastations of the Civil War, she managed to keep her family together in the house at 69 Church Street.

Lacking the financial resources for study outside Charleston, Alice Smith was taught at home and in local schools. She took art lessons at the Carolina Art Association where her teacher was a French woman, Louise Fery. When the noted Tonalist painter Birge Harrison (1854–1929) began in 1908 to spend winters in Charleston, she offered him studio space in the kitchen house behind the family home; their ensuing informal conversations served as a kind of critique of her art. Later, Smith and her sister kept studios nearby, where Alice painted and Caroline Smith gave music lessons.

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rarely traveled, preferring life in Charleston, where she was involved in various organizations such as the Gibbes Art Gallery and the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings. She also made herself available to prospective clients, tourists who began to flock to Charleston in the springtime. Always keenly interested in heritage, architecture, and preservation, Smith was a member of the committee that researched and published This Is Charleston, a landmark 1944 inventory of Charleston architecture. In recognition of her efforts to inspire and nourish the arts of the South, Smith was awarded an honorary degree by Mount Holyoke College in 1937. Smith’s most ambitious publication, A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties, was issued in 1936. The volume included narratives by her father and Herbert Ravenel Sass (1884–1958), a local historian, along with reproductions of thirty watercolors illustrating the cultivation of rice, life on a plantation, and the seasonal changes of the landscape. Four years later, she issued a small volume on the sketchbook of antebellum artist Charles Fraser (1776– 1860) that depicted area plantations and churches, her second published study of the revered Charleston painter. About 1950, at the age of seventy-five, Smith undertook the writing of her autobiography. Entitled “Reminiscences,” the manuscript consists of rich recollections of her childhood, local customs, and some of her experiences as an artist. At the time of her eightieth birthday in 1956, she was honored by her friends with the publication Alice Ravenel Huger Smith of Charleston, South Carolina: An Appreciation on the Occasion of her Eightieth Birthday. She died on February 3, 1958 and was buried near her parents in Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston. There, her tombstone reads: “Nature I loved and next to Nature, Art.” ECP & MRS

Artist image: Photograph of Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (detail). Courtesy of the Charleston Museum, South Carolina (MK 10917c).

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smith, gladys nelson (1890–1980) The fourth of ten children, Gladys Nelson Smith was born near Chelsea, Kansas, on August 15, 1890 to Joseph Kibler Nelson (1844–1917) and his wife, Ida May Brown Nelson (1861–1943). Located northeast of Wichita, the small farming community is now partially submerged beneath the manmade reservoir known as El Dorado Lake. Joseph Nelson was a prosperous farmer with several tracts of land, and his wife taught at a one-room Chelsea schoolhouse where Gladys was enrolled as a student. In “My Sister, Gladys,” a remembrance commissioned for a 1984 retrospective exhibition, Josephine Nelson (1898– 1995) recalled how their mother “knew what inadequate time the best-meaning teacher had for beginners” and “would have felt disgraced if a child of hers had not been able to read, write and do sums before being entrusted to the community ‘teacher.’” The Nelson home was one where music, art, and reading played an important role. Josephine Nelson remembered subscriptions to such periodicals as “the old Century, Review of Reviews, Outlook, and the peerless St. Nicholas and Youth’s Companion.” As a child, Gladys submitted verse to St. Nicholas, for which she received silver and gold badges as well as modest cash prizes. With these foundations, the pursuit of knowledge and a deep love of the land remained central to Gladys’ life. After graduating from El Dorado High School in Butler County, Kansas, Gladys Nelson attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence for two years and received a teacher’s certificate. She then taught painting and drawing at the Jetmore, Kansas, high school from 1915 to 1917. Following the death of her father in the spring of 1917, she returned to the University of Kansas to complete a bachelor’s degree in painting. While there, she met Errett Garrison Smith (1890–1973), whom she married in 1918. When Errett shipped out to serve in World War I, Smith joined several of her sisters in New Haven, Connecticut, where they briefly worked in a munitions factory. She then went to New York where she enrolled at the Art Students League, but her studies there were curtailed when she fell victim to the influenza epidemic.

Upon Errett’s return from military service in France, the young couple briefly settled in his hometown of Minneapolis, Kansas, where he served as a government attorney. They moved to Chicago in 1923, which afforded Gladys several months of study at the Art Institute of Chicago. These years marked the beginning of her efforts to establish herself as a painter with gallery connections; her work was sold at the What-Not Shop in Topeka and the Thurber Galleries in Chicago. In 1924, the Smiths settled in Washington, D.C. For the next six years, Smith pursued her craft at the Corcoran School of Art, taking composition and portrait classes, receiving several certificates for her work, and proving a durable participant in gallery events. One of her instructors was Edmund C. Tarbell (1862–1938), noted for his Impressionist technique and paintings of his family. On a two-month trip to Europe with her husband—December 1930 to February 1931— she realized long-anticipated goals of seeing the art and landscape of the old world. Not long after their return, Gladys Smith joined the prestigious Society of Washington Artists and the couple settled into a carriage house at 1749 St. Matthew’s Court, NW, behind the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle and some six blocks north of the Corcoran. In recognition of her achievements during these years, she was elected to membership in the Arts Club of Washington, an impressive connection that provided another venue for exhibitions of her work. Smith’s paintings were also exhibited in group shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and at what is now known as the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She developed a solid reputation for her portraits, especially of children. In 1936, the Smiths—who never had children of their own—purchased a sixty-eight acre farm near Urbana in Frederick County, Maryland, as a weekend retreat and, five years later, they moved to their final home on Cummings Lane in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The Frederick County farm would become the scene for many of Smith’s most colorful landscapes, near mystical visions of vividly colored foliage cast in brilliant sunlight. Throughout these years, Gladys Smith lived a creative existence: building her own frames, braiding intricate rugs in patterns of her own design, embroidering clothing, and gardening.

ECP

Artist image: Gladys Nelson Smith (1890–1980), Self Portrait, oil on canvas board, 15 x 12 inches (detail). The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina.

thieme, anthony johannes (1888–1954) Antonius Johannes Thieme was born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands on February 20, 1888. According to miscellaneous notes made by his wife which are included in the artist’s papers at the Archives of American Art, “from the age of 8, he drew everything in sight,” including “famous Dutch master drawings.” To discourage these interests, “his troubled parents sent him to a naval school in the north of Holland,” where he “learned the power and beauty of the sea—the trapping of old ships” and harbors “which he could not wait to paint.” His brief experience at the naval school led to his being asked to accompany an uncle, who captained a sailing ship, on a trip to America at the age of fifteen. This first brief visit was just three weeks long and confined to New York and Hoboken. When Thieme returned to Europe, he took up serious art studies, matriculating initially at the Royal Academy of Art at The Hague and later at the prestigious academy in Düsseldorf, Germany. His classes there in the applied arts of basic design, theatrical backdrops, and architectural renderings— many of which were led by the renowned German artist Georg Hacker (1865–1945)—were intended to give him the practical skills required to earn an income. He made summer visits to Italy, to study the light and to paint by the

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Although Smith continued to paint in the years after World War II, she became quite discouraged by the critical preference for non-objective art in the juried art world. For a while in the early 1950s, she stopped painting altogether and began writing poetry. In 1966, however, she added a large studio with a north-facing window onto the Chevy Chase house and took up her brush again. Around the age of eighty, Smith’s health began to fail: she was

diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1970, suffered from glaucoma and a debilitating fall, and endured the death of her adoring husband in 1973. As her mental health and eyesight declined, her sister Josephine moved in to care for her. Gladys Nelson Smith died in her sleep on September 15, 1980. In her capacity as executor Josephine Nelson added “painted by Gladys Nelson Smith, 1890–1980” to the back of many of her unsigned canvases.

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sea, and eventually spent two years in Naples. Thieme also made several visits to Paris, where he associated with the Dutch expatriate artist Kees van Dongen (1877–1968). In 1913, he worked briefly in Argentina. The artist had an ear for languages and conversed fluently in five. With the prospect of stage commissions waiting, Thieme returned to America in 1917, anglicizing his first name to Anthony in the process. For ten years, he was employed as a theatrical set designer, working first in New York and then painting backdrops for the Henry Jewett Players and at Copley Theater in Boston. He also began to create a body of work based on his plein air painting excursions to the Cape Cod area. A highly successful showing and sale of these works at Boston’s Grace Horne Galleries in 1928 marked the end of his theatrical work and the beginning of his career as a full-time painter. In 1929, Thieme settled in Rockport, Massachusetts. Later that year, on August 1, he married Lillian M. “Becky” Beckett (1891?–1984), a fashion designer whom he had met at the wedding of a mutual friend, the sculptor Richard Henry Recchia (1885–1983). The couple purchased an old cottage on South Street in Rockport where they would be based for the rest of the artist’s life. From 1930 to 1942, Thieme directed a summer school there. His wife recounted that “he was a maestro to his large class” of “doctors, lawyers, ministers, and teachers.” As an instructor, “he stood for no nonsense,” yet had a “wonderful sense of humor that his students detected under his severe manner.” He insisted that his students keep their palettes tidy and be unsparing in their use of paint: “How can you have a brilliant canvas working from a dirty, muddy palette?” he would ask. “Wear holes in the soles of your shoes, but spend money on plenty of paint.”

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Thieme became an American citizen in 1936, but continued to value his European heritage and made regular trips to the continent. He was there in 1932 for exhibitions of his paintings in Paris, Brussels, and The Hague. He returned to Germany in 1938 and spent a great deal of time in Munich. In February of that year, he wrote to his wife of his choice to travel third-class on the trains in order “to be able to judge the common Germans as they are . . . nice to rich and poor alike. I do find them on the whole more serious then I used to know them, and they are heart and soul with Hitler.” Ominously, he adds that “they do not like the Jews and are not afraid to say so.” Thieme also reported that “the modernistic . . . kunst is not to be seen in Germany,” and that he discovered many artists to be working in a style “on the order of the Grand Central Galleries,” a reference to the realist representations by artists working apart from the emerging non-objective

style. On this trip, Thieme renewed his friendship with his former mentor Georg Hacker, whose haunting landscapes composed in oddly contrasting colors with Symbolist undertones, he greatly admired. He later sponsored a showing of Hacker’s work in Boston, to “repay him for much kindness.” When the old medieval port of Rotterdam was destroyed by German bombs in May 1940, Thieme wept. He then donated twelve paintings to an auction benefitting the Queen Wilhelmina Fund held in Boston. When her daughter Princess Juliana visited Boston, he was invited to a reception at the Gardner Palace in her honor; after the war, he was introduced to Queen Wilhelmina herself. Also in 1940, he was contacted by Roger William Riis (1894– 1953), an author and writer for Reader’s Digest, and asked to respond in writing to the question of what “led Americans of foreign birth to come to this country, and to ask those Americans whether they had gotten in the United States the things they wanted here.” The artist’s response had very little to do with “things,” but rather with place and the customs of the people. Thieme did acknowledge that he had “settled in Rockport, on Cape Ann,” where he had “everything I want in the way of home, social and professional life.” Yet he did make several stinging remarks on American society’s materialism, as well as the tendency to seek easy success in the art world. “At this time a word of warning is needed in the art world. In the last few years too many mediocre paintings have been allowed to hang in exhibitions. This has happened because art galleries have needed the fee of the artist. However, if continued, it will lower the standard of art in the United States for the public is being very much confused seeing bad art hung beside good art.” Students, he bemoaned, “expect to be artists with one course of instruction. Few of them want to learn to draw. . . . One sees, therefore, a great deal of superficial work lacking in sincerity.” During the war years, Thieme sought to assist the United States Navy. Writing to the Chief of the Bureau of Ships in Washington, D.C., in December 1941, he announced an unusual invention: “I have invented a flexible cover, rubber gasketed, to be lowered into place over a breach in the hull of a vessel, which when lowered into place, adheres to the hull by electro magnets. The advantages of this flexible cover are great strength and the fact that the patch permits the welding of the hold while it is in place.” There is no indication that the Navy took advantage of his breakthrough. Thieme’s greatest personal tragedy occurred in 1946 when his Rockport studio and gallery burned, destroying a significant accumulated body of work. It was apparently

a blow from which he never fully recovered, experiencing recurring bouts of depression which he tried to relieve by winter travel to warm painting locales. Between 1946 and his death in 1954, he worked in Charleston, South Carolina; St. Augustine, Florida; Nassau, Bahamas; Guatemala; and Mexico. St. Augustine proved especially inspirational. When work based on his observations of the colonial city was shown at New York’s Grand Central Art Galleries in November 1948, the catalogue reported that Thieme found “tremendous inspiration not only in the gracious old city, within the gates, but in the negro sections, at the docks, in the swamps, by the rivers.” From 1950 to 1954, he also kept a seasonal studio in Grasse, near the French Riviera. Throughout his active career, Thieme exhibited widely and enjoyed commercial reward; his work was represented in important annuals at the National Academy of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among others. He held membership in prestigious arts associations, including the American Water Color Society, the Boston Art Club, the National Arts Club, and the Salmagundi Club. Despite these successes and his wife’s constant encouragement, Thieme’s emotional struggles persisted. A miscellaneous note in his papers questioning the need for a set retirement age of sixty-five contends that “to be reminded constantly of growing older . . . is a bit depressing.” The circumstances of his death in December 1954 remain unclear. While making the annual trek to Florida, he died by his own hand in a Greenwich, Connecticut, hotel. His body was returned to Rockport for burial. After his death, Becky Thieme moved to Palm Beach, Florida, where she operated an art gallery specializing in the sale of his paintings for many years. She died in 1984. ECP

Artist image: Photograph of Anthony Thieme (detail). Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

turner, helen maria (1858–1958) Helen Maria Turner, the seventh and penultimate child of New Orleans residents Mortimer Turner (1809–1871) and his wife, Helen Davidson Turner (1821–1865), was born in Louisville, Kentucky, during an extended family visit. Her subsequent sibling and lifelong companion, Laurette “Lettie” Pintard Turner (1861–1923), was born after the family’s return to Louisiana, during their residency in Baton Rouge. Mortimer Turner was a planter, commercial goods factor active in the coal business, and the owner of several shipping lines which worked the Gulf Coast and lower Mississippi River Valley. The artist’s maternal greatgrandfather was John Pintard (1759–1844), a merchant and philanthropist credited with the founding of the New-York Historical Society in 1804 and the American Academy of Fine Arts in 1816. The Turners suffered devastating financial and personal losses during the course of the Civil War. Mortimer Turner’s fleet of cargo vessels was confiscated by Union troops, and their plantation home was burned to the ground. An elder son, Charles, was killed in battle in 1862 while fighting for the Confederacy. Then in 1865, Helen Davidson Turner died following a prolonged illness, followed six years later by her husband.

