B BOSTON

PAINTERS
1900-1930
R.H.IVES GAMMELL
 $34.95 until 1/1/87

$40.00

THE BOSTON PAINTERS

1900-1930

"The English is beautiful. The con-

tent is great! Gammell was to art in
New England what Bill Buckley is to
contemporary politics. In other words
an ultra-conservative and one who had
the facts at his fingertips."
Robert C. Vose, Jr.
Vose Galleries, Boston

Who were the Boston Painters, and why is

so little now known about them? In the front
ranks were Joseph R. DeCamp (1858-1923),
Edmund C. Tarbell (1862-1938), Frank W.
Benson (1862-1951) and William M. Paxton
(1869-1941).

Defenders of an older standard of execu-

tion—one that demanded a thorough and
comprehensive professional training— their
ideals, attitudes and objectives were in stark
contrast to those of the emerging younger
painters. This new school, whose more so-
cially conscious and less disciplined works
were to dominate the American scene for
decades, ridiculed the Bostonians for their
cult of beauty. Condemning them for their
knowledgeable workmanship which a rising
generation of students was being taught to
despise as academic, they succeeded in rel-
egating them into a temporary oblivion from
which they are only now beginning to emerge.

In reexamining the contribution of these

Boston based artists — their genesis, their
motivation, their teaching and the pictures
which they gave to the world — R. H. Ives
Gammell does much to hasten this renais-
sance

(Continued on back flap}

 BOSTON
i PUBLIC
UBRARY

i
LILIAN WESCOTT HALE Cclia's Bower
Courtesy, private collection
 THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900-1930

R. H. IVES GAMMELL
Edited by Elizabeth Ives Hunter

PARNASSUS IMPRINTS
Orleans, Massachusetts
^S\
iJpO««
 I

Copyright © 1986 by Elizabeth Ives Hunter

All rights reserved

ISBN 0-940160-3 1-5

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 85-063095

Pnnted in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Editor's Introduction ix

Introduction 1

I. The Antecedents 7

II. Frederic Porter Vinton, N. A. (1846-1911) 43

III. Joseph R. DeCamp (185 8-1923) 53

IV. Edmund C. Tarbell, n.a. (1862-1938) 67

V. Frank W. Benson, N.A. (1862-1951) 87

VI. William M. Paxton, N.A. (1869-1941) 109

VII. Philip L. Hale, a.n.a. (1865-1931)

Lilian Westcott Hale, N.A. (1881-1963) 123

VIII. Their Contemporaries 133

EX. The Guild of Boston Artists 165

X. A Summing Up 177

Biographical Notes 183

Index of Paintings 197

General Index 201

1
 Acknowledgments

No book can come into existence without a myriad helpful hands, the owners
of which each offer a unique contribution. I am truly grateful for the generous
cooperation of so many people and institutions.
Illustrations for this text have been provided by The Archives of Amer-
ican Art; The Brooklyn Museum; Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Dodds, III; Mr.
William Flynn; The Frick Collection; the Hammer Galleries; the Harvard
University Portrait Collection; the Massachusetts Historical Society; The
Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Na-
tional Collection of the Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution; The National
Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Mr. Edward L. Shein; the Thorn-
dike Library, Supreme Judicial Court, Boston, Massachusetts; the Vose Gal-
leries of Boston; Mr. Haig Tasjian; Alfred J. Walker Fine ArtS; Mr. H. B.
Willis, Jr.; the Worcester Art Museum and numerous private collectors. They
have provided the images which demonstrate, in R. A. M. Stevenson's words.
The impressionistic unity which hfts truth into poetry.
There are certain individuals whose willingness to extend themselves
has made this book possible. They are Miss Janice Sarkow, Director of Pho-
tographic Services at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and her assistant Miss
Jane Hankins; Mr. S. Morton Vose and his staff at the Vose Archive; Mr.
I

Robert C. Vose, Jr., Mrs. Marcia L. Vose, Mr. Robert C. Vose, IE, and Mr.
Abbot W. Vose, of the Vose Galleries; G. d'A. Belin, Esq., Mr. William B.
Osgood, Mr. Henry S. Lodge, and Mr. David Crockett of the R. H. Ives
Gammell Studios Trust; Mr. Henry B. Weil, President of the St. Botolph
Club; Mr. Donald Kelley of the Boston Athenaeum; Mrs. Alma King of the
Santa Fe East Gallery; Ms. Kathy Bumside of Hirschl &. Adler Galleries;
Mrs. Florence Cadogan; Miss Janet Millen; Mr. Richard Bartlett; Mr. Ben-
jamin Muse, Mr. Warren Freeman, and Mr. Trumbull Huntington; and Mrs. acknowledg-
Cilia Borras. ME NTS
This book was made possible, in part, by a grant from the St. Botolph
Club. vii
Lastly,would like to thank my husband, Robert Douglas Hunter,
I

without whose enthusiastic encouragement this project would never have

been completed.
 Editor's Introduction

R. H. Ives Gammell was never in any doubt as to where he stood on the

question of art today, yesterday and tomorrow. When he died in 1981 at the
age of 88 he behind him not only the evidence of his own paintings and
left

sketches but a phalanx of younger painters who had studied at his atelier
and whose works confirm the strength and promise of their mentor's creed.
Added to this is the testimony of his four published books plus numerous
unpublished essays and manuscripts. Indeed, Gammell's significance in
American art rests equally on his activities as a painter, teacher and writer.
Robert Hale Ives Gammell was born in 1893 in Providence, Rhode
Island. He told me in later life that the certain knowledge that he wanted
to be a painter came at age eight or nine when recuperation from a childhood
illness left him with the time to read an extensively illustrated biography
of Audubon. While still at the Groton School he showed his work to, and
received encouragement from, both William C. Loring, then head of the
painting department at the Rhode Island School of Design and William
Sergeant Kendall who would subsequently head the Painting Department
at Yale.
After graduation from Groton in 1 91he enrolled in the School of the
1

Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Here he met and was instructed by Edmund
Tarbell, Frank Benson, Philip Hale, and William Paxton. During the summer
he attended Charles W. Hawthorne's classes in Provincetown.
In 19 1 3 Tarbell, Benson and Paxton resigned from the faculty of the
Museum School in protest over changes in the direction of the Department
of Painting. At this point Gammell took the advice of his early mentor,
Kendall, and went to study under Royer and Laparra in Paris. These studies
were interrupted by the First World War, during which Gammell served first
in the infantry and later in intelligence. Gammell was still on active duty editors
in Paris during the Peace Conference and it is at this time that he had the introduction
opportunity to become closely associated with Joseph DeCamp who was in
Paris to paint a picture of the Peace Conference. i X
By 1920 Gammell was back in Boston pursuing his career as a painter
which continued until his death, except for a two-year hiatus at the end of
 the 1920's, during which he worked to improve his drawing under Paxton's
tutelage.
The work which Ives Gammell produced during his lifetime is re-

markably personal. Paxton is quoted as having said about his pupil, "I feel
like a chicken who has hatched a duck." This was because, first and foremost,
Gammell was driven to produce imaginative allegorical pictures. He draws
his subject-matter equally from Greek and Roman mythology; Biblical sources
and modem anthropology and the advanced psychological studies of Carl
Jung. His paintings are representational renderings of the ideas chosen, fur-
ther illuminated by symbolic elements. In 1985 the Hammer Galleries of
New York presented the major retrospective of his work. There one
first

could see first-hand the felicitous combination of the impressionist tradition

absorbed from his Boston teachers and colleagues and the intellectual and
literary concepts which have been a part of the tradition of Western Painting
through the 19th century French Academy. This marriage of two points of
view was not particularly understood or encouraged by his teachers as is
noted in the text. However, the fact that Gammell pursued his interest in
both areas provides his commentary on Boston Painters with an enhanced
perspective.
By the 1930's Gammell's awareness of what he saw as a rapid erosion
of painting standards, the quality of art teaching, the steady diminution of
the professional knowledge and competence shown by each oncoming gen-
eration of painters, impelled him to begin his writing and teaching in earnest.
In 1946 his Twilight of Painting was published by G. P. Putnam's Sons,
New York. The dedication reads To the painter, boin 01 unborn, who shall
hft the art of painting from the low estate to which it has fallen, this book
is hopefully dedicated.
In an interview with Robert Brown of The Archives American Art,
of
(March 21, 1973), Gammell reflected on Twilight of Painting and his re-
marks, included here, also shed light on the thrust of his other writings:

Now the contents of the book should speak for themselves

and they cannot be summarized here. It is not an attempt to teach
painting. Painting is too elusive and complex an art to be trans-

THE mitted in writing. I simply tried to give the reader some idea of its
BOSTON elusiveness and complexity, some realization that anything ap-
PAINTERS proaching competence in this formidably difficult calling can only
1900- 1930 be acquired by a very gifted student working long years under the
guidance of painters thoroughly trained themselves and who also
X have the gift of imparting that knowledge. That's a gift that many
fine painters have lacked. These simple facts of painting, and they
are facts of painting, were taken for granted everywhere before 1900
and still quite generally taken for granted, if improperly under-
 stood, as late as 1930. Now, forty years later they are absolutely
unacceptable and incomprehensible to even serious students of art
history and serious would-be painters and the need which I foresaw
is certainly universally present today. Whether Twilight of Paint-
ing served to meet that need in any degree I do not know.

As a teacher Gammell tried to provide his students with the training

necessary to solve the problems suggested by the creative impulse. In his
own words:

The purpose good teaching (of painting) is to establish

of all
a true relationship between the student and what he sees. Second-
arily, it should give him the technical means of expressing his

reaction to what he sees.'

Working with no more than five students at one time, he strove to

provide not only training in painting's technical aspects, but also an intel-
ligently supervised exposure to the dramatic arts and literature. His ideal
was a five-year integrated program, but not allwere able to remain for that
long. Ever the realist, however, he felt that he had performed some service
if only in helping a young person to discover that he was unsuited to become

a painter.
men and women who painted
This book was written to reintroduce the
in Boston during the 1900- 1930 period and to give some insight into the
reasons why they fell from positions of national prominence to obscurity.
The and social context. Mr.
text presents these painters in their historical
Gammell's acquaintance with his subjects provides a richness beyond his-
torical scholarship.