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Helen Turner and her siblings were entrusted to the care of a maternal uncle, Dr. John Pintard Davidson (1812– 1890), whose nurture and interest in the arts sustained the young girl who displayed aesthetic promise. The family faced economic strains that Turner realized would make formal art training impossible, as she later recounted: “I realized that I loved art, but that educational training was out of the question. Poverty was all about me.” She attended the Louisiana State Normal School, graduating with teaching credentials in 1878. Upon her return to New Orleans, as Judith Bonner has noted, she “made palmetto fans, paper flowers, and decorations for Mardi Gras, but the meager income did not permit her to study in New York.” When the artistic displays of the 1884–1885 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans inspired the formation of local schools of art, Turner was a beneficiary. William Woodward (1859–

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1939), a Massachusetts native who would become one of Louisiana’s best known painters in the Impressionist style, was her teacher at the free drawing class held on Saturdays at Tulane University. At the school connected to the newly formed Artists’ Association of New Orleans, her teachers included Andres Molinary (1847–1915), Paul Poincy (1833–1909), and Bror Anders Wikstrom (1854–1909). Turner taught at St. Mary’s College in Dallas, Texas, from 1893 to 1895, diligently saving her salary to underwrite a move to New York. The ever faithful Lettie went with her as cook and housekeeper. In 1895, at the age of thirtyseven, Turner entered classes at the Art Students League. Her teachers there were leading figures in the American art world: J. Carroll Beckwith (1852–1917), Kenyon Cox (1856–1919), Joseph De Camp (1858–1923), Douglas Volk (1856–1935), and Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922). She also studied at the Cooper Union’s School of Design for Women from 1898 to 1901 and again between 1904 and 1905. Although she was the recipient of a League prize for portrait painting in 1899, Turner continued her practical pursuits. From 1902 to 1919, she taught classes in costume and clothing design at the Manhattan branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association. During those same years, she also painted portraits; took study trips abroad with William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) in 1904, 1905, and 1911; and participated in art exhibitions at notable venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the National Academy of Design, to which she was named an associate in 1914. Seven years later, Turner was elevated to full academician at the National Academy, becoming the fourth female and first Louisianan to achieve the rank. Commercial outlets such as the Milch Gallery, Macbeth Gallery, and Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery showed her work alongside that of Impressionism’s American luminaries, including Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) and Daniel Garber (1880–1958).

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In 1906, Turner’s friend, the artist and teacher Charles Courtney Curran (1861–1942), invited her to join the burgeoning summer art colony at Cragsmoor, in upstate New York. Relieved of teaching duties and surrounded by like-minded artists, Turner thrived, creating the most significant works of her career. After renting a cottage for a few seasons, she designed a two-story cabin, complete with studio, that she named Takusan. From 1910 to 1941, Takusan served as her retreat and the setting for many of

her domestic scenes featuring women in various states of repose and quiet leisure. After Laurette’s death in 1923, Turner began to spend less time in New York City and, in 1926, returned to a permanent residence in New Orleans. Among her acquaintances there was the architect and historic preservationist Richard Koch (1889–1971). With Koch’s help, she found an apartment and studio at 717 St. Peter Street in the French Quarter. She would remain there until her last years, when she moved to 3501 Carondolet Street in the Garden District. Upon her return to New Orleans, Turner became a prominent figure in the local art scene, active in the Arts and Crafts Club and friends with many community artists. She also returned to her earlier pursuit of portraiture, fulfilling commissions for society matrons and executing a compelling likeness of the photographer Joseph Woodson “Pops” Whitesell (1876–1958). In 1930, Turner spent several months in Mexico where she created genre scenes and cityscapes that deviated from her typical style; this small body of work was later exhibited at the National Arts Club and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Isaac Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art) honored her with a one-woman exhibition in 1949. In her later years, Turner was quite vocal about her disdain for modern, non-objective art, describing it as “ugly, hideous, incomprehensible!” in an article published in the March 6, 1949 Louisville Courier-Journal. Having outlived both the academic standard bearers of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century thrill to Impressionism, Turner was interested in modern art, but not impressed. Just months after celebrating her ninetyninth birthday with a special party, Turner died on January 31, 1958. In the years after her death, interest in Turner’s art faded. In a companion catalogue to a 1983 retrospective held at Cragsmoor, author Lewis Rabbage observed that “Helen Turner realized, at least in her later years, that her work was, in a real sense, categorically passé even as it was created.” While that may be true, the current revival of enthusiasm for Turner’s art may reveal that, like other painters with a modest extant catalog, her ability to capture the beauty and sensitivity of quiet moments in repose may indeed stand the test of time. ECP

Artist image: Photograph of Helen Turner, Courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection (2004.0154).

wikstrom, bror anders (1854–1909) There were many facets to Bror Anders Wikstrom: seaman, painter, etcher, cartoonist, and designer of Carnival costumes and floats. He was born April 14, 1854 in Stora Lassåna in Nerike, Sweden, in the south central section of the country. His father was a merchant who hoped his son would follow his example, but instead Wikstrom escaped to the sea as a teenager, rising—according to some reports— to the rank of captain. He sketched regularly while ashore and spent time in Vera Cruz, Mexico, where he was impressed by the art he encountered. When he realized that worsening nearsightedness would be an impediment to a continued maritime career, Wikstrom enrolled at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts to study under Edward Perseus (1841–1890), a painter and portraitist very much in the academic tradition. Wikstrom furthered his education in Paris at the Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi. Wikstrom immigrated to the United States in 1881, visiting New York City briefly before spending about a year in Florida. He first visited New Orleans in 1883, and soon after made it his permanent home. Shortly after his arrival, he drew cartoons for the covers of two New Orleans weeklies, the Mascot in 1883 and Figaro in 1884. Wikstrom became actively involved in the local art scene and was one of the founders of the Artists’ Association of New Orleans (1886–1903), which promoted regional art through exhibitions and education. In 1885, the organization established a school where Wikstrom taught sketching pro bono; he also played a key role in creating and funding the 1887 publication of Arts and Letters, an Artists’ Association periodical that included literary selections and visual art.

MRS

Artist image: Photograph of Bror Anders Wikstrom. Courtesy Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library.

wiley, anna catherine (1879–1958) Anna Catherine Wiley was born on February 18, 1879 in Coal Creek, Tennessee, to Edwin Floyd Wiley (1839–1919) and Mary Catherine McAdoo Wiley (1849–1926). Both families were longtime residents of Anderson County with extensive land holdings and valuable mineral rights. In keeping with the loyalist sentiments of east Tennessee, both Edwin and his father served with Union forces during the Civil War. Mary Catherine’s family was very prominent in political affairs. Her half-brother, William Gibbs McAdoo, Jr. served as Secretary of the Treasury in President Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet and married Wilson’s daughter Eleanor. The fourth of her parents’ ten children, Catherine was especially close to her sister Eleanor McAdoo Wiley (1876–1977), who also pursued

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Wikstrom’s paintings derived from his experiences at sea, the lush Louisiana landscape, and his extensive domestic, Caribbean, and European travels. He exhibited locally and at the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville, as well as at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, commonly known as the World’s Fair. In 1884, Wikstrom served as an assistant to his ailing neighbor and

fellow Swede Charles Briton (1840–1884), who was one of the first established Carnival artists in New Orleans’ annual Mardi Gras celebrations. Following Briton’s death, Wikstrom became the premier float designer, working for the Rex and Proteus krewes for decades. His elaborate creations often had an exotic flavor and were based on such Middle Eastern classics as the The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1905 and the “Queen of Serpents” from The Arabian Nights in 1907. Because of his considerable reputation, Wikstrom was invited to create parade designs for New York’s 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River and the centennial of Robert Fulton’s implementation of the paddle steamer. Though he had been ill for several weeks, Wikstrom was at work on this project when he died in New York on April 27, 1909. He is buried in Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.

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painting. In 1882, the Wiley family moved to Knoxville, first to Laurel Avenue and then to 1317 White Avenue, both locations adjacent to the University of Tennessee campus. She and several of her siblings would have rich associations with the University. Her brother, Edwin Montgomery Wiley (1872–1924), a writer and art historian, served as the chief university librarian from 1891 to 1899, and her sister, Emma May Wiley (1874–1970), worked as a secretary in the university treasurer’s office for thirty years. The University of Tennessee at Knoxville became coeducational in 1891, four years before Catherine Wiley’s enrollment there in 1895. She remained at the university until 1897, creating a voluminous body of illustrative work, some of which appeared in the college yearbook, Volunteer. A large group of these drawings and illustrations are now part of the Anna Catherine Wiley Sketches Collection at the University of Tennessee Libraries. Wiley left Knoxville in 1903 for further study in New York, enrolling first in the Art Students League where she studied under Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951). In 1905, she took classes with William Merritt Chase (1849– 1916) at the rival New York School of Art. Upon her return to Knoxville later that year, she joined the faculty of the University of Tennessee’s department of home economics, teaching there until 1918. Summers were often spent in study elsewhere, notably with Robert Reid (1862–1929) and Martha Walter (1875–1976) in New England, while at home, she received instruction from fellow Knoxville artist and mentor Enoch Lloyd Branson (1853–1925). Wiley was an enthusiastic member of the local Nicholson Art League, which had originally been founded as the Knoxville Art Club in the early 1890s and later renamed for longtime president and respected professor Hunter Nicholson (1834–1901). The club sponsored exhibitions and educational forums; Wiley was a frequent lecturer on the topic of American Impressionism and served as president in 1913. That same year, she was chairman of the art committee of the National Conservation Exposition in Knoxville; the fair’s exhibition included entries by Arthur Davies (1862–1928), Robert Henri (1865–1929), Irving Wiles (1861–1948), J. Alden Weir (1852–1919), and other painters of national stature.

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Throughout these years, Wiley was also an active participant in national and regional exhibitions, including the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Southwestern Fair held in Atlanta in 1917. Though she was a frequent winner of medals and citations at these exhibitions, Wiley was never elected to membership in the National Academy of Design, a rejection often cited

as being partially responsible for the state of mental illness into which she declined in the early 1920s. Following the death of her parents in 1919 and 1926, as well as that of her close friend and mentor Lloyd Branson in 1925, Wiley’s mental health became increasingly unstable. After what has historically been described as a complete breakdown in 1926, her sisters committed her to a Philadelphia psychiatric institution. Wiley’s death certificate cites her place of death as Norristown State Hospital, a facility established in 1880 and once known as the State Lunatic Hospital at Norristown, and notes schizophrenia as a contributing factor. After thirty-two years of confinement, Catherine Wiley died on May 16, 1958. Her body was returned for burial in the Wiley family plot at Old Gray Cemetery in Knoxville. ECP

Artist image: Anna Catherine Wiley (1879–1958), Catherine Wiley: Self Portrait, n.d., oil on canvas, 23½ x 15 inches. Collection of David and Diana Wiley Blackledge; photograph courtesy of the Tennessee State Museum, Nashville.

woodward, ellsworth (1861–1939) Although he was not a native of the South, Ellsworth Woodward became a force in Southern art education and a dynamic spokesman for his adopted region. He was born on July 14, 1861 in Seekonk, Massachusetts, an agricultural area near the border with Rhode Island. His parents— Erastus Marion Woodward (1824–1903), a farmer, and Maria Carpenter Woodward (1823–1895), a homemaker— had six children. Ellsworth and his older brother William (1859–1939) would both become artists, a career path ignited by their visit to the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. From 1878 to 1880, Ellsworth attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, established in 1877 as one of the first institutions of higher learning to specialize in art and design. Around 1884, he furthered

his education in Munich, studying briefly with Samuel G. Richards (1853–1893) and an instructor often cited as Richard Fehr—probably Friedrich Fehr (1862–1927), who operated a private academy outside Munich. A few years later, Woodward took a leave of absence from his teaching duties and returned to Germany to work in the studio of Carl Marr (1858–1936). In 1885, Ellsworth Woodward—still a young man in his twenties—joined his brother William on the art faculty of Tulane University in New Orleans. Two years later, he became professor of art at Sophie Newcomb College, the women’s coordinate of Tulane, which had been founded in 1886. In 1890, he was made director of the art school, a position he held for forty-one years. Under Woodward’s leadership, Newcomb gained a national reputation for its particular style of pottery, distinctive for its green-blue matte glaze and decorative motifs derived from local flora and fauna. Infused with the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, Woodward developed a curriculum to counter the proliferation of machine-made products, emphasizing instead the creation of beautiful handcrafted objects suitable for everyday use. In addition to pottery, other offerings in the applied arts included book design, silversmithing, jewelry, and textiles, all of which met Woodward’s goal of preparing women to pursue vocations in these arenas.

for organizations such as the College Art Association, the American Library Association, and the Atlanta Art Association. Three years after his retirement from Newcomb College in 1931, he was appointed to direct the Gulf States Public Works of Art Project. While his teaching and leadership responsibilities claimed the majority of his time, Woodward faithfully pursued his own craft. He made drawings and etchings, and painted in oil and watercolor. The latter works—impressionistic scenes depicting Louisiana landscapes, New Orleans city life, and the places he visited while traveling—were represented in important exhibitions, including annuals at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After a full life dedicated to art education and promoting Southern art, Woodward died in New Orleans on February 28, 1939 at the age of seventyeight. MRS

Artist image: Wayman Elbridge Adams (1883–1959), Ellsworth Woodward: Study, oil on canvas, 27 1/4 x 23 3/8 inches. Courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection. Gift of Laura Simon Nelson (1995.103.1).