Before his death Mr. Gammell and I, as his literary executrix, had several
discussions about his manuscript for this book and his plans for its illus-

tration.The concepts and facts contained herein were quite familiar to me

since was also his God-daughter, the daughter of his Assistant for fifty
I

years and the wife of one of his pupils. I have tried to present the text and
illustrations in accordance with his wishes and believe that the evolution
from notes and manuscript to published volume would have met with his
approval.
EDITORS
Elizabeth Ives Hunter introduction

XI

I. American Artist ,
June 1981, "A Conversation with R. H. Ives Gammell" by Charles
Movalli.
 Elizabeth Ives Valsam and
R. H. IvesGammell in the
Summer of 1950

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

Xll
 THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900-1930
 Introduction

V V ho were these Boston Painters? Why

is so Httle now known about them? Today's reader is fully justified in raising
such questions about a group of artists who have been lost sight of for many
years. But answers to the first query are readily at hand in the art periodicals
covering the first quarter of the present century, throughout whose pages
names of Boston painters, reproductions of their work and praise of their
accomphshment are omnipresent.' It is even more enhghtening to leaf through
catalogues of the national exhibitions then held annually by the National
Academy of Design in New York, by the Pennsylvania Academy in Phila-
delphia and, after 1907, biennially by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Wash-
ington, where the best painting currently being done in the United States
was to be seen.
Names of artists with Boston addresses continually figure among the
prize winners and account for a conspicuously large number of the pictures
accepted by the juries appointed to pass on the entries. Only canvases which
met the high critical standards of painters who had attained professional
eminence were hung and therefore to have his entry accepted often sufficed
to establish a young artist's reputation. To have one's picture reproduced in
the catalogue was a signal honor for which the Boston painters frequently
qualified and the little photographs demonstrate the superior quality of their
work. These exhibition catalogues now provide the most revealing record
available of American painting during the period.
The second question, however, cannot be so easily disposed of because
the origins of the long eclipse undergone by these once nationally prominent
Bostonians are intricately concealed. The first seeds of the bitter dissensions
which ultimately submerged their renown were sown at the century's turn
during sessions of these very exhibition juries of which I have spoken.
The early controversies turned on the conflicting criteria whereby the
relative merit of paintings may be determined. That capital issue has been introduction
so obfuscated by the art criticism of the last fifty years that the professional
viewpoint which prevailed among painters before 1900 or thereabouts has I
been lost sight of and is scarcely comprehensible to the general reader today.
Inasmuch as the artists with whom this book is concerned continued to be
 its most sturdy champions until the end of their days I hope to make their
outlook understood in the following chapters.
Initially, jury deliberations centered on the strictly pictorial merits of
the paintings submitted. The professional stance was, "We are here to judge
how well a picture achieves purpose without regard to our own
its artistic

personal reactions to the objectives chosen by the artist. Is the job sufficiently
well done, by painterly standards, to be included in this exhibition? That is
the question we are here to decide upon." And up to that time there had
been substantial agreement among painters who had mastered their difficult
craft as to what constituted good professional job and on what grounds
a
their criteria could reasonably be considered valid.
But during the closing years of the nineteenth century, in the wake of
the impressionist schism, the following interrelated developments were be-
ginning to transform the very nature of the art itself. First, the polemics
engendered by that dispute discredited as "academic" the severe professional
training on which the survival of painting as a fine art depends. Then, once
this formidable bulwark had been sufficiently eroded, when the available
know-how of painting had been reduced to a trickle and the public inured
to the debased quality of what by that time passed for acceptable picture-
making, manipulating pigment became the pastime of irmumerable persons
ranging from grammar school children to octogenarians who had not the
slightest understanding of the noble but inaccessible art they were uncon-
sciously and blissfully caricaturing. And, finally, when all authority based
on extensive training and prolonged working experience had been elimi-
nated, art critics, museum men and kindred experts imposed themselves on
the public as tastemakers, arbiters and explicators of an art of which they
had no practical experience and had demonstrated no well-founded com-
prehension. And thatwhere we stand today.
is

The little group of painters working in Boston during the first quarter
of this century represented the best-trained segment of the profession dom-
iciled in America. By then they were surpassed by only a few isolated great
figures in Europe, survivors of a vanishing generation already long past their
prime. These Bostonians stoutly defended the old standards of execution
and in so doing antagonized a younger association of painters residing in
THE New York and Philadelphia. The leading dissidents^ were talented men, more
BOSTON or less adequately schooled in their own particular ways of painting pictures,
PAINTERS but none had undergone a thorough and comprehensive professional training.
1900-1930 Misunderstanding the nature of a discipline they had never experienced,
they persistently derided the older instruction and substituted something
2 else in its stead, a kind of locker-room pep talk about art which made a
tremendous appeal to their disciples, several of whom have recorded their
masters' words for posterity. The stated objectives, and especially the subject
matter, of the loquacious painters contrasted sharply with those favored by
the Bostonians.
Outside of the profession itself the choice of subjects was seen as the
divisive issue. The Boston painters had found their inspiration in the mores
of a leisure class and the enchanting New England landscape. The Ash Can
School, as the name implies, featured the life of city streets, often under-
scoring its sordidness and squalor grotesquely. These subjects can provide
admirable artistic material, as they have since before Rembrandt, but the
painters in question seldom depicted them with distinction of form, color
or composition and commonly
lamentably in all these respects. Yet
failed
the subjects were timely and became even more so during the lean years
that followed.
By awakening the nation's social consciousness the Great Depression
endowed things proletarian with a halo of moral superiority which brought
the Ash Can School center stage and relegated the Bostonians to the wings.
In the nineteen thirties they were ridiculed for their cult of beauty and
condemned for their knowledgeable workmanship which a rising generation
of art students was being taught to despise as academic. Sneered at as the ^

Genteel School by a new group of art writers, relegated to museum store-

rooms or "deaccessioned" by an influx of new curators who were taking
over art museums throughout the land, the Boston painters were shoved
into a temporary obhvion from which they are only now begiiming to emerge.

This is the background against which I propose to reexamine the con-

tribution made by these Boston-based artists; their origins, their objectives,
their teaching and the pictures which they gave to the world.
As their story unfolds it will become increasingly apparent that the
group discussed in the following chapters as the Boston Painters by no means
comprises all the noteworthy artists working in Boston between 1900 and
1930. The title is a generic one for many years applied by knowledgeable
persons to the artists here described. It connoted a certain kind of painting
characterized by very clearly stated and identifiable objectives and ideals
which was practiced by a number of more or less closely associated artists
working in the Boston area. They form the subject of this book. There were
other distinguished artists in the city with whom they lived on friendly
terms but who painted with a very different intent. Charles Hopkinson, for
instance, openly disassociated himself from them professionally and com-
mented adversely on their work. Dodge McKnight, a recluse living on Cape introduction
Cod, had no contact with them whatever. The Boston Painters, so-called,
constituted a school in accordance with the definition given in the diction- 3
ary, "a group of artists under a common influence." That common influence
will be the subject of my next chapter.^
 NOTES
1. Iwill cite as typical the 1908 volume of The International Studio, a magazine which
covered primarily European art. This volume contains an illustrated article devoted
to the work of Frank W. Benson. Another section on the "Ten American Painters"
singles out for reproduction pictures by three exhibitors, these being Joseph DeCamp,
Frank W. Benson and Edmund C. Tarbell. And a third article dealing with miniatures,
each one in full page, by Laura Coombs Hills, who figures in the present book as a
very remarkable pastellist of flowers in her later years.
2. The make-up of these two sets of co-exhibitors figures as an important circumstance
in the history of American painting at the turn of the present century. In 1895 ten
painters, good friends who also respected each other's professional accomplishment,
decided to exhibit together regularly under the simple caption, "Ten American Paint-
ers." Their names were Thomas Dewing (1851-1938); Edmund C. Tarbell (1862-
1938); Frank W. Benson (1862-1951); Joseph DeCamp (1855-1923); J. Alden Weir
(1852-1910); Edward Simmons (1852-1931); Childe Hassam (1859-1935); Willard L.
Metcalf (1858- 1925); Robert Reid (1862- 1939); John W. Twachtman (1852- 1902).
When Twatchtman died in 1902, William M. Chase took his place.
Their exhibitions, usually held annually in New York and Boston, were regarded
as important events. The critics soon referred to the associates as "The Ten American
Painters" and the appellation became widely used. Later on persons hostile to their
form of art implied that the painters themselves had arrogantly baptized themselves
the Ten. I had it from DeCamp himself that there was no substance whatever for
that ridiculous supposition and accusation.
"The Eight", as James Huneker called them in the New York Sun, perhaps to
differentiate them from the "Ten Americans", began exhibiting together in New
York in 1908. The artists included Robert Hemi, Arthur Davies, William J. Glackens,
Ernest Lawson, George B. Luks, Maurice B. Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John
Sloan. For an account of their activities I refer the reader to The Immortal Eight by
Bennard B. Perelman, Exposition Press, New York, 1962.
Several of these painters were outstandingly articulate and could dramatize their
esthetics with almost hypnotic power. I have heard several Henri pupils relate how
their teacher regularly held his class spellbound for an hour and more with discourses
during which the actual practice of drawing and painting was scarcely mentioned.
The artistic philosophy of the Ash Can School has been recorded in a number of
books, among which figure Gist of Art by John Sloan, American Artist Group, New
York, 1939; The Art Spirit by Margery Ryerson, Philadelphia, 1923; Queer Thing
Painting by Walter Pach, New York, 1938; and Ananias also by Walter Pach, New
York, 1938. Particularly illuminating in this context is an article which appeared in
the American Art Review, May-June, 1975, "For Life and Henri, 1940," by Guy
"^^^
Pene DuBois.
BOSTON 3. Examples of the resultant attitude abound. George Biddle (1885 -1973), for instance,
PAINTERS writing his autobiography in the late thirties [An American Artist's Story. Little,
1900— 1930 Brown and Co., 1939), recalls that the insurgents of 191 5, among whom he cheerfully
numbers himself; then a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts which
he attended after receiving a Harvard degree and spending some time at the Law
^ School, "rebelled against the technical formula of French impressionism and more
specifically against Philip and Lilian Westcott Hale's tepid subadolescent nudes.
Tarbell's dreary and uninspired academies and Sargent's bituminous portraits in the
genteel tradition." This pronunciamento typifies the emotional bias and visual im-
perceptiveness of the new student body. Once implanted, however, the credo con-
tinued to be faithfully mumbled for decades. We even find it echoed as late as the
nineteen-sixties in, of all places, the catalogue of a full scale exhibition devoted
exclusively to Boston painting for which most of the pictures were borrowed from
important art museums. The authoran introductory article goes out of his way
of
to quote a diatribe published half a century earlier and written by the most articulate
member of the Ash Can School sneering at the tum-of-the-century Bostonians with
what the latter writer dignifies as fine scorn. This sort of treatment has been regularly
accorded the Bostonians for several decades in certain quarters.
On a much higher literary level we are shocked to find these very accomplished
painters simply ignored. Van Wyck Brooks, in his masterly evocation of the cultural
scene on the northeastern Atlantic seaboard entitled The Confident Years, 1885-
1915 (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1952) makes no mention whatever of the Boston
painters we predominant role they were playing
are discussing notwithstanding the
in the United States during those same
But he does speak of Henri, John Sloan,
years.
Luks, Davies, Glackens and Shinn. We would find the omission incomprehensible
on the part of so scholarly a writer if we did not know that Brooks was the close
friend and biographer of John Sloan, by whom he was presumably briefed in matters
pertaining to painting. [John Sloan, A Painter's Life by Van Wyck Brooks, New York,
I955-)
Critics have all too often classified John Sargent with the Boston Painters. They are
actually poles apart artistically and studying their divergence should lead to a better
understanding of both his way of painting and theirs. Sargent stemmed from a dis-
tinguished Boston family and made prolonged visits to the city in order to paint
portraitsand to work on the great murals in the Boston Public Library and the
Museum of Fine Arts. But his working methods differed radically from those of the
group with whom we are here concerned. Sargent was primarily a sketcher who liked
to indicate the salient characteristics of his subject as far as possible in a single
sitting.He was wont to repeat the performance again and again until he was satisfied.
So most of the canvases on which he worked for a considerable time could be described
as a series of superimposed sketches of which only the final one is visible. I have
heard it said that he was known to have repeated the process thirty or forty times
on occasion. Sargent delighted in transient aspects and his astounding virtuosity was
evidently spurred by the difficulty of the tour de force required to snapshot them.
The passing expression of a face, the revealing gesture which signalizes a personality,
a momentary flash of sunlight caught on an animal in motion, matters which have
baffled the most dexterous painters, often elicited miracles from that nimble brush.
But to obtain those spectacular effects Sargent habitually slighted the forms and
ignored subtleties of color. On his visits to Joseph DeCamp's studio he used to linger
over the Bostonian's most highly finished heads, muttering, "I don't see how you
carry them so far without losing them. When I try to push them I always lose them"
(meaning "lose the overall effect"). INTRODUCTION
Another difference between the two outlooks is brought out by a description
Tarbell gave me of a call he made in Sargent's studio when the latter was painting
a sitter posed in front of a gray wall. "Sargent," he related in disapproving tones, ^
"was simply making that wall out of gray paint." Anyone who has appreciated the
 exquisitely rendered refracted lights and delicate penumbras on a gray wall painted
by Tarbell will perceive how unlike the two painters were. The Boston men respected
Sargent's power and enjoyed his company but they had no desire to emulate his work.
They constantly warned their pupils of the pitfalls his way of painting held for
beginners. Visual differences of this type differentiate painters and schools of paint-
ings one from another, not such peripheral details as their choice of subject or the
fact that one man paints fashionable ladies whereas another prefers proletarian bar-
flies or models simulating characters of the latter category.

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY Watson and the Shark Courtesy, Museum

of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mis. George van Lengerke Meyer
 The Antecedents

V V hen John Singleton Copley sailed for

Europe in 1774, he left in Boston a very individual assortment of portraits
which prefigured in several respects the art which would again distinguish
his native city something over a century later. The rigorous characterization
and exacting rendition of his colonial portrayals may justly be regarded as
manifestations of the New England conscience, that metaphysical entity
which not so long ago was widely recognized as a legacy of the Puritans and
drew from outlanders grudging respect tinged with commiseration. I re-
member hearing as a boy of a southern gentleman then residing in New
York who annually ignored Thanksgiving Day and in its stead feasted his
friends on the anniversary of the storm which drove the Virginia bound
Mayflower off her course to the shores of Massachusetts Bay. Many will
understand and some may applaud his gesture even today.
But, whether we like the trait or not, this locally pervasive heritage
long remained an element to be reckoned with in human affairs as well as
in the fine arts. In painting terms the New England conscience may declare
itself by a deep regard for truth and for uncompromising integrity of work-

manship, two virtues which, be it said, have been common denominators

of most of the recognized masterpieces painted before the New World was
discovered as well as since. And, although the Boston painters whose con-
tribution propose to discuss were not directly influenced by the work of
I

their distinguished predecessor, whom they esteemed without wishing to

emulate, they shared his honesty of purpose and his unstinting effort to
paint what he sawjust as it appeared to him. Unlike Copley, however, the
latter day Bostonians had been privileged to spend their formative years in
the leading ateliers of Paris and Munich surrounded by great art treasures
of the past. Furthermore, their sojourns abroad had coincided with the con-
fluence of two main currents of Western painting, one striving toward ideal-
ism in the wake of Raphael and his Italian compeers while the other followed . THE
Velasquez and the Netherlands masters in their direct interpretation of vis- antecedents
ual experience.
The intermingling of these equally valid but divergent concepts of pic- 7
ture making now respectively labelled the academic and the impressionist
intents generated a yeasty artistic ferment which, additionally spiked by the
rapid spread of plein air painting, packed an extraordinarily fecundating
 potential which persisted through several decades. It was in those exciting
years that the Americans destined to carry home the fertilizing new ideas
got their training and some of the most accomplished among them carried
the heady brew to Boston. The unique character which those ideas assumed
in the New England ambience animated what proved to be the ultimate
phase of nineteenth century impressionism.
The repatriated artists who elected to settle permanently in Boston were
clearly guided by a native affinity to the intellectual climate of the place.
This shared impulse accounts for the striking homogeneity of the group
which presently emerged as the Boston School. The community did not
attract or vivify imaginative spirits, visionaries ordreamers aspiring to paint
monumental decorations. The school coming to birth found its material in
their surrounding world whose work-a-day activities they delighted to de-
pict, raising the prosaic to the dignity of art by the quality of the represen-
tation they gave it. In this they resembled the seventeenth century Dutch
painters whom they admired. Like the Dutchmen, they were excellent por-
traitists and were widely sought after in that capacity. To the pursuit of
these time-honored objectives, they brought highly trained abilities and a
fresh perception of color relations sharpened by their study of brilliant light
effects out of doors, a practice still revolutionary at the time which also
sensitized the painters' observation of color seen indoors.
During the seventies and eighties three outsiders, two Americans and
a Belgian, were instrumental in establishing the painterly orientation of the
nucleus which coalesced in Boston toward the close of the last century. The
most prestigious of the three visitors was the Munich trained Frank Du-
veneck. This Kentucky-bom son of German immigrants lived abroad for a
number of years and spent the latter part of his life in Cincinnati. But he
frequented Boston throughout his career, married a Boston girl and sum-
mered at nearby Gloucester in his old age. In the present context it is of
particular interest that he was responsible for the artistic education of Joseph
DeCamp, technically the most accomplished of the Bostonians. He also
taught Theodore Wendel, about whom I shall have things to relate, and
Charles E. Mills, to whom owe much
I information.
Duveneck requires no introduction in these pages. His deservedly great
THE reputation — John Sargent called him "the greatest talent of the brush of
BOSTON this generation"' — has never declined. He was one of the scant four or five
PAINTERS previously celebrated American painters of genuine distinction whose rep-
1900-1930 utation survived during the esthetic revolution of the nineteen-thirties when
our tastemakers decreed that pictures should be rated by the degree of "social
8 consciousness" manifested in their subject matter and in inverse ratio to
the European influence detectable in their execution. Duveneck's work is

well known, his career has been admirably recorded^ and his status as an
artist rests assured. This celebrated figure will concern us here only in his
relatedness to our Bostonians. But that connection was prolonged and fruitful.
 JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY
Mrs. Richard Skinner (Dorothy The Ascension Courtesy, Museum of
Wendell), 1772 Courtesy, Pine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Susan
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Greene Dexter in memory of Charles
Bequest of Mrs. Martin Brimmer and Martha Babcock Amory

THE
ANTECEDENTS
DIEGO RODRIGUEZ DE SILVA JOHANNES VERMEER
Y VELASQUEZ Don Baltasar Officer and Laughing Girl
Carlos with a Dwarf Courtesy, Courtesy, the Prick Collection
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Purchase Henry LiUie Pierce Fund
 THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930
FRANK DUVENECK Sketch of a Turk, 1876 Courtesy, private collection
I O
 THE
ANTECEDENTS
FRANK DUVENECK Girl Reading, 1877
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles Henry Hay den Fund I I
 FRANK DUVENECK Caucasian Soldier, 1870
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Miss Alice Hopper
 13

FRANK DUVENECK Pastel Self-Portrait Courtesy, private collection

 y}

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

14

LEON BONNAT Portrait of Mrs. Francis Shaw

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Miss Clara E. Sears
 FREDERIC PORTER VINTON Sketch
of a Doorway Courtesy, Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston. Anonymous gift