Besides painting, teaching, and his administrative responsibilities at Newcomb, Woodward was active in many local and regional organizations. He was a leading advocate for the establishment of the New Orleans Art Association in 1900 and the Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans in 1922; he also supported preservation efforts in the historic French Quarter. He was integrally involved in the establishment of the Delgado Museum of Art (now the New Orleans Museum of Art) and, beginning in 1925, was its acting director for fourteen years, six of which included duty as president of the board as well. In addition, he was a founder of the Natchitoches Art Colony in Cane River Parish, Louisiana, a plein air community active between 1921 and 1937.

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Woodward’s most influential role may have been as a catalyst and champion of the Southern States Art League, an organization he led as president from its inception in 1921 until 1939. He explained its purpose to the local press: “The movement is not centralized in any city or around any group of artists: it is of the South, for the South and by the South, and its ultimate aim is to form in the South an appreciation of what the South can and will create in the fine arts.” A skilled orator and charismatic persona, he delivered speeches on art around the country

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annotations The following pages include both endnote citations and bibliographic references. For each artist featured in the catalogue of works, complete documentation—including primary and secondary sources—is consolidated under that artist’s individual heading. This section concludes with a select bibliography on the topic of Impressionism, especially as borne out in the American South. The Johnson Collection’s extensive library of nearly five thousand volumes, as well as its artist files, is available to scholars and museums. For more information on the Johnson Collection library, please visit thejohnsoncollection.org.

the larger world of scenic impressions 1

Napoleon III’s remarks were published as an announcement in the Parisian paper Le Moniteur Universel on April 24, 1863.

2

F or observations on the importance of the annual Salon to the Parisian climate of taste, see Otto Friedrich, Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), 15.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s review of the exhibition appeared in the October 1863 issue of The Fine Arts Quarterly Review. “Painting in France: The Salon of 1863,” The Fine Arts Quarterly Review 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864), 261. The “public and critics were screaming with horror at the nude in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, unaware that her outlines were taken direct from Raphael. That fear of the body which is usually called Victorian is a subject worthy of more disinterested examination than it has yet received. Unlike the scruples of the early Christians, it had no religious motive and was not connected with a cult of chastity. Rather it seems to have been a necessary part of that enormous facade behind which the social revolution of the nineteenth century could adjust itself.” Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 161.

3

4

John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4th rev. ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 85.

5

See Emile Zola, Mes Haines (Paris, 1866).

6

Rewald, History of Impressionism, 86.

7

F or a discussion of this shift in technique, see Paul Smith, Impressionism: Beneath the Surface (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995), especially 21–31 and 125–128.

8

 leuth Jourdan, Dianne W. Pittman, and Didier Vatuone, Frederic Bazille: Prophet of Impressionism (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn A Museum of Art, 1992), 119.

9

See Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).

10

F or a complete documentary account of Duncan Phillips’ acquisition of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, see the Phillips Collection Records at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

11

William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 306.

12

Frederick Wedmore, Evening Standard (London), July 1, 1882.

13

Adelyn D. Breeskin, The Graphic Art of Mary Cassatt (New York: Museum of Graphic Art, 1967), 10. Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1970), 39.

14 

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186

15

 illiam H. Gerdts, “The Arch-Apostle of the Dab and Spot School: John Singer Sargent as an Impressionist,” in Patricia Hills, W John Singer Sargent (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with H. N. Abrams, 1986), 118.

16

 enry James, “Parisian Festivity,” New York Tribune, May 13, 1876, as cited in Henry James, The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays H on the Pictorial Arts, selected and edited with an introduction by John L. Sweeney (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956), 114.

17

In some readings, the formation of the Ten American Painters (Frank Benson, Joseph De Camp, Thomas Dewing, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Robert Reid, Edward Simmons, Edmund Tarbell, John Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, and, later, William Merritt Chase) in 1897 was seen as a revolt against the National Academy of Design and various other New York Arts organizations such as the Society of American Artists. See Gerdts, American Impressionism, 171–185. However, no American school or organization represented a truly national salon of the same overwhelming presence as was to be found in London or Paris, both of which were their countries’ governmental capitals and commercial centers.

18

David F. Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 190.

19

See Richard J. Boyle, “American Impressionism,” in In This Academy: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1805–1976 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1976), 138–161.

20

 ernard Denvir, The Thames and Hudson Encyclopedia of Impressionism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 14. For B additional information on the Académie Julian, see Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art, Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940).

21

George du Maurier, Trilby (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1894), 78.

22

 onald G. Pisano, A Leading Spirit in American Art: William Merritt Chase, 1859–1916 (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, University R of Washington, 1983), 87–88.

23

Daniel Wildenstein, Monet’s Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978), 15.

24

D. Scott Atkinson in Lasting Impressions: American Painters in France, 1865–1915 (Evanston, IL: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1992), 11.

some things that are charming 1

Hassam to William Howe Downes, 28 May 1889, transcribed in Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Childe Hassam, exhibition catalogue (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1993), 179, quoted in H. Barbara Weinberg, Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (New Haven, CT: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 59.

2

 Kevin J. Avery, “A Historiography of the Hudson River School,” in American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River See School (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), 3–5.

3

Elliot Clark to Don Lewis, 7 January 1976 (correct date probably 1977). Archives, Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, GA.

4

 hase, “Lecture to Art Students,” January 15, 1916, typescript, Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, C quoted in Keith L. Bryant, Jr., William Merritt Chase: A Genteel Bohemian (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 115.

5

Bryant, William Merritt Chase, 211–212.

6

 ccording to page 50 of Bellows’ “The Artist’s Record Book A,” in the collection of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library A at Ohio State University in Columbus, OH.

7

 obert Henri, The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique R of Picture Making, The Study of Art Generally, and on Appreciation, repr. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1923; New York: Basic Books, 2007), 164.

8

 ary L. Alexander, “Cincinnati Artist’s Painting that Nearly won the ‘Queer’ Prize,” Cincinnati Times-Star, December 15, 1913; M and Alexander, “The Week in Art Circles,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November 24, 1935, quoted in Genetta McLean, Dixie Selden: An American Impressionist from Cincinnati, 1868–1935 (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Galleries, 2001), 50 and 51.

9

 nonymous letter, The Crayon (January 1857), quoted in Harold Spencer, ed., American Art: Readings from the Colonial Era A to the Present (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), 147. Hassam to Downes, 28 May 1889, quoted in Weinberg, Childe Hassam, 82.

11

 ary Taft, a writer for the New York Times, dubbed Malone the “garden artist of America” in a review of her exhibition M at the Women’s University Club in New York in 1920, as cited in Suzanne Kamata, “Blondelle Malone: The Sojourn of an American Garden Artist,” Sandlapper (Summer 2008), 14; Blondelle Malone’s letter to her parents is quoted in Louise Jones DuBose, Enigma: The Career of Blondelle Malone in Art and Society, 1879–1951 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1963), 64–65.

12

S mith, “Reminiscences,” in Martha R. Severens, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith: An Artist, a Place and a Time (Charleston, SC: Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Art Gallery, 1993), 119.

13

Harriet Porcher Stoney to Albert Simons, 22 March 1918. Albert Simons Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC.

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10

187

14

Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life Among the Mountaineers, rev. repr. ed. (New York: Outing Publishing Company, 1913; Alexander, NC: Land of the Sky Books, 2001), 50.

15

Cragsmoor Journal, August 1906, quoted in Barbara Buff, “Cragsmoor, An Early American Art Colony,” The Magazine Antiques 114 (November 1978), 1065.

16

E llsworth Woodward, “Address Delivered Before the Atlanta Art Association . . . At a Banquet Held at the Biltmore Hotel on the Occasion of the Dedication of the High Museum” (lecture, Atlanta, GA, October 16, 1926), transcript, Ellsworth Woodward Papers, Center for the Study of Southern Art, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA.

wayman elbridge adams 1

 ilbur D. Peat, Wayman Adams, N.A. 1883–1959, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings (Indianapolis, IN: The John Herron Art W Museum, 1959), n.p.

2

Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., “William Merritt Chase,” in Franklin Kelly, Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Deborah Chotner, and John Davis, American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press for the National Gallery of Art, 1996), 58.

3

Ernest W. Watson, “Wayman Adams Paints a Portrait,” Art Instruction 3, no. 6 (June 1939): 10.

4

Henri, The Art Spirit, 17; 147–148.

additional sources Adams, Wayman, Papers. Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin; Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, LA; and Thomas Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Earle, Helen L. Biographical Sketches of American Artists. Charleston, SC: Garnier and Co., 1972. Keilman, Tom. Wayman Adams: American Artist, 1883–1959. Waco, TX: Tom Keilman and Sons Auctioneers, 1993. Lockman, DeWitt McClellan, Papers. Interview with Wayman Adams. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Newton, Judith. A Grand Tradition: The Hoosier Salon Art and Artists 1925–1990. Indianapolis, IN: Hoosier Salon Patrons Association, Incorporated, 1993.

george charles aid 1

Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 547.

2

 illiam Tait, “Napoleon at Fontainebleau,” in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1834, as printed in The Museum of Foreign Literature W and Science 26, January–June 1835 (Philadelphia: Adam Waldie for E. Littell, 1835), 494.

3

P eter Bermingham, American Art in the Barbizon Mood (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Collection of Fine Arts, 1975), 11.

4

Ibid., 10.

5

 ichael McCue, Paris and Tryon: George C. Aid (1872–1938) and His Artistic Circles in France and North Carolina (Columbus, M NC: Condar Press, 2003), 11–12.

6

Ibid., 199.

additional sources Blackman, Lynne, ed. Southern Masters of Printmaking. Spartanburg, SC: Spartanburg County Museum of Art, 2005.

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188

McCue, Michael J. “George C. Aid.” In The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Art and Architecture, Volume 21, edited by

Judith Bonner and Estill Curtis Pennington. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. ——. Tryon Artists: 1892–1942. Columbus, NC: Condar Press, 2001.

carl christian brenner 1

Justus Bier, “Carl C. Brenner: A German American Landscapist,” The American German Review 17 (April 1951): 21.

2

Ibid.

3

 rthur F. Jones and Bruce Weber, The Kentucky Painter: From the Frontier Era to the Great War (Lexington: University of A Kentucky Art Museum, 1981), 44.

4

Bier, “Carl C. Brenner,” 24.

additional sources Brenner, Carl C., Papers. Filson Historical Society, Louisville, KY; Louisville Free Public Library, Louisville, KY; and Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY. Tobe, Carol Brenner. “Carl Christian Brenner.” In The Encyclopedia of Louisville, edited by John E. Kleber. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

lyell edwin carr 1

New York Times, March 19, 1894.

2

Quoted in Kurtz, Catalogue of Works of Art, 61.

3

Thomas Benedict Clarke, Catalogue of the Thomas B. Clarke Collection of American Pictures (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1891), 24–25.

4

 arguerite Tracy, “New Field in American Art,” The Year’s Art as recorded in The Quarterly Illustrator for 1894 (New York: M Harry C. Jones, 1894), 258.

5

Bermingham, American Art in the Barbizon Mood, 24.

6

Donald Davidson, Still Rebels, Still Yankees, and Other Essays (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 266.

additional sources Carnegie Institute Museum Records. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Carr, Edson I. The Carr Family Records. Rockton, IL: Herald Printing House, 1894. Carr, Lyell. “A Dream Painter.” The Quarterly Illustrator 2, no. 8 (October–December 1894).

william chadwick 1

 ichard H. Love, William Chadwick, 1879–1962: An American Impressionist (Chicago, IL: R. H. Love Galleries, Inc., 1978), R 95–96.

2

P amela D. King, “The Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences and Art in Savannah,” in Pamela D. King and Harry H. DeLorme, Jr., Looking Back: Art in Savannah 1900–1960 (Savannah, GA: Telfair Museum of Art, 1996), 10.

3

King and DeLorme, Looking Back: Art in Savannah, 10.

Chadwick, Pauline, Papers. Formerly with Love Galleries, Chicago, IL; location unknown.

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additional sources

189

elisabeth augusta chant 1

Claude Howell, quoted in Anne G. Brennan, Elisabeth Augusta Chant, 1865–1947 (Wilmington, NC: St. John’s Museum of Art, 1993), 7.

2

Henry Jay MacMillan, Elisabeth Augusta Chant (Wilmington, NC: St. John’s Museum, 1972), n.p.

3

Chant, Wilmington Star-News, July 17, 1938, quoted in Henry Jay MacMillan, Violet and Gold: The Story of Artistic Activity on Cottage Lane (Wilmington, NC: Lower Cape Fear Historical Society, 1991), 22.

additional sources Block, Susan Taylor. “Elisabeth Augusta Chant.” Cape Fear Cogitations (blog). http://susantaylorblock.com/2011/02/19/ elisabeth-augusta-chant-part-one. Chant, Elisabeth, Papers. Cameron Art Museum (formerly St. John’s Museum of Art), Wilmington, NC; and Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN. Coen, Rena Neumann. Minnesota Impressionists. Afton, MN: Afton Historical Society Press, 1996. Conforti, Michael. Art and Life on the Upper Mississippi, 1890–1915. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Crump, Robert. Minnesota Prints and Printmakers, 1900–1945. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, 2009. Howell, Claude. “Two Hundred Years of Painting in North Carolina, 1776–1976.” In Two Hundred Years of the Visual Arts in North Carolina. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1976. The Work of E. A. Chant. Wilmington, NC: The Art League of Wilmington, 1925.

eliot candee clark 1

Eliot Clark, “Notes from Memory,” American Artist 21, no. 6 (June–August 1957), 72.

2

David B. Lawall, Eliot Clark, N.A., Retrospective Exhibition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Art Museum, 1975), 4.

3

Eliot Candee Clark, J. Francis Murphy (privately printed, 1926), 29.

4

Margaret Fowler Clark, “Eliot Clark, N. A. (1883–1980),” unpublished manuscript, 24–25, Eliot Clark Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

5

James Abbott McNeill Whistler delivered his famous “Ten O’Clock Lecture” at Prince’s Hall in London on February 20, 1885; the address was subsequently published by the artist.