His first contact with Boston was made in 1874. The twenty-seven year
old painter had returned to Cincinnati for a visit following four years of
assiduous study in Munich and was living with his parents when he received
an invitation from William Morris Hunt to send some canvases to an ex-
hibition at the Boston Art Club. This association had recently been founded
at the instigation of Hunt himself, a commanding personality whose pres-
ence in Boston sufficed to make the city the artistic focus of the United
States. Duveneck sent five canvases to the show, all of which were sold.^
However, he declined several requests to move East to paint portraits and
instead he used the profits of his successful venture to pay for a return trip
to the Bavarian capital.
From Munich, in the spring of 1876, young Duveneck visited Paris for
the time and remained there three weeks. Once back in Germany again
first THE
he writes home to his German born parents in America, "I have returned ANTECEDENTS
to Munich accompanied by Herr Vinton (from Boston). "-^ Now this young
Herr was simply Frederic Porter Vinton, bom at Bangor, Maine, in 1846, 15
who had been studying in Paris that winter under the prestigious Leon
Bonnat. Young Vinton had grown up in Boston where his art education had
been supervised by Hunt himself so the two young Americans abroad had
 DENNIS MILLER BUNKER JcSSica, 189O
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift by contribution

many friends in common. It was Hunt who had advised Vinton to go to

THE Paris.And Vinton in due course would settle in Boston and become the
BOSTON senior member of the group with which we shall be concerned throughout
PAINTERS this volume.
1900- 1930 It was therefore in the nature of things that these two American painters

of about the same age should establish a firm friendship which lasted until
16 Vinton's death in 191 1. But we have reason to wonder what moved the
twenty-nine year old Vinton to abandon Bonnat, with whom he had worked
only a year at that time, for the inferior painters in Munich. 5 We may surmise
that he was carried away by the personal magnetism of his new comrade.
 DENNIS MILLER BUNKER Meadow Lands, 1890
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Miss Susan Upham

Nevertheless, it was a singular decision for such a man to have made and

one fraught with consequences which permanently affected the character

of his painting. To this we shall return in the chapter devoted to Vinton's
career.
Dennis Bunker's sojourn in the Boston area was brief but extraordinarily
seminal.* Bom in Brooklyn from a mother of French stock the slender, high-
strung, very handsome young man presented a strikifig contrast to the heav-
ily Teutonic Duveneck whom Henry James wrote off as illiterate.^ After a
short period of study in New York under William Chase, who had recently
returned from Munich where he and Duveneck had been boon companions. THE
Bunker was off to Paris in the fall of 1882 where he was received into Jean ANTECEDENTS
Leon Gerome's atelier at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He rapidly fell into the
ways of the French capital, learned the language, assimilated a substantial 17
amount of French culture and returned to the United States a very civilized
personality. Gerome's discipline had imparted a finesse to Bunker's innate
sense of form which differentiated his draftsmanship from the rendering in
 DENNIS MILLER BUNKER The Pool, Medficld
Emily L. Ainsley Fund
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

the work of most

terms of chiselled underlying planes which characterizes
Mumch trained Americans, a subtlety
which he later commumcated
of the
perceptible when
to his pupil William Paxton. The contrast is immediately
painter with its counterpart by
we compare a head or a hand by the latter
has its own merits but the difference
Joseph DeCamp. Each interpretation
is both fundamental and
esthetically significant as we shall see^
called to take charge oHhe painting
In the fall of 1885 Bunker was
department at the Cowles Art School m the Massachusetts capital city.
overworked term certainly befits
Although the moody young gemus, for this
found a very cordial welcome
Dennis Bunker, never learned to Uke the city he
in both its artistic coteries and its
most agreeable social circles He was
Club, a friendly aggre-
immediately taken into the newly formed Tavern
gation of artists, men of letters, musicians
and mdividualists of diverse kinds
the similarly
which had coalesced Frederic Vinton's studio. Together with
m
constituted St. Botolph Club, this organization
was to provide a meeting
THE
ensuing years. Frank Duveneck
BOSTON place for Boston painters throughout the
was an assiduous member of the Tavern but, as he
only joined m 1889 and
PAINTERS never have
Bunker left Boston the fall of that year, the two painters may
m
1900- 1930
met There is no record of their having done so.
Sargent dur-
18 Bunker must have fraternized there with the visiting John
eminent expatriate's membership
ing the winter of 1887 - 1888, although the
met frequently at the hospitable
dates from .1890. The two men certainly
who was a friend and
residence of the now legendary Mrs. Jack Gardner,
 DENNIS MILLER BUNKER George Augustus Gardner, 1888
Courtesy, Museum Monks,
of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of G. Gardner
THE
John P. Monks and Mrs. Constantin Pertzoff, grandchildren of the sitter ANTECEDENTS

19
patron of both. They soon became close comrades and a fellow member of
the Tavern Club recalled Sargent's declaring, many years after Bunker's
untimely death, "that he did not remember anyone to whom he had been
 JOHN LA FARGE Girls Preparing JOHN LA FARGE Adoring
Kava Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Angels (Study for the
Boston. Bequest of William Sturgis Ascension) Courtesy, Museum of
Bigelow Fine Arts, Boston

more deeply attached." To another member Sargent declared that Bunker

had evidenced greater innate painterly gifts than any previous American
artist. And he presently invited the young man to spend the suBimer with

him and his family in England at Talcot.^

So throughout the summer of 1888 the two artists painted the English
countryside together and exchanged ideas. The importance of this conjunc-
tion lies in the fact that Sargent knew Claude Monet well by that time and
had assimilated the great French landscapist's perception of color observed
out of doors, a way of seeing which extended the scope and the language of
painting to an extent which seemed nothing less than revolutionary at the
THE time. The phenomenally gifted Bunker immediately appreciated the import
BOSTON of the innovation and mastered its procedures in those short summer months.
PAINTERS His command of the new approach is attested by the superlative landscapes
1900- 1930 he painted at Medfield during the two remaining summers of his brief career.
He seems to have been the first painter to bring the new understanding to
20 Boston and its painters. Very soon afterwards, however, Boston painters
established close and continued contacts with Monet himself and the Gi-
vemy group, as we shall see. But the first Hnkage was through Dennis Bunker
by way of John Sargent.
 JOHN LA FARGE Vasc of Flowers,
1864 Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. Gift of Louise W. and Marian R.
Case

My information about the third precursor of our Boston group is rather

fragmentary. In my student days the name of Otto Grundmann was famiUar
in art circles as that of a Belgian painter who had taught Tarbell and Benson
in the early years of the Museum School and was also eponym to the Grund-
mann Building, a rambling structure containing studios and a vast hall suit-
able for picture exhibitions which occupied the site of the present John
Hancock high rise. In the placid years during which I delighted in questioning
Tarbell about painting matters I regrettably neglected to question him about
this almost legendary figure. It never occurred to me that shortly after Tar-
bell's death, which was to come in 1938, a rapid succession of untoward
events would precipitate the disintegration of a fine art which had flourished
for centuries and impel me to assume the ungrateful task of recording its
sunset years. But I have since then assembled a number of relevant facts . the
about the man and I have most fortuitously come across a very penetrating antecedents
evaluation of his teaching, made by Tarbell himself, which I shall report in
the chapter devoted to that artist. For the moment we will simply glance 2 I
at the provenance of the German painter who should perhaps be credited
with having given the Boston group their most distinctive characteristic.
The institution later known as the Museum School was founded in
 FRANK w. BENSON Still Life — Flowers and Tea Set Courtesy, the Hammei Galleiies

1876 under the supervision of five painters, three of whom figured promi-
nently in nineteenth century American art history: William Morris Hunt,
John La Farge and Francis D. Millet. Despite the fact that his pictures are
unjustly overlooked today, Frank Millet (1846- 1912) was an able painter
who exerted a very considerable influence on the course of American paint-
ing. ^ He had learned his craft under the guidance of Henry Leys (1815-1869)
in Antwerp, a Belgian artist noted for having revived the Flemish methods
of painting with unctuous pigment, evolving a technique based on his study
THE of the Van Eycks^° at a time when most European studios favored the meager
BOSTON handling disseminated by the pupils whom Louis David had taught in his
PAINTERS declining years. Leys himself had been a pupil of Brackeleer (1792- 1883),
I9OO--1930 likewise a Belgian and Belgian trained. So Millet's own technical instruction
was markedly unlike that of the Americans who returned from Paris or
22 Munich. And it was he who recommended Otto Grundmann (1844- 1890),
a fellow pupil of his at Antwerp, as the man who should be given charge of
the painting department at the new school under consideration. It turned
out to have been an admirable choice in every respect.
 ^3

WILLIAM MORRIS HUNT The Belated Kid, 1857

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Elizabeth Howes
 FRANCIS DAVIS MILLET Seacoast Couitesy, Museum of Fine Arts.
Boston. Gift of Mis. Julia Isaacs

FRANCIS DAVIS MILLET Grandpa's Visit, 1885 Couitesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston.
Charles H. Bayley Pictuie and Painting Fund
 Although few paintings by Grundmann are known to exist they suffice
to show that he had the do-it-yourself ability without which no one can
teach others this extraordinarily complex and elusive art, widely promul-
gated opinions to the contrary notwithstanding. The list of graduates from
the "Boston Art Museum School of Drawing and Painting", to give the wordy
title it was known by in the Grundmann years, is certainly impressive."

Furthermore the curriculum instituted by this young foreigner is extremely

memorable, in certain respects superior to the later one which took form
under Tarbell and Benson, the pupils who succeeded him as teachers at the
School. Otto Grundmann appears as one of those uncommon painters who,
extremely knowledgeable themselves but lacking a strong creative drive,
dedicate themselves to teaching and are remembered for the importance of
their pupils. The rarely mentioned Paduan Squarcione in the early fifteenth
century and Lecoq de Boisbaudran in nineteenth century Paris fall into this
category. Grundmann may be similarly remembered as progenitor of the
Boston School rather than as a painter.
A brochure put out by the Boston Museum School in the fall of 1975
to mark its upcoming Centennial Aimiversary in 1976 has provided valuable
facsimiles of documents relating to its own inception. The earliest are ex-
cerpts from school circulars which enlighten the reader about the teaching
methods instituted by Otto Grundmann. These fragmentary indications suf-
fice to show that the young German, whose excellent schooling at Antwerp
I have signalized, had a very clear understanding of how painting should be

taught and his ideas deserve serious consideration today. A brief survey of
his curriculum is appropriate for its impact on the later Boston painters and
also because its intrinsic merit commends it to the attention of anyone
interested in reviving the now moribund art. Without first rate teaching
talented young people cannot evolve into good painters, however great their
innate gifts may be.
The most notable feature of the course and the least expected was its

inclusion of systematic memory training. This recently neglected but ex-

traordinarily rewarding visual discipline was discarded during the eighties
and nineties by chauvinistic impressionist teachers obsessed by their con-
viction that their every touch must register an immediate reaction to a thing
seen and unaware that their idol. Degas, proclaimed memory training to be
the very cornerstone of a painter's studies. This attitude probably explains
why no hint of such a drill subsisted after Tarbell and Benson took over the. the
school in 1890. So we are surprised to find the following clause in the rules antecedents
and regulations formulated by Grundmann in 1877. "Each student will bring,
on Monday morning, a drawing made from memory during the week of the 2 5
subject assigned for that week's work." And in an undated report to the
School Committee's chairman Mr. Grundmann specifically mentions the
"drawings from the nude figure which the students repeated at home from
 EMIL OTTO GRUNDMANN EMIL OTTO GRUNDMANN
Union Army Veteran Study of a Hindu
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Boston. Gift of the Boston Art Gift of Mis. Thomas Riley
Students Association

memory." Dropping this exercise did a grave disservice to the artists who
emerged from the Museum School during its second phase.
Another key feature of the Grundmann art courses which was likewise
discontmued he refers to as follows. "During the time of Mr. Millet's lectures
on Greek costume they painted various studies from the draped figure. I also
formed a selected class in composition. Subjects were given, which the
students worked out bringing their drawings to be criticized." Activities of
this t>'pe were mtended to stimulate the creativity of embryonic imagina-
tions and to bndge the gap between rendering from nature and incorporating
that essential skill with the art of picturemaking of which it is primarily a
constituent. Their neglect during the regime of the great Bostonians was
THE directly responsible, in my opinion, for the circumscribed nature of the art
BOSTON produced by the institution's later alumni. Philip L. Hale, be it said, made
PAINTERS a praiseworthy but abortive effort to carry on Frank Millet's leadership.
1900- t930 But the inestimable Otto's enduring contribution to art lay in his having
brought from Antwerp to New England the seminal principles of observing
26 and rendering the subtlest aspects of color which, as interpreted by his
disciples, were to give Boston paiating its most distioctive feature. The
character of this approach was lucidly defined by Tarbell in his conversations
with Dean Warren as follows.
 In itself this old Netherlandish method, like the Golden Rule, is
easier to understand than to carry out. Its main point is merely to
give each little area of the painting its own paint, right in hue and
value, v^ithout further modification from or into adjoining areas.
The method is akin to that of the mosaic. Halftones are to be
painted as halftones, not mixed on the canvas by pulling a dark
stroke into a lighter. When each area has been thus independently
treated and any needed transitions have been made, not by w^iping
one color into another but adding intermediate touches, the picture
is finished.

This sounds simple enough in all conscience. Having been very carefully
schooled in this method myself I feel impelled to add, how^ever, that its
significance as well as its practice will always elude the nonpainter. The
two things only dawn on the comprehension of the very talented after several
years of intensive study when they have a good command of drawing and
can put down light and dark values accurately. To carry out the entire
operation with complete success, a feat I have never been able to accomplish,
represents the ultimate in painterly virtuosity. The toui de force was trium-

THE
ANTECEDENTS

27

EMIL OTTO GRUNDMANN Interior of a German House

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A. Shuman Collection
 CLAUDE OSCAR MONET Grand Canal, Venice
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of
Alexander Cochrane

phantly executed from time to time by several Boston artists with radiantly
beautiful results. Centuries may elapse before this happens again.
Having delved into the unique character of Otto Grundmarm's teaching
as evidenced by the curriculum of the Museum School, we must turn to an
extended, nay technical disquisition on "Impressionism." This term has
become fashionable in art circles today and much is being written on the
subject. Pictures labeled as being impressionist command large prices, are
approvingly stared at and are expiated upon by art critics. What is written
about these pictures has little or no relevance to what the painters them-
selves tried to accomplish and shows no perception whatever of the degree
to which particular examples under discussion succeeded or failed when
judged professionally by the criteria observed by the men who painted them
and by their fellow craftsmen.
THE Those Boston Painters who are the subject of this work are qualified
BOSTON as impressionists, in the current broad acceptation of the term, by their
PAINTERS aims. Their direct and indirect contacts with the great Claude Monet himself
1900 -1930 qualifies them as impressionist in the limited sense associated with the
painters who followed his leadership. These American disciples should be
28 considered authoritative spokesmen for this particular phase of painting.
Now, although the attitude of mind which governs the impressionist
painter is applicable in every form of representational painting, it is pecu-
liarly suited to solve the problems posed by plein air landscape, an art form
which burgeoned in the second half of the nineteenth century. Consequently,
the working methods which we now associate with Claude Monet embody
and reveal impressionist thinking in its most unalloyed guise. It is therefore
very fitting that Monet should have been accidentally responsible for the
name now extended to denote a category of painters which includes Titian,
Velasquez and Vermeer. So examination of Monet's working methods may
even increase the reader's understanding of those three towering geniuses
who painted in very diverse fashions but held objectives by no means dis-
similar to those of the French master of landscape painting.
The overriding purpose of all impressionists, it cannot be too insistently
repeated, is to give pictorial form to their own reactions before the spectacle
proffered by nature. They are so deeply stirred by the splendor of what they
see that they accept it as the paragon of attainable beauty whose interpre-
tation constitutes the painter's supreme task, one which he undertakes in
all earnestness and humility. As Monet himself put it, "all the great painters

were more or less impressionists." He called it primarily a matter of instinct.

And no person experienced in this art will deny that the impulse to render
on canvas or paper the pageant tendered by the visible world is the painter's
hallmark. The type which we designate as impressionist, however, is by
temperament disposed to obey that motivation much more single-mindedly
than his fellow painters who utilize visual phenomena in order to express
a decorative, story-telling or poetical intent. Buteven the paintings of those
who give priority to these latter factors will in the long run retain esthetic
interest largely in accordance with the quality of the impressionist element
in their representation.
Let us then briefly examine the nineteenth century impressionist land-
scape painter at his work how he pursues the objective I have at-
to see
tempted to define. Watching him we are immediately struck by the crucial
role played by the color key which he establishes as he begins his painting.
Unless the reader grasps the determinative importance of this key he will
not comprehend the changes which revolutionized landscape painting in the
eighteen-seventies and eighties whose repercussions are still perceptible to-
day. During those critical decades a number of very gifted painters wrestled
with the difficult problem of conveying the brilliance of colors observed
under the open sky, especially in sunshine, whose upper range greatly ex-
ceeds the scope of pigments intended to make their effect indoors. Until the
mid-nineteenth century landscapes had ordinarily been painted in studios. THE
from drawings previously made on the spot. Such luminosity as the earlier antecedents
landscapes may possess their authors obtained by opposing values ranging
from pure white, used to depict white clouds or sunlit whitewashed walls, 29
let us say, to tones verging on black applied in the darkest passages. Courbet

was still using this gamut in 1875. The contrast was always one of value
rather than one of color.
 But as painters began to take their easels out of doors they soon realized
that the above described procedure yielded results which bore little resem-
blance to the glittering scenes before their eyes in which dark browns and
blackish greens were conspicuously absent. They presently discovered that,
whereas white pigment seen by indoor light perforce sets the upper limit of
their color scale, the lowest color notes observable under the open sky lies
well within reach of the paints laid out on their palettes. They were surprised
to find that, out of doors in broad daylight, the very darkest objects, a black
velvet dress or the coat of a black dog, assumed a value both much lighter
and more colored than they had suspected. And so a brand new approach
was gradually evolved by that nucleus of fascinated experimenters. Instead
of setting the picture's key at the top of the scale, with the white cloud, for
instance, then recording the full contrast of the blue sky behind it and
descending at the same relative pitch down to the picture's darkest note
they reversed the process. They settled the dark tones first, in their mind's
eye at any rate, matching their actual value exactly and giving them the
maximum coloration detectable in nature. They thereby established the
picture's key at the bottom of its scale which, as I just said, turned out to
be unexpectedly light and brightly colored. The available color range, then,
lay between those darks and pure white at the top. And they further dis-
covered that if the intermediate hues were given their precise relative color
saturation and value, a very taxing operation indeed, the desired brilliance
and persuasiveness could be attained. Claude Monet described this act to
the Boston painter Lilla Cabot Perry as follows: "When you go out to paint,
try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or
whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of
pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to yoif; the exact
color and shape until it gives you your own naive impression of the scene
before you."" There we have a declaration about impressionist landscape
procedure from its leading exponent. The specific end in view was to capture
on canvas the radiant beauty which enraptured the artist as he looked at
nature. He felt that such splendor simply could not be improved upon and
typically approached his task in a spirit of reverent humility. Writing shortly
before his death in 1926, Monet defined his own aims unequivocally in these
THE words: "Je n'ai que le merite d'avoir peint directement devant la nature en
BOSTON cherchant a rendre mes impressions devant les effets les plus fugitifs et je
PAINTERS reste desole d'avoir ete la cause du nom donne a un groupe dont la plupart
1900- 1930 n'avaitriend'impressionisme." (Letter to Evan Charteris dated June 2 1, 1926,
quoted in John Sargent by Evan Charteris. Charles Scribners Sons. New York,
3 O 1927.) When artists of Monet's caliber write to an art historian about their
aims they take pains to say exactly what they mean and there it stands. Yet
our art critics persist in lauding Monet's pictures for qualities which he
clearly disavowed and museum directors blatantly transmogrify his mas-
 William M. Paxton in Provincetown
Courtesy, private collection

terpieces with colored electric lighting which nullifies the very effects which
he himself asserts were their most important constituent. Surely both the
artist and his public deserve to be better served than that.
The truth is that the impressionist intent adhered to by a certain type
of painter ranging from Velasquez to Monet, the most recent distinguished
painters of this persuasion having been our Bostonians, eludes non-painters
by its very simplicity. Its overriding purpose is to report on canvas or paper,
for all to see, the unsurpassable esthetic interest of visual phenomena as
they appear to the artist's eye. This ambition is which
typically the urge
impels a bom painter to choose this primarily visual art as his vehicle of
self expression. But its visual orientation baffles museum visitors who arrive
looking for intellectual and emotional profundities in the masterpieces they
have read about. The latter elements may indeed be present and, when that
is the case, can add incalculably to the artist's contribution. But a painting's