6

Jane Judge, “Eliot C. Clark’s Paintings on View,” Savannah Morning News, February 1, 1924.

additional sources Clark, Eliot. Alexander Wyant. New York: privately printed, 1916. ——. History of the National Academy of Design. New York: Columbia University Press, 1954. ——. John Twachtman. New York: privately printed, 1924. ——. Sixty Paintings by Alexander H. Wyant. New York: privately printed, 1920. ——. Studies by American Masters at Cooper Union. New York: privately printed, 1927. Clark, Eliot Candee, Papers. Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. Cohen, Mildred Thaler. Eliot Clark (1883–1980): Artist, Scholar, World Traveler. New York: Marbella Gallery, Inc., 1990. Love, Richard H. Walter Clark (1849–1917) and Eliot Clark (1883–1980): A Tradition in American Painting. Chicago, IL: R. H. Love Galleries, 1980. Pisano, Ronald G. Eliot Clark: American Impressionist, 1883–1980. New York: Hammer Galleries, 1981.

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190

Telfair Museums Archives, Savannah, GA.

kate freeman clark 1

E dmund Russell Freeman to Kate Freeman Clark, 22 February 1900, Kate Freeman Clark Papers, Marshall County Historical Society, Holly Springs, MS, quoted in Cynthia Grant Tucker, Kate Freeman Clark: A Painter Rediscovered (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), 67.

2

Clark, “Recollections of Shinnecock and Mr. Chase,” October 12, 1921, unpublished manuscript, Clark Papers, quoted in Tucker, Kate Freeman Clark, 34.

3

Ibid., 42.

4

Will of Kate Freeman Clark, quoted in Tucker, Kate Freeman Clark, 8.

additional sources Black, Patti Carr. Art in Mississippi, 1720–1980. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998. Jenkins, Kathleen McClain. “Kate Freeman Clark (1875–1957): An Artist and a Lady.” In Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, Elizabeth Anne Payne, Marjorie Julian Spruill, and Susan Ditto, eds. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. ——. Summers of ’96: Shinnecock Revisited: The Inspiration of Kate Freeman Clark by William Merritt Chase. Laurel, MS: Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, 1996. Lawrance, Gary. Houses of the Hamptons, 1880–1930. New York: Acanthus Press, 2007.

colin campbell cooper 1

 illiam H. Gerdts, “Cooper in New York and Beyond,” in William H. Gerdts and Deborah Epstein Solon, East Coast/West W Coast and Beyond: Colin Campbell Cooper, American Impressionist (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2006), 22.

2

See Gerdts, East Coast/West Coast and Beyond for several comparisons between Cooper and Childe Hassam.

additional sources Cooper, Colin Campbell, Autobiographical Notes. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA. ——. “The Poetry of Cities: Eight Paintings by Colin Campbell Cooper, N.A.” Century 100 (October 1920): 793–800. ——. “Skyscrapers and How to Build Them in Paint.” Palette and Bench I and II (January and February 1909): 90–92, 106. Fischer, Courtney, and Frank Goss. “Colin Campbell Cooper, NA (1856–1937): California and New York Impressionist; Noted Orientalist.” Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery. http://www.sullivangoss.com/colin_campbell_cooper. Gerdts, William H., and Deborah E. Solon. “Colin Campbell Cooper, American Impressionist.” American Art Review 18, no. 5 (September–October 2006): 138–151. Goolsby, Tina. “Colin Campbell Cooper: An American Impressionist with a Global Perspective.” Art & Antiques 6, no. 1 (January–February 1983): 56–63. Hansen, James M. An Exhibition of Paintings by Colin Campbell Cooper. Santa Barbara, CA: James M. Hansen, 1981. Howe, Willis E. “The Work of Colin Campbell Cooper.” Brush and Pencil 18, no. 6 (August 1906): 73–75. Hughes, Edan Milton. Artists in California, 1786–1940. San Francisco, CA: Hughes Publishing Company, 1989. Laguna Beach Art Museum. Southern California Artists, 1890–1940. Laguna Beach, CA: Laguna Beach Museum of Art, 1979. Martin, Gloria Rexford. “Then and Now.” Antiques & Fine Art Magazine 9 (November/December 1991): 85–93. Price, Marshall N. “Colin Campbell Cooper: Impressions of New York.” Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2002. Stern, Jean, et al. Reflections of California: The Athalie Richardson Irvine Clark Memorial Exhibition. Irvine, CA: Irvine Museum, 1994.

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Stott, Annette, ed. Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland 1880–1914. Savannah, GA: Telfair Books, 2009.

191

Wall, Pam, and Sara Arnold. “Outside Perspectives Visiting Artists in Charleston.” Antiques and Fine Art Magazine 10, no. 6 (December 2011): 305. Wilson, L. W. “Santa Barbara’s Artist Colony.” American Magazine of Art 12 (December 1921): 411–414.

emma josephine sibley couper 1

 ouper, quoted in Dorothy Joiner, “J. S. Couper: An Art Historian’s Perspective,” in Suzanne Harper, Dorothy Joiner, and C James Longstreet Sibley Jennings, Josephine Sibley Couper (1867–1957): Daughter of the Old South/Artist in a Modern World (Macon, GA: Museum of Arts and Sciences, 1992), 4.

2

J ohn Dewitt McCollough (1822–1902), the parish’s first rector, designed the Episcopal Church of the Advent; he was also responsible for several other Gothic revival churches in South Carolina. The cornerstone was laid in 1850, but due to construction delays and the Civil War, the building was not consecrated until 1864. It was later expanded, and the tower was added in 1915. See John B. Edmunds, The Episcopal Church of the Advent: History and Records 1848–1998 (Spartanburg, SC: Reprint Company, 1998).

3

Couper, quoted in Joiner, “J. S. Couper,” in Harper et al., Josephine Sibley Couper, 8.

additional sources Couper, Josephine Sibley, Archives. Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, GA. Daab, Zan Schuweiler. Josephine Sibley Couper and The Southern Art Spirit. Spartanburg, SC: Spartanburg Art Museum 2002.

john elliott parker daingerfield 1

E lliott Daingerfield to Mr. C. W. Sills, 8 December 1927, location of original unknown; copy in Artist File, Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, SC.

2

Nina Spalding Stevens, “Pilgrimage to the Artist’s Paradise,” Fine Arts Journal (February 1911): 108 and 111.

3

Grand Canyon National Park, Rules and Regulations (Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, 1927), 2.

4

 aingerfield, “Sketch of his Life—written by Elliott Daingerfield—in Response to a Request,” unpublished and undated D manuscript, Elliott Daingerfield Papers, Center for the Study of Southern Art, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA, quoted in J. Richard Gruber, Elliott Daingerfield: Art and Life in North Carolina (Blowing Rock, NC: Blowing Rock Museum of Art and History, 2011), 41 and 27.

5

Daingerfield, quoted in Robert Hobbs, Elliott Daingerfield: Retrospective Exhibition (Charlotte, NC: Mint Museum of Art, 1971), 48.

additional sources Daingerfield, Elliott, Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Eldredge, Charles C. American Imagination and Symbolist Painting. New York: New York University Press, 1979. Eldredge, Charles C., Barbara Babcock Millhouse, and Robert G. Workman. American Originals: Selections from Reynolda House, Museum of American Art. New York: Abbeville Press, 1990. Kinsey, Joni. The Majesty of the Grand Canyon: 150 Years in Art. Bel Air, CA: First Glance Books, 1998. Moore, James Elliott. “Daingerfield, Elliott.” In NCpedia, published online by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. http://ncpedia.org/biography/daingerfield-elliott. Pennington, Estill Curtis, and Richard J. Gruber. Victorian Visionary: The Art of Elliott Daingerfield. Augusta, GA: Morris Museum of Art, 1994.

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192

Sessions, Ralph, et al. The Poetic Vision: American Tonalism. New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2005.

william de leftwich dodge 1

F or a more thorough examination of Dodge’s education and career, see Ronald G. Pisano, William de Leftwich Dodge: Impressions Home and Abroad (New York: Beacon Hill Fine Art, 1998).

2

Richard Guy Wilson, American Renaissance (1876–1917) (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1979), 12.

3

Cynda L. Benson, “William de Leftwich Dodge,” in King and DeLorme, Looking Back: Art in Savannah, 44.

4

Sara Dodge Kimbrough, Drawn From Life: The Story of Four American Artists Whose Friendship Began in Paris During the 1880s (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press), 61–62.

5

Martha R. Severens, Greenville County Museum of Art: The Southern Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996), 116.

6

S arah Adeline “Lily” Barnes Livingston (1865–1945) was a native of Brooklyn and childhood friend of Fanny Bland Pryor Dodge. She owned and operated several thoroughbred stud farms in New Jersey and Canada, and also owned an impressive property on Harris Neck near Savannah, Georgia. Known as the “queen dowager of horse racing,” she was inducted into the Canadian Racing Hall of Fame in 2011.

7

Severens, The Southern Collection, 116.

additional sources Balge, Marjorie. “William de Leftwich Dodge: American Renaissance Artist.” Art & Antiques 5, no. 1 (January–February 1982): 95–103. Dodge, William de Leftwich, and Sara Dodge Kimbrough, Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Kimbrough, Leftwich Dodge. “Portrait of the Artist/Dodge’s Murals Helped Create ‘National Monument of Art.’” Library of Congress Information Bulletin, May 5–19, 1997, 174–178. Platt, Frederick. “A Brief Autobiography of William de Leftwich Dodge.” The American Art Journal 14 (Spring 1982): 55–63. ——. “The Easel Paintings of William de Leftwich Dodge.” Nineteenth Century 10, no. 1 (1990): 7–10.

gaines ruger donoho 1

 harles Burr Todd, “The American Barbizon,” Lippincott’s Magazine (April 1883), 323, quoted in Helen A. Harrison, “East C Hampton’s Artists in Their Own Words,” in Jeffrey W. Anderson, William H. Gerdts, and Helen A. Harrison, En Plein Air: The Art Colonies of East Hampton and Old Lyme, 1880–1930 (Old Lyme, CT: Florence Griswold Museum, 1989), 52.

2

See Weinberg, Childe Hassam.

3

Robert Hefner, East Hampton Village Historian, e-mail communication to the author, January 15, 2014.

4

“ One of Ours,” The Star, June 23, 1938, quoted in Victoria J. Beck, “The Life and Art of Gaines Ruger Donoho,” in René Paul Barrilleaux and Victoria J. Beck, G. Ruger Donoho: A Painter’s Path (Jackson: Mississippi Museum of Art, 1995), 40.

additional sources Braff, Phyllis. “Resurrecting an Obscure Landscapist.” New York Times, January 14, 1996. Donoho, Gaines Ruger, Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Ronald G. Pisano. G. Ruger Donoho (1857–1916): A Retrospective Exhibition. New York: Hirschl and Adler, 1977. ——. Long Island Landscape Painting, 1820–1920. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. Wallace, Terry. Caroline M. Bell and the Peconic Bay Impressionists. East Hampton, NY: M. T. Fine Arts/Wallace Gallery, 2006.

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Weinberg, H. Barbara. “‘Painting Your Own Country’: The American Impressionists at Home.” Cleveland State University. http://academic.csuohio.edu/tah/regional_arts/artsheritage/p2painting.pdf.

193

alexander john drysdale 1

See Howard A. Buechner, Drysdale (1870–1934): Artist of Myth and Legend (Metairie, LA: Thunderbird Press 1985.

2

 andolph Delehanty, Art in the American South: Works from the Ogden Collection (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University R Press, 1996), 63.

3

Rick Stewart, “Toward a New South: The Regionalist Approach, 1900–1950,” in Kuspit, Donald B. et al., Painting in the South: 1564–1980 (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1983), 107.

4

Buechner, Drysdale, 7.

5

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), 74.

additional sources Dobie, Ann. “Alexander Drysdale.” In KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, published online by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. http://www.knowla.org/entry/1240/&view=summary. Drysdale, Alexander John, Papers. Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, LA; and Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans.

william gilbert gaul 1

Agnes C. Jones and Dorothy Cope, Van Buren County, Tennessee, Pictorial History (Nashville, TN: Turner Publishing Company, 1998), 3.

2

James A. Hoobler, Gilbert Gaul: American Realist (Nashville: Tennessee State Museum, 1992), 3.

3

George Parsons Lathrop, “An American Military Artist,” The Quarterly Illustrator 1 (October–December 1893): 238.

4

Stewart, “Toward A New South,” in Kuspit et al., Painting in the South, 106.

additional sources Davis, Louise. “Turnips and Triumph in Tennessee: A Portrait of the Artist Gilbert Gaul.” Tennessean Magazine, August 18– September 1, 1974. Holzer, Harold, and Mark E. Neely, Jr. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art. New York: Orion Books, 1993. Kelly, James C. “Landscape and Genre Painting in Tennessee, 1810–1985.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 44, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 90. McEntee, Jervis, Diaries. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Murphy, Josephine. “Gilbert Gaul in Tennessee.” Nashville Tennessean Magazine, September 4, 1949. Pomery, Dan E. “Holding the Line: William Gilbert Gaul as a Military Artist.” Art of Tennessee. Nashville, TN: Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 2003. Reeves, James Franklin. Gilbert Gaul. Huntsville, AL: Huntsville Museum of Art, 1975. ——. “William Gilbert Gaul: Illustrator and Painter.” Master’s thesis. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University, 1981.

edward b. gay Richard G. Coker, Portrait of an American Painter: Edward Gay, 1837–1928 (New York: Vantage Press, 1973), 45.

2

“The Paintings of Edward Gay,” New York Mail, March 14, 1881.

3

George Inness, quoted in Coker, Portrait of an American Painter, 92.

4

Ibid., 98–99.

5

Ibid., 105.