ultimate viability as a work of art depends on the quality of the visual terms
whereby its message is conveyed. This axiom has been abundantly dem-
onstrated over the centuries. THE
In short, a painter may properly be called an impressionist to just the ANTECEDENTS
extent that he renders aspects of nature as he saw them with unflinching
honesty. Most people nowadays, however, mistake for impressionism itself 31
the working methods devised by Monet and his associates solely to obtain
the maximum degree of truth. More erroneously still, these good folk accept
as masterpieces the many failures which are inevitably frequent in this
 elusive type of painting beset with hazards and pitfalls. They then often
conclude that the lapses themselves must be examples of impressionist
them accordingly. Such misdirected panegyrics have
virtuosity and praise
been lavished, for instance, on numerous painfully poor jobs perpetrated by
Monet and Renoir in their old age. By another regrettable twist, the predi-
lection of certain impressionist artists for painting prospects veiled in mist
or made indistinct by the dazzle of sunshine has led casual observers to
believe that Impressionism connotes vagueness of presentation although
"precise rendering of hazy effects" would more correctly characterize those
particular paintings. Again, in what is perhaps the most widespread mis-
prision of all, the rapid execution and incompleteness often imposed on
impressionist canvases by changing weather conditions and similar mishaps
have made the adjective impressionist a synonym for sketchy. All of these
misinterpretations bypass the objectives and the consciously intended mer-
its of the impressionist painters completely.
Misunderstood from an opposite angle impressionist visual truth is also
confused with the semblance of tactility, now popularly called tiompe I'oeil

or "magic realism," and with the esthetic vacuity of photography. The for-
mer depends for its effect on calculated overstatement of detail at the expense
of the overall impression. To do this well requires great dexterity which, if
it is conjoined to decorative patterning, may attain a genuine distinction of

its own but remains a far cry from Impressionism. The difference which

separates the two concepts is made immediately apparent by comparing a

fine Chardin with a Harnett or a Peto. But the insidious blandness of a
photograph is even more abhorrent to the impressionist painter. The ability
to make use of photographs in performing certain professional tasks, such
as portraying deceased persons, is indeed a necessary part of a professional
painter's equipment but, if he knows his business, he is well aware that
these documents simply do not provide the visual phenomena which give
distinction to renderings from nature when they have been perceptively
observed and skillfully rendered.
A glance at the painterly ethic of these profoundly committed impres-
sionists should bring their aims into a truer focus. Complete emotional
involvement has always been a characteristic of significant painters and
THE stem disapproval of those who fail to live
their ardor often vents itself in
BOSTON up The leading Boston painters demonstrated the
to their austere code.
PAINTERS impressionist reverence for visual truth with a rigor which their Puritan
1900 -1930 forebears would have approved.
For example, when I consulted Joseph DeCamp about joining a popular
3 2 summer painting class conducted by a well-known artist his reply was cat-
egorical."No, son," he censured, "go and study with a man who teaches
you to paint truth." When an acquaintance of mine complained to me that
he had brought a fashionable and high-priced English portraitist as a guest
to a Boston club and that Edmund Tarbell and Leslie Thompson had both
declined to be introduced to the celebrity I pointed out that they considered
him to be a fraud. And, again, when I heard Wilbur Dean Hamilton mention
in passing that he had once been admitted to the working studio of William
Bouguereau I eagerly questioned him about the skylights of the building
where such astoundingly well simulated outdoor effects had been painted.
The elderly painter answered drily, "I never could be interested in the work
of a painter who did not try to paint the truth." This in the tone of a high-
minded citizen who had been asked what he saw when he had accidentally
blundered into a brothel. I could cite many such quotations from life and
others culled from the recorded words of celebrated painters. Such was the
art of painting in its heyday. If anyone asserts that these attitudes are in-
comprehensible in today's intellectual climate I am not prepared to gainsay
him. But I have no hesitation in saying that no significant painting can be
produced until total involvement of this quality, coupled with technical
competence, once again is a creative force of civilization.
But the single-minded fervor which carries strong personalities to su-
perior accomplishment readily becomes narrow-minded zealotry in their
disciples, their interpreters and their camp followers. Some academic sup-
porters of the "grand style," whose dominance mid-nineteenth century real-
ists and impressionists destroyed, were sidetracked into untenable positions

by disputes relating to subject matter and esthetic theory. The dissidents of

the eighteen-seventies had the inestimable merit of bringing the true sub-
stance of the painter's art to the fore once more. But their twentieth century
epigones, who exercised a control over their profession even more despotic
than that wielded by their academic predecessors, were producing, teaching
and fostering an art whose scope had been reduced to rendering bits of nature
more or less ably on canvas.
The background I have sketched indicates that the multiple roots of
the school of painters which flowered on Boston soil at the turn of the
twentieth century reached into the richest artistic loam available in nine-
teenth-century Europe. It is all the more remarkable that its pictorial fruitage
should smack of New England as characteristically as baked beans and cod-
fish cakes for Sunday breakfast. Posterity is likely to discover in this marked
local savor the additional charm of evoked bygone time and place which
permeates the work of the seventeenth-century Dutchmen or the rococo art
of Watteau and his disciples. . the
ANTECEDENTS

33
 NOTES

1. " 'After all Frank Duveneck is the greatest talent of the brush of this generation.'
These are the words which John Singer Sargent spoke at a dinner given in London
in the early nineties, in a discussion of the merits of such eminent men as Carolus
Duran and others." Frank Duveneck, by Norbert Heermann. Houghton Mifflin Co.
Boston, 1918.
2. Frank Duveneck, by Josephine W. Duveneck. John Howell. San Francisco, 1970.
The author was the artist's daughter-in-law.
3. Heerman, Op. Cit., p. 30.

4. Duveneck, Op. Cit., p. 63.

5. Bates, Arlo. Frederic Porter Vinton. In the catalogue for the Memorial Exhibition of
the works of Frederic Porter Vinton. November, 1911. Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
6. For further information on Bunker see my biography, Dennis Miller Bunker, by R.
H. Ives Gammell. Coward-McCann. New York, 1953.
7. James' observation of Duveneck is vividly projected by Leon Edel in Henry fames;
the Middle Years. J. B. Lippincott, 1962. Edel's account of James' relations with
Frank Duveneck and the Boot family presents a revealing picture of the painter's
personality.
8. Walter Muir Whitehill, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A Centermial History. The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970.
9. Frank Davis Millet (1846- 1912). Studied at the Royal Academy in Antwerp under
Baron Leys. During his professional life he was decorated by several foreign gov-
ernments including Belgium, Russia, France and Japan. He was director of the Amer-
ican Academy in Rome when he died in 19 12.
10. I owe this bit of information to PhiHp L. Hale's excellent essay on Alfred Stevens

(Alfred Stevens, Masters in Art Series). Now, Hale may well have had it from Grund-
mann himself. In any case Hale surely discussed the matter with his intimate
associate Tarbell, Grundmann's pupil, and both men were well aware that Stevens
had also been directly influenced by Baron Leys.
11. The list which appears in a brochure entitled "1975-76 Centennial Catalog, School
of the Museum of Fine Arts," includes the following notabihties besides Edmund C.
Tarbell and Frank W. Benson: Charles H. Davis, Edward Simmons, Childe Has-
sam, Thomas Dewing, Robert Reid, Willard Metcalf, Herman D. Murphy, Ade-
laide C. Chase, Louis Kronberg, William W. Churchill. (Joseph De Camp is also
listed, mistakenly. De Camp taught there briefly but was never a pupil at that
institution.)
12. "Reminiscences of Claude Monet" by Lilla Cabot Perry. The American Magazine
of Alt, March, 1927.

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

34
 DENNIS MILLER BUNKER The Pool, Mcdfield, 1889
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Emily L. Ainsley Fund

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

35
 JOSEPH R. DECAMP The Blue Cup
Courtesy, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Edwin S. Webster, Laurence T. Webster,
and Mary M. Sampson in memory of their father, Frank G. Webster
JOSEPH R. Decamp Sally Comtesy. Worcester Ait Museum
 THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900-1930 JOSEPH R. Decamp The Violinist Courtesy, private collection

38
 JOSEPH R. DECAMP The Guitar Player, 1908
Courtesy,Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles Heniy Hayden Fund

39
 THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

40

FRANK DUVENECK Italian Peasant Woman

Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston
 FREDERIC PORTER VINTON La Blanchisseuse
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Alexander Cochrane
Gift of

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

41
 EMIL OTTO GRUNDMANN Interior Courtesy, private collection

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

42
 1

Frederic Porter Vinton, n.a.