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194

additional sources Buff, Barbara Ball. Windy Summits, Fertile Valleys: An Artistic Journey through the Shawanguck Mountains. Cragsmoor, NY: Cragsmoor Free Library, 1982. Coker, Richard G. A Love for Landscape. Columbia, SC: Columbia Museum of Art, 1974. Gay, Edward, Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Lockman, DeWitt McClellan, Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. “Edward Gay.” In National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume 10. New York: James T. White, 1900: 375–376. Obituary, American Art Annual 20 (1928): 369. Spassky, Natalie, et al. American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume 2: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1816 and 1845. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985.

lovell birge harrison 1

Charles Louis Borgmeyer, “Birge Harrison: Poet Painter,” Fine Arts Journal 29 (October 1913): 590–591.

2

Birge Harrison, Landscape Painting (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 4–5; 31; 38–39.

3

See Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963).

4

Harrison, Landscape Painting, 250–251.

5

 uthor Martha R. Severens connects Harrison’s visit to a 1907 travel article written by Charles Henry White for Harper’s A Monthly Magazine in her book, The Charleston Renaissance (Spartanburg, SC: Saraland Press, 1998), 48.

6

 irge Harrison to Alice Smith, 16 July 1916, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, B SC, quoted in Severens, The Charleston Renaissance, 50.

7

Birge Harrison, “The Case of the Pastel,” Art and Progress 6, no. 5 (March 1915), 155.

additional sources Cleveland, David Adams. A History of American Tonalism. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2010. Harrison, Birge. “The Case of the Pastel.” Art and Progress 6, no. 5 (March 1915): 154–157. Harrison, Birge, Writings on Landscape Painting. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Hoeber, Arthur. “Birge Harrison, NA, Landscape Painter.” International Studio 44, no. 173 (July 1911): 13–15.

james vernon herring James Herring, foreword to Tenth Anniversary Exhibition (Washington, DC: Howard University, 1940), quoted in Janet Gail Abbott, “The Barnett Aden Gallery: A Home for Diversity in a Segregated City” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2008), 39. Dr. Abbott’s dissertation is available online at etda.libraries.psu.edu/paper/8984/4243.

2

New York Times, October 26, 1930, quoted in Abbott, “The Barnett Aden Gallery,” 42.

3

 omare Bearden, “Historical Notes,” in The Barnett-Aden Collection (Washington, DC: Published for the Anacostia R Neighborhood Museum in cooperation with the Barnett-Aden Gallery by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974), 18.

4

Albert J. Carter, “Tributes to the Founders of the Barnett-Aden Gallery,” in The Barnett-Aden Collection, 153.

5

 lain Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and A Charles Boni, 1925), 266.

6

James A. Porter, “James A. Porter—Artist,” Opportunity, Journal of Negro Life 11 (February 1933): 47, quoted in Abbott, “The Barnett Aden Gallery,” 41.

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additional sources American Art from the Howard University Collection. CD-ROM. Washington, DC: Howard University Television, 2000. Baker, Scott W., et al. A Proud Continuum: Eight Decades of Art at Howard University. Washington, DC: Howard University Gallery of Art, 2005. Bearden, Romare, and Harry Henderson. A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon, 1993. Cooks, Bridget. Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. Dyson, Walter. Howard University, The Capstone of Negro Education, A History: 1867–1940. Washington, DC: Graduate School of Howard University, 1941. Fax, Elton C. Seventeen Black Artists. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971. Herring, James V., Papers. Howard University Library Archives, Washington, DC. Morrison, Keith. Art in Washington and its Afro-American Presence, 1940–1970. Washington, DC: Washington Project for the Arts, 1985. Powell, Richard J., and Jock Reynolds. To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Edited by Louise Stone. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art/Phillips Academy; and New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1999. Reynolds, Gary A., and Beryl J. Wright. Against the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation. Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 1989. Severens, Martha R., and Leo F. Twiggs. Reflections of a Southern Heritage: 20th Century Black Artists of the Southeast. Charleston, SC: Gibbes Art Gallery, 1979. Thomas, Alma, Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Wyche, Hope. “Portraits.” The Hilltop: The Student Voice of Howard University, November 10, 1950.

harry leslie morris hoffman 1

Jeffrey W. Anderson, Harry L. Hoffman: A World of Color (Old Lyme, CT: Florence Griswold Museum, 1988), 7–8.

2

“ Our History,” Florence Griswold Museum, accessed January 14, 2015, http://www.florencegriswoldmuseum.org/learn/ourhistory/lyme-art-colony.

3

Jennifer Ackerman, “Harry Leslie Hoffman,” in King and DeLorme, Looking Back: Art in Savannah, 57.

additional sources Lyme Historical Society Records. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

alfred heber hutty Anna Wells Rutledge, Artists in the Life of Charleston: Through Colony and State from Restoration to Reconstruction, repr. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1949; Columbia; University of South Carolina Press, 1980).

2

Sara C. Arnold, “Alfred Heber Hutty: The Artist and His Career,” in Sara C. Arnold et. al., The Life and Art of Alfred Hutty (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012), 31.

3

Harrison, Landscape Painting, 139.

4

“Poet of Line and Color,” State Magazine, May 21, 1950.

5

DuBose Heyward, “Charleston: Where Mellow Past and Present Meet,” in James M. Hutchisson, ed., A DuBose Heyward

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196

Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 63–64. J ean Bosworth, “Artist Hutty Paints 301st Charleston Scene,” Charleston Evening Post, December 1, 1949, quoted in Arnold, “Alfred Heber Hutty,” in Arnold et al., The Life and Art of Alfred Hutty, 13.

6

7

Birge Harrison, “Old Charleston as Pictured by Alfred Hutty,” The American Magazine of Art 13, no. 11 (November 1922), 481–483.

8

 lfred Hutty to Thomas Waring, 23 October 1923, Carolina Art Association Papers, Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC. A Quoted in Harlan Greene, “Outsider and Artist: Alfred Hutty in Charleston,” in Arnold et al., The Life and Art of Alfred Hutty, 94.

additional sources Gibbes Art Gallery. Alfred Hutty: A Memorial Exhibition. Charleston, SC: Carolina Art Association, 1956. Hutty, Alfred H., Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Carolina Art Association/ Gibbes Museum, Charleston, SC; and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Phillips, Duncan. American Etchers, Volume 2: Alfred Hutty. New York: T. Spencer Hutson, 1929. Saunders, Boyd, and Ann McAden. Alfred Hutty and the Charleston Renaissance. Orangeburg, SC: Sandlapper Publishing, 1990. Williams, Lynn Barstis. Imprinting the South: Southern Printmakers and Their Images of the Region, 1920s–1940s. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.

rudolph frank ingerle 1

C. J. Bulliet, “Artists of Chicago Past and Present, No. 23: Rudolph Ingerle,” Chicago Daily News, July 27, 1935.

2

E leanore Jewett, art critic for the Chicago Tribune, quoted in “Painter of ‘The Smokies,’” undated exhibition brochure, Artist File, Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, SC.

3

Paul Gilbert, art critic for the Chicago Herald American, quoted in “Painter of ‘The Smokies.’”

4

James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, 1900), in James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, with a biographical introduction by George Ellison (Asheville, NC: Bright Mountain Books, 1992), 517.

5

“Oconaluftee Visitor Center Officially Dedicated,” Great Smoky Mountains, National Park Service, last modified April 19, 2011, http://www.nps.gov/grsm/parknews/ovc-dedicated.html.

6

Rudolph Ingerle, “A Painters’ Paradise and Its Lure,” The Palette and Chisel 8, no. 5 (May 1931): 1–2.

additional sources Greenhouse, Wendy. Chicago Modern 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press in association with the Terra Foundation, 2004. ——. “Rudolph Ingerle.” M. Christine Schwartz Collection. http://www.schwartzcollection.com/artists/rudolph-ingerle. Greenhouse, Wendy, and Susan Weininger. Chicago Painting 1895 to 1945: The Bridges Collection. Springfield: University of Illinois Press with the Illinois State Museum, 2004.  Loy, Dennis J., and Caroline Honig. One Hundred Years, 1887–1987: Catalog of the Collection, Union League Club of Chicago. Chicago, IL: Union League Club of Chicago, 1987. Nesbitt, Joanne, ed. with Barbara Judd. Those Brown County Artists: The Ones Who Came, The Ones Who Stayed, The Ones Who Moved On, 1900–1950. Nashville, IN: Nana’s Books, 1993. Richter, Marianne, and Wendy Greenhouse. Union League Club of Chicago Art Collection. Chicago, IL: Union League Club of Chicago, 2003.

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Rudolph Ingerle (1879–1950): Paintings of the Ozarks, the Great Smoky Mountains, and the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition. Chicago, IL: Aaron Galleries, 2002.

197

Sellroe, Edna. “Rudolph Ingerle—Famous Painter of Landscapes and Character Studies of Mountaineers.” Artistry: A Magazine Devoted to the Muses, December 1937. Smith, J. Francis. “The Art Academy.” Brush and Pencil 1, no. 5 (February 1898): 171–176. Sparks, Esther. A Biographical Dictionary of Painters and Sculptors in Illinois, 1808–1945. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1971.

wilson henry irvine 1

Wilson Irvine, quoted in Florence Davies, “The Artist’s Velvet Tie Gives Way to Hip Boots,” Detroit News, March 16, 1924, Wilson Henry Irvine Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

2

Harold Spencer, Wilson Henry Irvine and the Poetry of Light (Old Lyme, CT: Florence Griswold Museum, 1998), 97n, 50; and 79n, 49; and telephone conversation with the author, February 3, 2014.

3

Irvine, quoted in “Artist Tells of Hebrides; Warns Against Stagnation in Landscape Painters’ Life and Work,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Detroit, 1924, quoted in Spencer, Wilson Henry Irvine, 40.

4

“Art Exhibition at Old Lyme,” Shoreline Times, August 11, 1932, quoted in Spencer, Wilson Henry Irvine, 42.

additional sources Gordon, Cheryl Cibulka. Explorations of An American Impressionist: The Art of Wilson Irvine (1869–1936). Washington, DC: Adams Davidson Galleries, 1990.
 Irvine, Wilson Henry, Papers. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, IL; Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT; and Palette and Chisel Club Archives, Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts, Chicago, IL. Sellroe, Edna. “Wilson Henry Irvine—Noted Landscape Painter—Beloved in Life—Revered in Memory by the Art World.” Artistry: A Magazine Devoted to the Muses, June 1938.

charles harvey joiner 1

I first heard this theory when researching a work of art once held in the collection of Mr. Morrow Richards of Paris, Kentucky. The story was said to have originated in the old Stewart Department Store in Louisville, where Joiner’s paintings were displayed and sold.

2

L ouisville Courier-Journal, December 9, 1900, quoted in Estill Curtis Pennington, Kentucky: The Master Painters (Paris: KY: Cane Ridge Publishing Company, 2008), 133.

3

Sam Binkley, “Kitsch as a Repetitive System: A Problem for the Theory of Taste Hierarchy,” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 2 (2000): 131.

4

 udolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, expanded and rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of R California Press, 1974), 60.

5

 Bruce W. Chambers, Art and Artists of the South: The Robert P. Coggins Collection (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984), 83.

additional sources Joiner, Charles Harvey, Papers. Bridwell Art Library, Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville, KY; Filson Historical Society, Louisville, KY; and Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY. Kurtz, Charles M. Catalogue of Works of Art in the Art Building of the Southern Exposition at Louisville, KY. Louisville, KY: John P. Morton and Co., 1883.

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198

john ross key 1

See Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia on the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, Fifty-seventh Congress, First Session, Senate Report No. 166 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902).

2

 ndrew J. Cosentino and Henry H. Glassie, Jr., The Capital Image: Painters in Washington, 1800–1915 (Washington, DC: A Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 113.

3

Boston Evening Transcript, March 1, 1918, quoted in Cosentino and Glassie, The Capital Image, 114.

additional sources Catalog of a Collection of Oil Paintings and Drawings by the Late John Ross Key (1837–1920). Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1927. Harrison, Alfred C., Jr. “Bierstadt’s Bombardment of Fort Sumter Reattributed.” The Magazine Antiques 165, no. 3 (February 1986): 416–422. Key, John Ross. “Recollections of Whistler While in the Office of the United States Coast Survey.” Century Magazine 75 (April 1908): 928–932. Kiplinger Washington Collection. Historical Society of Washington, Washington, DC. Picturesque World’s Fair: An Elaborate Collection of Colored Views: Comprising Illustrations of the Greatest Features of the World’s Columbian Exposition and Midway Plaisance. Chicago, IL: W. B. Conkey, 1894.

blondelle octavia edwards malone 1

L ouise Jones DuBose, Enigma: The Career of Blondelle Malone in Art and Society, 1879–1951 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1963), ix. Although Malone’s actual birth year of 1877 is correctly noted on page 1, the title page and cover of Enigma mistakenly cite 1879 as the year the artist was born.

2

Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2001), 42.

3

 ary Taft, a writer for the New York Times, dubbed Malone the “garden artist of America” in a review of her exhibition M at the Women’s University Club in New York in 1920, as cited in Suzanne Kamata, “Blondelle Malone: The Sojourn of an American Garden Artist,” Sandlapper (Summer 2008), 14.

4

Dubose, Enigma, 65.

5

Ibid., 45.

additional sources Exhibition of Aiken and Southern Gardens by Blondelle Malone. New York: The Misses Hill Gallery, 1922. Malone, Blondelle, Papers. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Parris, Nina G. South Carolina Collection, 1779–1985. Columbia, SC: Columbia Museum of Art, 1985. Underwood, Chad Lee. “What Price Glory: The Life and Art of Blondelle Octavia Malone.” Master’s thesis. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2003.

lawrence mazzanovich  illiam O’Brien to Mazzanovich, 26 November 1926, Lawrence Mazzanovich Papers, Center for the Study of Southern Art, W Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA.

2

Mazzanovich, quoted in Cloe Arnold, “The Colors About You Influence You for Good or Bad, Declares Artist Mazzanovich,” The Morning Telegraph, October 29, 1916.

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1

199

3

Lena McCauley, “Southern Art Awakening,” Art World Magazine of the Chicago Evening Post, April 24, 1928.

additional sources Clark, Charles Teaze. “Lawrence Mazzanovich in Connecticut.” The Magazine Antiques 170, no. 5 (November 2006): 148–155. ——. Lawrence Mazzanovich 1871–1959: Tryon Paintings. Tryon, NC: Tryon Fine Arts Center, 1991. Lansing, Amy Kurtz. “The Artistic Heritage of Connecticut.” American Art Review 19, no. 6 (November–December 2007): 158–65, 167–68. McCue, Michael J. Lawrence Mazzanovich: Impressionist Paintings of Tryon. Asheville, NC: Asheville Art Museum, 2001. Vie, Marie, and Marjorie Searl, eds. Head, Heart, and Hand: Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1994.

willie betty newman 1

 illie Betty Newman, “Forum of the People: More about Art,” undated clipping, Willie Betty Newman Papers, Center for W the Study of Southern Art, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA.

2

Nashville Banner, November 18, 1899, quoted in Stephanie A. Strass and Susan Shockley, “The Art of Willie Betty Newman,” American Art Review 14, no. 1 (January–February 2002), 104.

3

Edward Webb, “Tones and Overtones: Willie Betty Newman,” The Citizen Appeal, July 11, 1930.

4

Nashville American, May 2, 1909.

additional sources Betty Family Papers and Whitney-Newman Papers. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, TN. Grogan, Kevin. “Willie Betty Newman.” In The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Art and Architecture, Volume 21, edited by Judith Bonner and Estill Curtis Pennington. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Haverstock, Mary Sayre, Earnette Mahoney Vance, and Brian L. Meggitt, ed. Artists in Ohio, 1787–1900: Biographical Dictionary. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000. Kelly, James C. “Willie Betty Newman.” In The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, published online by the Tennessee Historical Society and the University of Tennessee Press. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=992. Morrow, Libbie Luttrell. “Mrs. Willie Betty Newman’s Pictures.” The Olympian Magazine 2, 1903. Rice, DeLong. “Art Relative to Life: The Willie Newman School of Art.” The Taylor-Trotwood Magazine 3 and 4 (1906). Walker, Celia. “A Century of Progress: Twentieth Century Painting in Tennessee.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 4–8. Williams, Charlotte A. The Centennial Club of Nashville: A History, 1905–1977. Nashville, TN: privately printed, 1978.

clara minter weaver parrish  artha E. Cook and Courtney George, “Gender and Sexuality in Literature,” in M. Thomas Inge, ed., The New Encyclopedia of M Southern Culture: Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 76.

2

Comer Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South: 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 429.

3

Christine Crafts Neal, “Daughters of the South,” in Alabama Heritage, no. 21 (Summer 1991), 8.

4

New-York Tribune, January 28, 1893.

5

Quoted in C. Reynolds Brown, Clara Weaver Parrish (Montgomery, AL: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1980), 17–18.

6

Severens, The Southern Collection, 118.

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200

additional sources “Clara Weaver Parrish (1861–1925).” In Eight Southern Women. Greenville, SC: Greenville County Museum of Art, 1986. Parrish, Clara Weaver, Papers. Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery.

paul albert plaschke 1

 alerie Ann Leeds, “George Luks,” in Hollis Koons McCullough, ed., Collection Highlights: Telfair Museum of Art (Savannah, V GA: Telfair Museum of Art, 2005), 192.

2

Estill Curtis Pennington, Plaschke (Jeffersonville, IN: Howard Steamboat Museum, 2008), 18.

3

Thomas D. Clark, The Kentucky, Bicentennial Edition (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 239.

additional sources Briggs, Peter S. “Popular Political Art: Paul Plaschke’s Cartoons on the Russian Revolution.” Master’s thesis. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1975. Plaschke, Paul A., Papers. Filson Historical Society, Lousiville, KY; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; University of Louisville Library, KY.

chauncey foster ryder 1

Florence Davies, Detroit News, quoted in Chauncey F. Ryder, N.A., 1868–1949 (Hingham, MA: Pierce Galleries, 1978), 3.

2

 yder, quoted in Ronald G. Pisano, “Chauncey Foster Ryder: Peace and Plenty,” American Art & Antiques 10 (September– R October, 1978), 76–83.

3

James Huneker, “Seen in the World of Art,” New York Sun, March 19, 1911, quoted in Lisa N. Peters, John Francis Murphy and Chauncey Foster Ryder: Among Tonalism’s Many Faces (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2010), n.p.

4

Christian Monitor, 1922, quoted in Pisano, “Chauncey Foster Ryder,” 80.

additional sources Abbot, Elinor. “Memories of Chauncey and Mary Ryder,” unpublished manuscript. Estate of the artist, location unknown. Macbeth Gallery Records and Sidney Woodward Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Ryder, Chauncey F., Papers. Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Sessions, Ralph, et al. The Poetic Vision: American Tonalism. New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2005.

hattie saussy 1

 arlan Greene, “Au Point: Of Time and Two Cities,” in Roberta Sokolitz, ed., Southern Sisters: The Art of Charleston and H Savannah (Charleston, SC: Charleston Renaissance Gallery, 2004), 6.

2

Cynda L. Benson, “Emma Cheves Wilkins,” in King and DeLorme, Looking Back: Art in Savannah, 106.

3

Kristine L. Holzbach, “Hattie Saussy,” in King and DeLorme, Looking Back: Art in Savannah, 91.

4

 issy Fitzpatrick, “Fifty Years of Art and She’s Still at It,” Savannah Morning News, undated clipping, Artist File, Johnson C Collection, Spartanburg, SC.

“Paintings Shown by Hattie Saussy: Savannah Artist Holds Interesting Exhibition,” undated, unidentified clipping, Artist File, Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, SC. 5

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6

Thetis Rush, Hattie Saussy, Georgia Painter (Spartanburg, SC: Robert M. Hicklin, Jr. Inc., 1983), 4.

201

7

Saussy, quoted in Dinny Jones, “Art Association’s Show Opens,” Savannah Morning News, September 3, 1974.

additional sources Saussy, Hattie, Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Center for the Study of Southern Art, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA; and Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, GA. Vigtel, Gudmund. 100 Years of Painting in Georgia. Atlanta, GA: Alston and Bird, 1982.

paul sawyier 1

Arthur F. Jones, The Art of Paul Sawyier (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 10.

2

Ibid., 58.

3

Ibid., 68.

4

Clark, The Kentucky, 239.

5

Bob Sehlinger and Johnny Molloy, A Canoeing and Kayaking Guide to Kentucky (Birmingham, AL: Menasha Ridge Press, 2004), 116.

6

James Lane Allen, The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky and Other Kentucky Images (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1892), 19.

7

 illard Rouse Jillson, Paul Sawyier: American Artist (1865–1917), A Brief Biographical Sketch (Frankfort, KY: Blue Grass Press, W Inc., 1971), 50.

additional sources Jillson, Willard Rouse. “A Bibliography of Paul Sawyier, American Artist.” Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 37, no. 121 (October 1939): 271–282. Sawyier, Paul, Papers. Bridwell Art Library, Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville, KY; Filson Historical Society, Louisville, KY; Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, KY; and Special Collections Library, University of Kentucky, Lexington. Townsend, John Wilson. “Paul Sawyier, Kentucky Artist: Some Recollections of Him.” Filson Club Quarterly 33 (October 1959): 310–313.

dixie selden 1

“The Week in Art Circles,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November 14, 1926, quoted in McLean, Dixie Selden, 77–78.

2

McLean, Dixie Selden, 54.

3

“The Week in Art Circles,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November 14, 1926, quoted in McLean, Dixie Selden, 78.

4

Genetta McLean, “Painting Authentication,” July 10, 2013, Artist File, Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, SC.

5

 erbert Greer French, “Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by Dixie Selden” (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1936), H n.p. This exhibition was on view at the museum from March 5–April 8, 1936.

additional sources Aronson, Julia, et al. The Cincinnati Wing: The Story of Art in the Queen City. Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2003. Goldman Family Archives, location unknown. McChesney, H. V. “Dixie Selden.” Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 35 (1937): 273–276. Samson, Carl. “Cincinnati Past and Present.” Classical Realism Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1991): 17–21.

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202

Shearer, Christine Fowler. Breaking with Tradition: Ohio Women Painters 1870–1950. Massillon, OH: Massillon Museum, 2005.

william posey silva 1

Laura C. Martin, Southern Gardens: A Gracious History and A Traveler’s Guide (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993), 59.

2

 arbara Bellows, “The Lowcountry Lady and the Over-the-Mountain Man,” in James M. Hutchisson and Harlan Greene, ed., B Renaissance in Charleston: Art and Life in the Carolina Low Country, 1900–1940 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 19, 20.

3

Julia Mood Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1928), 12, 13.

4

Leila Mechlin, “William P. Silva—An Appreciation,” American Magazine of Art 14, no. 1 (January 1923): 28.

5

DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen, Carolina Chansons: Legends of the Low Country (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), 10.

alice ravenel huger smith 1

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, “Reminiscences,” in Martha R. Severens, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith: An Artist, A Place and A Time (Charleston, SC: Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Art Gallery, 1993), 91–92.

2

H. B., “Art in Charleston,” The State, 1931.

3

Smith, “Reminiscences,” in Severens, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, 117.

4

Louis Lawson to the author, 14 April 1987.

5

Smith, “Reminiscences,” in Severens, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, 97.

additional sources Alice Ravenel Huger Smith of Charleston, South Carolina: An Appreciation on the Occasion of Her Eightieth Birthday. Charleston, SC: privately published, 1956. Eades, Pamme Lynn. “Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and the Development of Charleston Regionalism.” Master’s thesis. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1994. Hutchisson, James, and Harlan Greene, eds. Renaissance in Charleston. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Mack, Angela D., and Roberta Sokolitz. Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, 1876–1958. Charleston, SC: Carolina Galleries, 2002. ——. “Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and Elizabeth O’Neill Verner: Champions of the Charleston Renaissance.” In South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2, edited by Marjorie Julian Spruill, Valinda W. Littlefield, and Joan Marie Johnson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Smith, Alice Ravenel Huger. A Charleston Sketchbook 1796–1806. Forty Watercolor Drawings of the City and Surrounding Country, Including Plantations and Churches, by Charles Fraser. Charleston, SC: Carolina Art Association, 1940. ——. Twenty Drawings of the Pringle House on King Street, Charleston, S.C. Charleston, SC: Lanneau’s Art Store, 1914. Smith, Alice Ravenel Huger, and D. E. Huger Smith. The Dwelling Houses of Charleston, South Carolina. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1917. Smith, Alice Ravenel Huger, D. E. Huger Smith, and Herbert Ravenel Sass. A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1936. Smith, Alice Ravenel Huger, Papers. Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; and South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC.

gladys nelson smith 1

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 ladys Nelson Smith to Josephine Nelson, 16 March 1939, quoted in Josephine Nelson, “My Sister, Gladys,” in Linda Crocker G Simmons, Gladys Nelson Smith (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1984), 29.

203

2

S mith lecture notes quoted in Linda Crocker Simmons, “Gladys Nelson Smith (1890–1980): Washington Painter from Kansas,” in Simmons, Gladys Nelson Smith, 13.

3

 ladys Nelson Smith Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. My appreciation to fellow G author Estill Curtis Pennington for his research of these materials and his discovery of this fitting summary of Smith’s life and career.

additional sources Fort, Ilene, and Michael Quick. American Art: A Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991. Taylor, Abby. Gladys Nelson Smith (1890–1980): Fulfilled Dreams. Greenwich, CT: Greenwich Gallery, undated.

anthony johannes thieme 1

 nthony Thieme to Roger William Riis, 10 June, 1940, Anthony Thieme Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian A Institution, Washington, DC.

2

Judith A. Curtis, Anthony Thieme 1888–1954 (Rockport, ME: Rockport Art Association, 1999), 12.

3

Ibid., 11.

4

 eview by Gwendoline Keene, “Gloucester Once Again Calls to the Lovers of Art,” Boston Evening Transcript, July 14, 1928, R Thieme Papers.

5

Lillian M. “Becky” Beckett Thieme, unpublished biographical sketch of Anthony Thieme, Thieme Papers.

6

J ohn Peale Bishop, “The South Revisited,” in Edmund Wilson, ed., The Collected Essays of John Peale Bishop (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 454.

additional sources Curtis, Judith A. Anthony Thieme 1888–1954. Rockport, MA: Rockport Art Association, 1999. Grand Central Art Galleries Records. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Pollack, Deborah C. “Anthony Thieme.” In The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Art and Architecture, Volume 21, edited by Judith Bonner and Estill Curtis Pennington. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Thieme, Anthony, Papers. Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY. Torchia, Robert W. Lost Colony: Artists of St. Augustine, 1930–1950. St. Augustine, FL: Lightner Museum, 2001.

helen maria turner

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204

1

Maia Jalenak, “Helen M. Turner, American Impressionist” (master’s thesis, Louisiana State University, 2003), 69.

2

Lewis Hoyer Rabbage, Helen M. Turner, NA: A Retrospective Exhibition (Cragsmoor, NY: Cragsmoor Free Library, 1983), 6.

3

 uncan Phillips, A Collection in the Making: A Survey of the Problems Involved in Collecting Pictures, Together with Brief D Estimates of the Painters in the Phillips Memorial Gallery (New York: E. Weyhe, 1926), 56.

4

Norma Broude, Impressionism: A Feminist Reading, The Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 151, 152.

5

Jalenak, “Helen M. Turner, American Impressionist,” 102.

6

The Spur, March 1921, as quoted in Jalenak, “Helen M. Turner, American Impressionist,” 80.

additional sources Bonner, Judith. “Helen Maria Turner.” In The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Art and Architecture, Volume 21, edited by

Judith Bonner and Estill Curtis Pennington. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Faquin, Jane Ward, and Maia Jalenak. Helen M. Turner: The Woman’s Point of View. Memphis, TN: Dixon Museum of Art, 2010. Rabbage, Lewis Hoyer. “Helen M. Turner (1858–1958).” In Eight Southern Women, Greenville, SC: Greenville County Museum of Art, 1986. Radl, Maureen. A Century of Women Artists in Cragsmoor. Cragsmoor, NY: Cragsmoor Free Library, 1979. Turner, Helen Maria, Papers. Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, LA; and New-York Historical Society, New York.

bror anders wikstrom 1

American Art News 3, no. 75 (April 15, 1905), 6.