1846- 1911

I .n the fall of 191 1 the Boston Museum

of Fine Arts put on a memorial exhibition of paintings by Frederic Vinton.
I had then been a pupil of Philip L. Hale at the Museum School for but a
few weeks although I can still recall my general impression of an imposing
array of dignitaries ranged about the gallery walls in heavy gold frames. I
naturally looked at these canvases with the unseeing eyes of a neophyte but
my attention was captured by several copies which the artist had made in
Madrid, after Velasquez, because the originals were familiar to me through
reproductions I had seen in art books.
Art students think in such terms. I only introduce this personal rem-
iniscence because it brings into focus several points bearing on the matters
in hand. The episode, for one thing, situates your historian's relationship in
time to the senior painter of the group under discussion, the only member
of its nucleus with whom he was personally unacquainted. It will also pre-
pare the reader for the almost unrelieved series of masculine notabilities
whose portraits make up the bulk of Vinton's life work. The most inform-
ative biographical document available' tells us that he painted over two
hundred of them whereas a depiction of his own wife would seem to have
been his only venture on the distaff side.^ And, finally, my boyhood memory
underscores this artist's profound admiration for Velasquez, an attitude shared
by his Boston colleagues which exercised a powerful influence on their
approach to painting. At the age of thirty-six Vinton forsook his remuner-
ative portrait schedule for a while and travelled to Madrid in order to make
the painstakingly executed Velasquez copies which were subsequently fea- . FREDERIC
tured in his memorial exhibition. The leading Boston painters were to follow vinToN
his example during the ensuing years.
The Vinton family had moved to Chicago when the boy was ten and 4 3
then settled in Boston five years later. A fortunate accident put the teenager
in touch with the ever helpful William Morris Hunt to whom he ventured
to show some sketches. America's leading painter is said to have exclaimed,
 FREDERIC PORTER VINTON The Rivcr Loing at Grez, France
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Joseph Beale Glover Fund

"You've as much art as I had when I started; go ahead." Vinton later pro-
claimed his debt to the mighty Hunt as well as to several minor painters
whom he met in Boston through the master. ^ He also worked at the Lowell
Institute, drawing from life under that singular artist, sculptor, painter and
anatomist. Dr. Rimmer. These local celebrities must have given him ex-
cellent instruction since the young man was unable to collect sufficient
funds to go abroad until 1875. He was then twenty-nine, an age at which it
is impossible for a man to acquire the mastery Vinton eventually displayed

THE unless he has already been extremely well grounded in the fundamentals
BOSTON So he arrived in Paris in the fall of that year and we read that he was
PAINTERS presented to the great Leon Bonnat by his friend Edwin H. Blashfield. Three
1900- 1930 years older than Vinton, the New York bom Blashfield was educated at the
Boston Latin School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before
44 he turned to painting and went to Paris in 1867. The two young men must
have frequented the same circles in Boston and known each other well there.
So Blashfield would naturally have advised his newly arrived old friend to
study under his own very distinguished teacher and recommended him to
the great academician.
 FREDERIC
VINTON

45

FREDERIC PORTER VINTON William Warren, 1882 Courtesy,

Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of a Committee of Citizens
EDWIN ROWLAND BLASHFIELD Lady in 2L Satin Gown, 1873 Couitesy, Museum
of Fine Aits, Boston. Bequest of Grenville H. Norcwss
 But, as we saw in the preceding chapter, during the following spring
young Duveneck appeared on the scene and in three weeks time induced
his new acquaintance to abandon one of the most renowned teachers of
painting in Europe and return to Munich with him. This unexpected change
left its mark on Vinton's art and so the move calls for scrutiny. The formative

professional contacts made by painters as they develop are very largely re-
sponsible for the qualities and defects of their mature work. The visual habits
they firstestablish are not easily changed. If we wish
to understand a paint-
er's work we must look to his teachers and they are not always the artists

in whose classes he was officially enrolled.

Now the biographical sketch at our disposal tells us that Bonnat gave
his departing pupil a letter to Piloty, then the official panjandrum of Bavarian
painting, although the French Academician expressed his disapproval of the
young man's decision. And the record goes on to say that, although Vinton
'

never delivered Bonnat's letter, he was duly received into Piloty's studio and
worked there for a year. But he did not take kindly to German methods and
returned to Paris "in a happy frame of mind," thus implying that Vinton
had spent that year under the tutelage and even the direct teaching of Piloty.
This imaginary picture does not accord with the known facts. When
Frank Duveneck had arrived in Munich from America in 1870 he had entered
the Academy, to be sure, but there is no evidence that he ever even met
Piloty.4 After three months drawing under one Strahuber he was promoted
to the life class of Wilhelm von Diez. There he found himself with Leibl,
Trubner and Lofftz among the insurgent German realists whom he was soon
to surpass at their own game. And in his letter home reporting his return
to Munich with Vinton in the spring of 1876 Duveneck writes, "My studio
is in the same section of the Academy and in fact right next to Professor

Diez so that we are together more or less and that is a great opportunity for
a student. "5 We find, too, that William Chase was also in Munich at that
time.
So Vinton had moved to Munich in order to be with, and to work with,
these young painters who represented the avant garde of realism. He very
understandably did not care to tell M. Bonnat that he was leaving his atelier

because he preferred to pursue his studies with a group of young dissidents

in Germany. So he tactfully pocketed the magnanimous master's letter to
Piloty and departed. Wecan only guess what brought about his dissatisfac-
tion with German methods. But he did stay there a year and probably came •
Frederic
to realize that Paris was a more stimulating place than the provincial Ba- vinton
varian capital. He obviously could not face Bonnat after what had taken
place. So he applied for admission to the recently opened atelier of Jean Paul 47
Laurens and became the first foreigner accepted there as a pupil.
No serious student of the history of painting can afford to shrug off
details of this order as inconsequential minutiae. They are actually of capital
importance because the factors most operative in determining the progress
 throughout the centuries have always
of the art or in precipitating its decline
depended on the contacts established between its accomplished practitioners
and their talented juniors. To be genuinely fruitful associations between
teacher and disciple must be close and prolonged. Transmission of this for-
midably intricate craft consists of very much more than passing along tech-
nical know-how. It is basically an inculcation of a way of seeing interwoven
with a philosophy of self-expression in visual terms, the two things being
intimately related. So whenever those indispensable contacts deteriorate, as
they did during the nineteen thirties, the vast corpus of knowledge and skills
without which an even passably good picture cannot be created rapidly
disintegrates, perhaps not to be reconstructed for centuries. I shall consider
an important part of my task accomplished if the following chapters dem-
onstrate how this principle functioned in the development of a group of
painters who represent the last significant manifestation of a creative im-
pulse which originated in the time of Giotto. Geniune understanding of its
operation could lead to an eventual renascence of the noble art which that
impulse engendered.
Now Vinton was exceptionally fortunate in his earliest professional
associates and their influence is clearly traceable throughout his later work.
His first mentor, William Morris Hunt,* had learned more about painting
methods from Couture than from any of his other teachers. Couture was in
most respects an excellent instructor but he taught his pupils to rely on a
color formula keyed to reddish brown shadows very noticeable in the flesh
tones and this habit Hunt himself never overcame. Bormat, Vinton's second
great teacher, had received his early training in Madrid, with the Prado in
the offing, and at the start of his career he observed his flesh tones more
sensitively but he never comprehended the cool, silvery light "Vhich irra-
diates the later canvases of Velasquez. Vinton doubtless benefited to some
degree from his winter with Bormat but one wishes he had remained with
him longer. For the Munich group, including Duveneck at the time Vinton
worked among them, painted flesh in tones unabashedly imitated fiom Dutch
and Flemish masterpieces yellowed by time and varnish. And Jean Paul
Laurens, to whom Vinton next turned, a powerful artistic personality with
a rare feeling for monumental composition, was no colorist though he could
THE be effective within his own color scale. We accept the brownish tonality of
BOSTON his epically historical pictures because it exactly suits their austerely im-
PAINTERS pressive symbolism which is ennobled by the architectonic dignity of his
1900-1930 superb patterning. Vinton never successfully overcame the bias imposed on
his perception of color by this succession of teachers who saw the world
48 brownly.
In 1878 he was back and settled in Boston where he immediately dis-

tinguished himself by painting a striking portrait of Thomas G. Appleton,

the local Maecenas who attained posthumous fame through his dictum that
 |H
^^^H
^^^^^^^^^^K

^^^^ ^H|I|''^''

y^^^L^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^L_1_^^H

E ^fi^^^^^^l

FREDERIC PORTER VINTON Alexander Moseley

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Alexander Moseley
 THOMAS COUTURE WILLIAM MORRIS HUNT
Portrait of a Lady Girl Reading, 1853 Courtesy,
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift
Gift of Mis. Samuel Dennis Warien of Mis. Chailes W. Dahney

all good Bostonians go to Paris when theydie. The portrait launched Vinton
on eminent Boston gentlemen. Their
his long career of accredited painter of
impressive effigies still hang in the board rooms of banks and hospitals or
the halls of court houses and state capitols; striking characterizations, well
composed, admirably drawn and, perhaps from the nature of the sitters
themselves, not very exciting. In 189 1 Vinton was given the rank of aca-
demician by the National Academy of Design.
But his art scarcely influenced the work of his younger Boston col-
leagues at all. During the few years which separated them a turning point
of art history had been rounded. The men who returned from Europe soon
after him and settled in the New England city were preeminently colorists.
They must have respected their senior's ability to draw, his gift for presenting
THE each personality with dignity in a well composed picture. But his impris-
BOSTON onment in the Bonnat-Laurens color formula was to them anathema. Joseph
PAINTERS DeCamp, who arrived in 1884, was his junior by only twelve years, but
1900- 1930 during that crisis of rapidly developing visual understanding the interval
sufficed for a whole new way of seeing to be established. DeCamp came
50 home representing the avant garde. The divergence in their work is im-
mediately noticeable in that always critical area of the painter's art, the
treatment of flesh tints, especially their shadows and half-tones. Vinton was
unexpectedly successful in taking over the outdoor gamut of Impressionism
and painted a number of perceptively observed landscapes before his death
 WILLIAM MORRIS HUNT Girl with Cat, 1856
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Bequest of Edmund Dwight
 in 191 But his portraits retained their blackish shadows and undifferen-
1.

tiated half tones to the end. He merits the position to which he has been
assigned as the senior member of the Boston group although his painting
lacked several of their most typical traits. And he retains a high place in
American portraiture by virtue of his draftsmanship and his gift for char-
acterization.

NOTES

1. Arlo Bates. Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Frederic Porter Vinton. Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, 191 1. Bates was a Boston man some standing in his
of letters of
day. He was one of the earlier members of the Tavern Club, which in 1884 was
founded by a group of convivial gentlemen in the habit of meeting for dinner at
Vinton's studio on Park Square. So we may assume that the two men consorted on
familiar terms imtil the painter's death in 191 1. But there is no reason to believe
that the writer ever questioned his clubmate about his professional career. The fact
that Bates fell back on the Robinson article cited below and quoted it verbatim when
he wrote his biographical sketch implies the contrary.
2. Whitehill, Op. Cit., p. 214. Some idea of Mrs. Vinton's portrait may be obtained from
a photograph of the Vinton exhibition there reproduced. It is evidently a very forceful
performance which no other American painter has surpassed on its own terms.
3. Frank T. Robinson, Living New England Artists. Boston, 1888.
4. Charles E. Mills, who studied with Duveneck in Munich a few years later, told me
that although Piloty officially headed the Academy he did not teach there.
5. Whitney, Op. Cit, p. 64.
6. For a detailed description of Hunt's professional training see Philip Hale's excellent
study in the Masters in Arts series for 1908.