2

Ellsworth Woodward, “B. A. Wikstrom—An Appreciation,” Architectural Art and Its Allies 4, no. 10 (April 1909), 3.

3

Ibid., 4.

additional sources Bonner, Judith. “Artists’ Association of New Orleans (1886–1903).” In KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, published online by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. http://www.knowla.org/entry/600. Dobie, Ann B. “Bror Anders Wikstrom.” In KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, published online by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. http://www.knowla.org/entry/1378. Schindler, Henri. Mardi-Gras Treasures: Costume Designs of the Golden Age. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2002. ——. Mardi-Gras Treasures: Float Designs of the Golden Age. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2001. Wiesendanger, Martin, and Margaret Wiesendanger. Nineteenth Century Painters and Paintings from the Collection of W. E. Groves. Reprint. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1998. Wikstrom, Bror Anders, Papers. Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, LA; New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, LA; Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans.

anna catherine wiley 1

Henry W. Grady, The New South (New York: Robert Bonner’s Sons, 1890), 267.

2

 amlin Garland, Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art, Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting and the Drama (Chicago, IL: H Stone and Kimball, 1894), 140.

additional sources Klacsmann, Karen Towers. “Catherine Wiley.” In The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Art and Architecture, Volume 21, edited by Judith Bonner and Estill Curtis Pennington. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Layman, Earl D. The Paintings of Miss Catherine Wiley. Knoxville, TN: Dulin Gallery of Art, 1964. Pennington, Estill Curtis. Southern Impressionist: The Art of Catherine Wiley. Nashville: Tennessee State Museum, 1990. Wiley, Anna Catherine, Records. Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, Knox County Public Library, Knoxville, TN. Wiley, Anna Catherine, Sketches Collection. Special Collections, University of Tennessee Libraries, Knoxville. Young, Namuni Hale. Art and Furniture of East Tennessee: The Inaugural Exhibit of the Museum of East Tennessee History. Knoxville: East Tennessee Historical Society, 1997.

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ellsworth woodward 1

Richard Megraw, Confronting Modernity: Art and Society in Louisiana (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 29.

2

E llsworth Woodward, “Present Day Art in the South: Cause and Effect,” The Art Bulletin VI, no. 1 (September 1923), 8; and Woodward, “An Art League Extension,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 27, 1922, quoted in Karen Towers Klacsmann, “Forgotten Endeavors: the Role of Women Members of the Southern States Art League in the Dissemination of the Visual Arts in the South” (master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 2002), 16.

3

Megraw, Confronting Modernity, 33.

4

E llsworth Woodward, “Technique in Painting” (lecture at Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA, 1929), Delgado Museum Archives and Ellsworth Woodward Papers, Center for the Study of Southern Art, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA.

additional sources Bragg, Jean Moore, and Susan Seward. Painting the Town: The Woodward Brothers Come to New Orleans. New Orleans, LA: Jean Bragg Gallery, 2004. Cullison, William R. Two Southern Impressionists: An Exhibit of the Woodward Brothers, William and Ellsworth, Selected from the Art Collection of Tulane University. New Orleans, LA: Tulane University, 1984. Hinckley, Robert. William Woodward: American Impressionist. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011. Luster, Sarah B. “The Natchitoches Art Colony: A Southern en Plein Air Art Colony, 1921–1937.” Master’s thesis. New Orleans, LA: Tulane University, 1992. Main, Sallie. “Ellsworth Woodward.” In KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, published online by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. http://www.knowla.org/entry/529. ——. “‘The Most Natural Expressions of Locality’: Ellsworth Woodward and The Newcomb Pottery.” In Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by John Lowe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. ——. “Women, Art and Social Change: the Newcomb Pottery Enterprise.” Louisiana Cultural Vistas 24, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 32–41. Sartisky, Michael, J. Richard Gruber, and John R. Kemp, eds. A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial of Art in Louisiana. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Woodward, Ellsworth, Papers. Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, LA. Woodward, Ellsworth. “Present Day Art in the South: Cause and Effect.” The Art Bulletin 6, no. 1 (September 1923): 8–10.

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206

select bibliography Adler, Kathleen, Erica Hirshler, and H. Barbara Weinberg, et al. Americans in Paris, 1860–1880. London: National Gallery, 2006. Andersen, Jeffrey W., William H. Gerdts, and Helen A. Harrison. En Plein Air: The Art Colonies of East Hampton and Old Lyme, 1880–1930. Old Lyme, CT: Florence Griswold Museum, 1989. Atkinson, D. Scott. Lasting Impressions: American Painters in France, 1865–1915. Evanston, IL: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1992. ——. William Merritt Chase: Summers at Shinnecock, 1891–1902. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1987. Bermingham, Peter. American Art in the Barbizon Mood. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Collection of Fine Arts, 1975. Blaugrund, Annette. Paris 1889: American Artists at the Universal Exposition. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1989. Bourguignon, Katherine M. American Impressionism: A New Vision, 1880–1900. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Brettell, Richard R. Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860–1890. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Broude, Norma. Impressionism: A Feminist Reading, The Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Rizzoli, 1991. Carr, Carolyn Kinder. Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World’s Fair. Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, 1993. Chambers, Bruce. Art and Artists of the South: The Robert Powell Coggins Collection. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984. Corn, Wanda. The Color of Mood: American Tonalism, 1880–1910. San Francisco, CA: M. H. deYoung Museum, California Palace of Honor, 1972. Dearinger, David Bernard, ed. Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design. New York: Hudson Hills Press for the National Academy of Design, 2004. Delehanty, Randolph. Art in the American South: Works from the Ogden Collection. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Distel, Anne. Impressionism: The First Collectors. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1990. Eiland, William U., and Donald D. Keyes, with Janice Simon. Crosscurrents in American Impressionism at the Turn of the Century. Athens: University of Georgia Art Museum, 1995. Fink, Lois. American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons. Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990. Frank, Susan Behrends. American Impressionists: Painters of Light and the Modern Landscape. New York: Rizzoli, 2007. Gerdts, William H. American Impressionism. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984. ——. Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting, 1710–1920. 3 vols. New York: Abbeville Press, 1990. ——. California Impressionism. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998. ——. Monet’s Giverny: An Impressionist Colony. New York: Abbeville Press, 1993. ——. “Post-Impressionist Landscape Painting in America.” Art & Antiques 6, no. 4 (July–August 1983): 60–67. Herbert, Robert L. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Hiesinger, Ulrich. Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters. Munich, Germany: Prestel, 1991. Hill, May Brawley. The American Impressionists in the Garden. Nashville, TN: Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in association with Vanderbilt University Press, 2010.

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House, John. Impressionism: Paint and Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

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Hutchisson, James, and Harlan Greene, eds. Renaissance in Charleston. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Jacobs, Michael. The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America. Oxford: Phaidon, 1985. Jones, Arthur F., and Bruce Weber. The Kentucky Painter: From the Frontier Era to the Great War. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Art Museum, 1981. King, Pamela, and Harry H. DeLorme, Jr. Looking Back: Art in Savannah, 1900–1960. Savannah, GA: Telfair Museum of Art, 1996. Kirschke, Amy Helene. “The Southern States Art League: A Regionalist Artists’ Organization, 1922–1950.” Master’s thesis. New Orleans, LA: Tulane University, 1983. Klacsmann, Karen Towers. “Forgotten Endeavors: The Role of Women Members of the Southern States Art League in the Dissemination of the Visual Arts in the South.” Master’s thesis. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2002. Kuspit, Donald, et al. Painting in the South: 1564–1980. Richmond, VA: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1983. Larkin, Susan G. The Cos Cob Art Gallery: Impressionists on the Connecticut Shore. New York: National Academy of Design in association with Yale University Press, 2001. Lowrey, Carol. A Legacy of Art: Paintings and Sculptures by Artist Life Members of the National Arts Club. New York: National Arts Club, 2007. Mahe, John A., II, and Roseanne McCaffrey. Encyclopedia of New Orleans Artists 1718–1918. New Orleans, LA: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1987. McCue, Michael J. Tryon Artists: 1892–1942. Columbus, NC: Condar Press, 2001. McMahan, Virgil E. Washington, D.C. Artists Before 1900: A Biographical Dictionary. Washington, DC: Virgil E. McMahan, 1976. Moffett, Charles S., et. al. The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. Newton, Judith, and Carol Weiss. A Grand Tradition: Art and Artists of the Hoosier Salon, 1925–1999. Indianapolis, IN: Hoosier Salon Patrons Association, 1993. Novak, Barbara. American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience. 3rd rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pennington, Estill Curtis. Downriver: Currents of Style in Louisiana Painting, 1800–1950. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1990. ——. Kentucky: The Master Painters from the Frontier Era to the Great Depression. Paris, KY: Cane Ridge Publishing House, 2008. ——. Look Away: Reality and Sentiment in Southern Art. Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Publishers, 1989. ——. A Southern Collection. Augusta, GA: Morris Museum of Art, 1992. ——. Subdued Hues: Mood and Scene in Southern Landscape Painting, 1865–1925. Augusta, GA: Morris Museum of Art, 1999. Pennington, Estill Curtis, and James C. Kelly. The South on Paper: Line, Color and Light. Spartanburg, SC: Robert M. Hicklin, Jr., 1985. Rubin, James Henry. Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Severens, Martha R. The Charleston Renaissance. Spartanburg, SC: Saraland Press, 1998. ——. Greenville County Museum of Art: The Southern Collection. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1995. Shipp, Steve. American Art Colonies, 1850–1930: A Historical Guide to America’s Original Art Colonies and their Artists. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Smith, Paul. Impressionism: Beneath the Surface. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995.

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Solon, Deborah E., and Will South. In and Out of California: Travels of American Impressionism. Laguna Beach, CA: Laguna Art Museum, 2002.

Sondergaard, Sidsel Maria, ed. Women in Impressionism: From Mythical Feminine to Modern Woman. Milan, Italy: Skira, 2006. Spencer, Harold, Susan G. Larkin, and Jeffrey W. Anderson. Connecticut and American Impressionism. Storrs: The William Benton Museum of Art/University of Connecticut, 1982. Wallace, Terry. The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and their French Teachers. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. Weinberg, H. Barbara, et. al. American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. Weisberg, Gabriel P. Beyond Impressionism: the Naturalist Impulse. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Westphal, Ruth Lilly, Martin E. Petersen, and Janet B. Dominick. Plein Air Painters of California: The North. Irvine, CA: Westphal Publishing, 1986. Yuhl, Stephanie. A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

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index a

Académie Colarossi, 110, 147, 167, 181 Académie Julian, 23, 29, 32, 34, 41, 48, 72, 84, 102, 108, 116, 135, 137, 143, 148, 156, 166, 169, 174, 181 Académie Vitti, 143 Adams, Wayman, 31–32, 46, 134–135, 150 Three Graces, 31–32, 46, 47 Aden, Alonzo, 82, 155 Aid, George, 28, 34, 48, 100, 135–136 Hiver en Forêt de Fontainebleau, 28, 48, 49 Art Institute of Chicago, 22, 40, 41, 72, 78, 90, 120, 137, 138, 143, 146, 147, 152, 156, 158, 159, 164, 167, 168, 173, 177, 179, 180, 183 Art Students League, 22, 30, 35, 41, 46, 54, 60, 64, 68, 74, 76, 84, 86, 104, 106, 112, 120, 124, 128, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 154, 156, 157, 163, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171, 176, 180, 182 Artists’ Association of New Orleans, 124 126, 150, 180, 181

b

Backstage (Hutty), 35, 86, 88, 89 Barnett Aden Gallery, 82, 155 Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 154 Bazille, Frédéric, 14–15, 16 Summer Scene, 13, 14–15 Beach Landscape (Herring), 82, 83 Beach Scene (Gay), 78, 79 Beckwith, J. Carroll, 20, 24, 144, 180 Bellows, George, 31 Footpath Virginia, 31, 33 Bierstadt, Albert, 28, 78, 162 Black Mountain (Carr), 52, 53 Blue Sail, Concarneau (Selden), 114, 115 Bouguereau, William, 11, 32, 143, 148, 166 Boulanger, Gustave, 137, 148 Brandt, Carl, 54, 170 Branson, Lloyd, 128, 182 Breakfast in Bed (Cassatt), 18 Breckenridge, Hugh, 41, 64, 144–145 Brenner, Carl, 50, 136–137 Winter, 50, 51 Bridgman, George, 147, 157, 170

c

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210

Cabaniss, Lila, 110, 170 Cabins, South Carolina Low Country (Silva), 34, 116, 117 Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (Sargent), 19, 21 Carr, Lyell, 52, 137 Black Mountain, 52, 53 Cassatt, Mary, 16, 18–19, 22, 98, 163, 180 Breakfast in Bed, 18

Centennial International Exhibition, 142, 153, 162, 182 Cézanne, Paul, 38, 41, 56, 62, 100, 108 Chadwick, William, 30, 54, 92, 138–139 Church Towers, 54, 55 Chant, Elisabeth, 56, 139–140 Spring Landscape, 56, 57 Charleston Garden (Hutty), 86, 87 Charleston Renaissance, 110, 116, 118, 154, 175 Chase, William Merritt, 20, 22, 23, 31, 32, 41, 46, 60, 64, 72, 112, 114, 124, 128, 134, 141, 142, 144, 148, 150, 163, 167, 171, 173, 180, 182 Church Street, Charleston (Irvine), 35, 38, 92, 93 Church Towers (Chadwick), 54, 55 Cincinnati Art Academy, 41 Clark, Eliot, 30, 58, 140–141 Silver and Pearl, 58, 59 Clark, Kate Freeman, 31, 60, 141–142 Summer Landscape, 60, 61 Clarke, Thomas B., 52 Cliff Dwellers Club, 90, 92, 158, 160 Clothesline (Dodge), 43, 70, 71 Constable, John, 78, 152 Cooper Union School, 22, 106, 148, 168, 180 Cooper, Colin, 35, 38, 62, 142–144 St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, 35, 38, 62, 63 Couper, Josephine Sibley, 41, 64, 100, 144–145 Episcopal Church, Spartanburg, SC, 64, 65 Fishermen’s Conversation, 40, 41 Cox, Kenyon, 145, 147, 148, 167, 180 Cragsmoor, New York, art colony, 41, 78,124, 153, 180 Crumbling Idols, 158, 160

d

Daingerfield, Elliott, 28, 64, 66, 68, 144, 145–146 Infinities, 66, 68, 69 Madonna and Lamb, 28, 29, 66 Springtime, 66, 67 Degas, Edgar, 12, 15, 18 Dodge, William de Leftwich, 24, 43, 70, 147–148 Clothesline, 43, 70, 71 Donoho, Gaines Ruger, 29, 34, 72, 148–149 Ploughmen in a Fenced Field, 29, 72, 73 Drysdale, Alexander, 74, 94, 149–150 Louisiana Twilight, 74, 75 DuMond, Frank Vincent, 22, 30, 64, 74, 84, 128, 138, 144, 150, 156, 157, 170, 182 Durand-Ruel Gallery, 19, 20, 23 Düsseldorf Academy, 32, 122, 152, 177 Duveneck, Frank, 58, 112, 114, 171, 173

e

École des Beaux-Arts, 11, 20, 70, 80, 137, 147, 153 Entrance to Magnolia Gardens in Spring (Thieme), 37, 38, 122 Episcopal Church, Spartanburg, SC (Couper), 64, 65

f Fishermen’s Conversation (Couper), 40, 41 Flower Garden (Parrish), 32, 104, 105 Flower Seller (Hassam), 29, 30 Footpath Virginia (Bellows), 31, 33 French Poplar Trees in the Mist (Newman), 34, 102, 103

g Garden Scene (Malone), 98, 99 Garland, Hamlin, 90, 134, 158, 160 Gateway to North Carolina (Ryder), 41, 108, 109 Gaul, Gilbert, 76, 150–151 Van Buren, Tennessee, 76, 77 Gay, Edward, 78, 151–153 Beach Scene, 78, 79 Gerdts, William, 8, 16, 19, 175 Gérôme, Jéan-Leon, 11, 70, 147 Griswold, Florence, 29, 54, 84, 92, 108, 138, 156, 157, 160, 169

h Harrison, Birge, 35, 80, 86, 88, 118, 153–154, 157, 175 Sunburst at Sea, 80, 81 Hassam, Childe, 27, 29, 31, 34, 35, 54, 62, 72, 84, 92, 140, 149, 160 Flower Seller, 29, 30 Havemeyer, Louisine Elder, 22 Henri, Robert, 31, 32, 46, 64, 134, 144, 182 Herring, James, 82, 154–155 Beach Landscape, 82, 83 Herron Art Institute, 46, 134, 135, 168 Hiver en Forêt de Fontainebleau (Aid), 28, 48, 49 Hoffman, Harry, 30, 34, 84, 156–157 Street Scene, Savannah, Georgia, 30, 84, 85 Hopper, Edward, 35, 62 Hutty, Alfred, 35, 38, 86, 88, 116, 157–158, 175 Backstage (etching), 35, 86, 88 Backstage (oil), 35, 86, 89 Charleston Garden, 86, 87 In Magnolia Gardens, 35, 36, 86

i

James, Henry, 19–20 Joiner, Harvey, 74, 94, 161 Woods Scene, 94, 95

k

Kentucky Fishing Scene (Sawyier), 112, 113 Kephart, Horace, 38, 40 Key, John Ross, 28, 96, 162 Summertime on Chain Bridge Road, 96, 97 View of Washington from Arlington, 26, 28, 96 Kurtz, Charles, 50, 52

l

Lady with Parasol (Wiley), 41, 128, 129 Lavery, John, 124 Law, Margaret, 64, 100, 144, 145 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Manet), 10, 12, 14, 15, 16 Lefebvre, Jules-Joseph, 34, 137, 143, 166 Locke, Alain, 82, 155 Louisiana Twilight (Drysdale), 74, 75 Luks, George, 106, 168 Luncheon of the Boating Party (Renoir), 14, 15–16 Lyme, Connecticut, art colony, 29, 30, 54, 64, 84, 92, 108, 138, 139, 144, 156, 157, 160, 165, 169

m MacMonnies, Frederick, 148, 163 Madonna and Lamb (Daingerfield), 28, 29, 66 Malone, Blondelle, 24, 34, 98, 163–164 Garden Scene, 98, 99 Manet, Édouard, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16 Mazzanovich, Lawrence, 7, 40–41, 100, 164–165 Smoky Mountains, 6, 40 View from Tryon, 100, 101 McMicken School of Drawing and Design, 41, 166, 171, 173 Meeker, Joseph, 74, 116 Metcalf, Willard, 54, 92, 148, 160 Millet, Jean-François, 28, 48, 52, 66, 76, 146, 166 Monet, Claude, 14, 15, 19, 20, 23–24, 34, 62, 70, 98, 102, 106, 149, 163, 164 Impression, soleil levant, 23, 25 Moon in the Mist (Smith, Alice), 118, 119 Moran, Thomas, 66, 72, 146 Munich Academy, 32, 50, 114, 136, 173

n

Napoleon III, 11, 12 National Academy of Design, 20, 54, 60, 66, 72, 76, 78, 90, 104, 124, 128, 134, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158,

|

Impression, soleil levant (Monet), 23, 25 In Magnolia Gardens (Hutty), 35, 36, 86 Infinities (Daingerfield), 66, 68, 69 Ingerle, Rudolph, 38, 40, 41, 90, 158–159 Oconolufty, 90, 91 Sunday Afternoon, 38, 39 Inness, George, 66, 74, 78, 145, 146, 153 International Cotton Exposition, 149 Irvine, Wilson, 35, 38, 92, 159–160 Church Street, Charleston, 35, 38, 92, 93

j

211

National Academy of Design (continued), 159, 160,162, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 179, 180, 182 New York School of Art (Chase School of Art), 31, 60, 141, 182 Newman, Willie Betty, 34, 41, 102, 165–166 French Poplar Trees in the Mist, 34, 102, 103 Noble, Thomas, 41, 112, 166, 171, 173 Nocturne (Plaschke), 106, 107

o

Oconolufty (Ingerle), 90, 91 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 31

p

Palette and Chisel Club, 92, 158, 159, 168 Palmer, Bertha, 20, 22 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 135, 142, 143, 147, 149, 156, 159, 169 Paris Salon, 11, 14, 16, 18, 29, 34, 70, 72, 102, 104, 108, 135, 143, 147, 148, 149, 152, 154, 165, 166, 169 Parker, Lawton, 24, 48 Parrish, Clara Weaver, 32, 105, 167–168 Flower Garden, 32, 104, 105 Path with Mossy Trees (Saussy), 110, 111 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 22, 31, 52, 72, 78, 80, 137, 138, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 152, 153, 156, 158, 159, 163, 165, 167, 168, 173, 174, 179, 180, 182, 183 Plaschke, Paul, 106, 168–169 Nocturne, 106, 107 Ploughmen in a Fenced Field (Donoho), 29, 72, 73 Poincy, Paul, 74, 150, 180

r

Rain in the South (Thieme), 122, 123 Reid, Robert, 22, 41, 128, 182 Renoir, Auguste, 14, 15–16, 20 Luncheon of the Boating Party, 14, 15–16 Robert-Fleury, Tony, 32, 148, 166 Rockport, Massachusetts, art colony, 122, 178 Rock-ribbed New England (Woodward), 130, 131 Roerich, Nicholas, 141 Ryder, Chauncey, 41, 108, 169–170, 174 Gateway to North Carolina, 41, 108, 109

s

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212

Salon d’Automne, 145, 163 Salon des Refusés, 11, 12, 14, 16 Sargent, John Singer, 14, 16, 19, 64, 80, 124, 142, 144, 153 Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 19, 21 Sarony, Napoleon, 137 Saussy, Hattie, 110, 170–171 Path with Mossy Trees, 110, 111 Savannah Art Association, 30, 171

Sawyier, Paul, 106, 112, 171–172 Kentucky Fishing Scene, 112, 113 Selden, Dixie, 32, 41, 114, 172–174 Blue Sail, Concarneau, 114, 115 Shinnecock, New York, art colony, 31, 46, 60, 141–142, 144 Silva, William, 34, 38, 106, 116, 174–175 Cabins, South Carolina Low Country, 34, 116, 117 Silver and Pearl (Clark, Eliot), 58, 59 Smith, Alice Ravenel Huger, 34–35, 106, 118, 175–176 Moon in the Mist, 118, 119 Swamp Scene, 35, 42, 43 Smith, Gladys, 120, 176–177 Three Muses, 120, 121 Smoky Mountains (Mazzanovich), 6, 40 Société Anonyme des Artistes, 15, 23 Song of Summer (Turner), 41, 124, 125 Sophie Newcomb College, 43, 183 Southern Art Union, 74, 150 Southern States Art League, 130, 145, 171, 174, 175, 183 Spanish Colonial Garden (Wikstrom), 126, 127 Spring Landscape (Chant), 56, 57 Springtime (Daingerfield), 66, 67 St. Louis World’s Fair, 135, 137, 166, 172, 181 St. Philip’s Church, Charleston (Cooper), 35, 38, 62, 63 Steele, T. C., 134, 159 Street Scene, Savannah, Georgia (Hoffman), 30, 84, 85 Summer Landscape (Clark, Kate), 60, 61 Summer Scene (Bazille), 13, 14–15 Summertime on Chain Bridge Road (Key), 96, 97 Sunburst at Sea (Harrison), 80, 81 Sunday Afternoon (Ingerle), 38, 39 Swamp Scene (Smith, Alice), 35, 42, 43 Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (Whistler), 16, 17

t

Tarbell, Edwin, 120, 149, 177 Telfair Academy, 30, 54, 58, 138, 141, 156, 170, 171, 174 Ten American Painters (The Ten), 31, 41 Thieme, Anthony, 38, 122, 177–179 Entrance to Magnolia Gardens in Spring, 37, 38, 122 Rain in the South, 122, 123 Three Graces (Adams), 31–32, 46, 47 Three Muses (Smith, Gladys), 120, 121 Tiffany, Louis Comfort, studios, 104, 157, 167 Tulane University, 43, 180, 183 Turner, Helen, 19, 41, 43, 124, 150, 153, 170, 179–180 Song of Summer, 41, 124, 125 Twachtman, John, 54, 58, 60, 138, 140, 141, 148, 163

v

Van Buren, Tennessee (Gaul), 76, 77 Van Gogh, Vincent, 100, 106, 130 View from Tryon (Mazzanovich), 100, 101 View of Washington from Arlington (Key), 26, 28, 96

w

Whistler, James, 11, 16, 18, 58, 72, 140, 162, 169 Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 16, 17 Wikstrom, Bror, 126, 180, 181 Spanish Colonial Garden, 126, 127 Wiley, Catherine, 19, 41, 43, 128, 170, 181–182 Lady with Parasol, 41, 128, 129 Wilkins, Emma, 110, 170 Winter (Brenner), 50, 51 World Columbian Exposition, 20, 96, 141, 147, 149, 154, 160, 162, 167, 172 Woods Scene (Joiner), 94, 95 Woodstock, New York, art colony, 35, 86, 154, 157, 158 Woodward, Ellsworth, 43, 126, 130, 182–183 Rock-ribbed New England, 130, 131 Woodward, William, 130, 180, 182, 183

z

Zola, Émile, 12

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For a small staff to produce three sizeable volumes in four years requires the enthusiastic collaboration of several skilled professionals, all of whom must share a dedication to the project. The Johnson Collection is grateful for the individual and institutional contributions that have enriched the production of Scenic Impressions and continue to help advance the collection’s mission. For their scholarship and eloquence, we extend our deep thanks to authors Estill Curtis Pennington and Martha R. Severens. This book’s creative scope and memorable title have their genesis with Buck, while Martha thoughtfully helped tailor its final form and provided curatorial vision to the companion exhibition. Kevin Sharp has penned insightful studies of Impressionism as it developed in the United States and in his foreword offers a perspective on the “long, slow search” for the movement in the South, as well as the “eloquent dialects” of artists working in the region. The endorsement of Dr. William Gerdts, author of the landmark study American Impressionism, is particularly gratifying to the collection’s efforts, and we greatly appreciate his ongoing encouragement. Once again, Richard Gee of Gee Creative has brought his keen artistic sensitivity to bear on the book’s design—and his signature high standards to the technicalities of the production process. A successful art book demands premier photography; the expertise of Carroll Foster of Hot Eye Photography, Rick Rhodes Photography and Imaging, LLC, and Tim Barnwell Photography are on full display in the exceptional tributes to the paintings reproduced here. Our partners at the University of South Carolina Press— particularly the press’s director Jonathan Haupt—add resonance and reach to collection titles. Our museum counterparts enable us to send TJC exhibitions far beyond Spartanburg’s city limits, and we appreciate their generous hospitality, excellent leadership, and capable staffs, especially the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, and its director Kevin Sharp; and the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia, and its director Kevin Grogan. For their assistance with research, exhibition preparation, and myriad other tasks, we thank: Stephanie Cassidy, Art Students League, New York; Alfred Harrison, Jr., North Point Gallery, San Francisco; Karen Klacsmann; John McDade, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Anita Mechler and Margaret Gross, Union League of Chicago Library; Leslie Patterson, Chicago Public Library; Colin Post Painting Conservation, Asheville, North Carolina; Harold Spencer, professor emeritus, University of Connecticut, Storrs; Smith Dray Line, Greenville, South Carolina; and Cary Wilkins, Center for the Study of Southern Art, Morris Museum of Art.

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Located in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the Johnson Collection offers an extensive survey of artistic activity in the American South from the late eighteenth century to the present day. The Johnson family is committed to creating a collection which captures and illuminates the rich history and diverse cultures of the region. By making masterworks from its holdings available for critical exhibitions and academic research, the collection hopes to advance interest in the dynamic role that the art of the South plays in the larger context of American art and to contribute to the canon of art historical literature. The collection also seeks to enrich its local community by inviting the public to interact with these inspiring works of art. For more information, please visit thejohnsoncollection.org.

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