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

52
 Ill

Joseph R. DeCamp
1858— 1923

I had been sent to him by Wilham

Sergeant Kendall, an eminent Philadelphia-based painter
' now unjustly for-
gotten, under whose guidance I was beginning my studies. Kendall wanted
me to show examples of my work to the man whom he considered to be
the best-trained painter then residing on this side of the Atlantic. I was
seventeen at the time and I still vividly recall his friendly, "Come on down,
son," as I stood at the head of a stairway descending from an entrance balcony
to the studio below. Momentous episodes of that caliber etch themselves
indelibly in the minds of aspiring young painters and today, more than sixty
years later, I can still picture DeCamp reaching into a portfolio for some
photographs of paintings by Velasquez. First he selected the celebrated
bodegone representing an old woman cooking eggs,^ and pointed to the
rigorous insistence with which each detail had been worked out. Then he
took up the Rokeby Venus^ and said with a characteristic sweep of his long
fingers across the broadly modelled forms, "But before he got through he. Joseph
made them like this." decamp
That painterly application of the stem motto, "Ad astia pei aspera,"
presents the man together with his artistic creed. It epitomizes the incor- 5 3
ruptible integrity of his approach to Nature as the touchstone of the painter's

The portrait of Joseph R. DeCamp is courtesy of a private collection.

 WILLIAM SERGEANT KENDALL The CriticS
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mrs. William Sergeant Kendall

art; his reverence for Velasquez as Nature's consummate interpreter and his
THE direct, down-to-earth way of instilHng in a boy'smind what he beUeved
BOSTON should be the guiding principle of his future studies. Every member of the
PAINTERS Boston group proclaimed the same gospel but DeCamp's way of doing it was
1900- 1930 the most colorful and compelling.
Joseph Rodefer DeCamp was bom in Cincinnati in 1858. He began his
54 art studies when he was fifteen by attending an evening class taught by
Thomas S. Noble at the McMicken School of Design, an institution which
subsequently became the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Two years later young
DeCamp left high school and worked full time at the McMicken.
 JEAN LEON GEROME L'Eminence Grise (Gray
Eminence)Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Bequest of Susan Cornelia Warren

In view of the almost ineradicable effect which his first systematic

teaching has on a painter's future development we would like to know more
about Thomas Noble. The very fact that DeCamp became one of the best
draftsmen of his day speaks well for his capability as an art instructor. The
pupil himself assured me that after two years of study he could draw as
correctly as he ever came to do. "Of course," he added, "you never cease
trying to improve your interpretation of form. That struggle never ends."
William Paxton, another first-class draftsman, gave me time es-
a similar
timate of his own evolution. Now both these painters knew what they were
talking about so we lesser folk who fared very differently must take it as
was Dennis Bunker, a pupil
truth. Paxton's first teacher of Gerome. So we
may assume that Noble was no ordinary pedagogue. Bom in 1835, he "stud-
ied in New York and Paris" and later held the post of director at the Art
Academy of Cincirmati until 1904. These scanty details indicate that he
was not an inconsiderable figure. It was still unusual for an American of his
generation to study in Paris and he was there during the eighteen fifties
when Couture's atelier was in flower and the towering figure of Ingres dom-
inated the art scene. To have prepared Joseph DeCamp for his career is a, JOSEPH
substantial contribution in itself. DECAMP
Then in 1878 DeCamp was off to Munich. Cincinnati painters had been
Munich oriented by Duveneck, as we have seen, and this probably explains 55
the young Joe's choice of the German city rather than Paris at a time when
the glittering capital, recovering from the Franco-Prussian War, was once
again the world's chief magnet for art students. On his arrival he worked
 for a short time under Diez.* But by the spring of 1879 he, too, had been
drawn into Duveneck's orbit and was painting under the tutelage of that
thirty-one year old prodigy. A little band of earnest disciples had gathered
around him in the village of Polling, near Munich, using the rooms of a
disaffected convent for studios and painting landscapes about the country-
side. As the summer ended most of them followed their leader to Florence.
There they continued their studies for two winters, spending the hot months
in Venice. At that point Duveneck was persuaded to go to Paris and the
little class broke up. Whereupon three of the pupils, DeCamp, Ross Turner

and Charles Mills, moved south to Rome for the winter. In the spring DeCamp
and Turner sailed for America by way of Naples.
This unusual curriculum proffered an experience of Europe very differ-
ent from the training undergone by most young American painters who
went abroad to study in those days. The "Duveneck Boys" formed a small
coterie of talented young men united by a common objective under the
guidance of a brillant painter who, despite his limited intellectual outlook,
was an artist to the finger tips. Through their teacher's connection with the
Boots5 the boys had access to the cosmopolitan social world of Florence and
Venice to which several of them, like Julian Story and John Alexander, were
related by family connections. The situation offered ample opportunities for
self-education and the acquisition of worldly wisdom. But DeCamp re-
mained untouched by the historical and literary associations which invest
the very stones of European cities. DeCamp had no taste for literature though
he read avidly for information along certain lines. Nor did he acquire the
veneer of cosmopolitan manners which Americans who reside abroad for
any length of time so readily assume. Fie, on the contrary, deliberately clung
all his life to certain homespun which exerted a charm of -their own
traits
and underlined the essential probity and worth of the man.
But he was thoroughly alert to everything which related directly to
picture painting. As he could draw quite correctly when he arrived he was
better prepared than his classmates to assimilate Duveneck's rare faculty
for expressing form with paint, something very different from coloring a
carefully established drawing and which presupposes a power of discernment
not many painters ever attain. All his life DeCamp considered this essen-
THE tially painterly quality to be a major asset of the painter's self expression.
BOSTON Time and again as we strolled together through the Louvre he would pull
PAINTERS up before a Hals, a Rembrandt, a Fragonard, a Gericault or some other master,
1900- 1930 major or minor, to expatiate on how the artist had "made it out of paint."
The feat may
indeed contribute an exhilarating fillip to a passage intrinsi-
5 6 cally fine. But, perhaps overprized during the eighties and nineties, this
strictly ancillary quality contains the seeds of decadence. Unless its flour-
ishes are underpinned by very strong draftsmanship, spirited brushwork shps
into mere bravura which only emphasizes the vacuity of a second-rate paint-
er's statement. The slapdash techniques which became prevalent every-
where during the first quarter of the present century prepared the way for
the sheer incompetence of the nineteen thirties. DeCamp himself, however,
had the requisite mastery and he abandoned Duveneck's varnish-rich me-
dium for a more stable mix of oil and turpentine which he handled with a
dexterity comparable to his master's. To this he added a perception of color
which the older man never attained.
Art writers have detected a Whistler influence in DeCamp 's painting,
one critic going so far as to assert that in Venice he had actually studied
with the painter of symphonies and nocturnes. The two had roomed in the
same pensione for a time but young DeCamp had cordially disliked his sharp-
tongued neighbor without caring much for his pictures. Whistler once made
a helpful suggestion about a study the boy was working on and invited him
upstairs to his improvised studio. Young Joe, never inhibited by diffidence,
asked the middle-aged celebrity why it was that he never modelled his faces
in light and shade. "Oh! I used to do that!" Whistler had retorted and pulled
out an early canvas. To the student it looked like an inferior Courbet. DeCamp
laterconcluded that Whistler's incapacity to master chiaroscuro had forced
him which brought him fame. When
to create the art of crepuscular flatness
he told me this he also paid his respects to Whistler's exquisite taste and
to the charm of many of his pictures. If memory serves, these remarks were

JOSEPH
DECAMP

57

James A. McNeill Whistler Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston

 THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

58

JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER The Little RoSC of

Lyme Regis, 1895 Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. William
Wilkin s Wan en Fund
made to me in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts before the "Little Rose of
Lyme Regis"!
After an interval spent in Cincinnati we find DeCamp director of the
Art Department at Wellesley College in 1884. There he taught for nearly
two years. The fact that he boarded with his old comrade Charles Mills and
his sister in Dedham
throughout that entire period suggests that "Millsie"
had played an important part in securing for his former fellow student the
job which brought him east to the Boston area where he would remain for
the rest of his life. he moved into the city itself and
For, in the fall of 1885,
taught at the Museum School on Copley Square, until 1888. Otto Grund-
mann was still instructing there and Dennis Bunker was doing the same
thing at the neighboring Cowles Art School. We know from Bunker's letters
that the two younger artists were in the habit of drawing from the nude
model in a studio housed in the not distant Mechanics' Building, then a
sprawling landmark on Huntington Avenue. One would like to know what
that talented pair learned from one another. In age only two years apart,
they were very unlike in temperament and intellectual scope. One reflected
Gerome's teaching and the culture of France whereas the other had returned
from abroad a midwestemer scarcely touched by his contact with Europe.
When I knew DeCamp, Bunker was a dim figure to me, so I never asked
him about his dead colleague.
As these studies focus on painting I include only biographical material
which relates to the artistic evolution of the painters under consideration.
A fire which destroyed the contents ofDeCamp's studio in 1904 was just
such an event because it established him as a painter of portraits. On the
following day the poor man walked Botolph Club lounge and
into the St.

announced that all his paintings had been destroyed. "I have a family to
support," he told them. "I'll paint anybody's portrait for $100.00." Partly
out of friendliness, several men took him up at once and were delighted
with what they got in return. Soon the demand for DeCamp portraits was
so great that they commanded the top current market price and their vogue
never declined. The masterly rendering he made of Theodore Roosevelt for
Harvard University in 1908 is the finest presidential portrait since Gilbert
Stuart's "Athenaeum" head of George Washington. After Vinton's death in
1 91 1 DeCamp had no rival on this side of the Atlantic in the field of mas-
culine portraiture. Like Vinton, he failed to capture the feminine clientele,
perhaps because his friend Tarbell had pre-empted it in Boston. DeCamp ^ JOSEPH
enjoyed lamenting the fatality which forced him to devote his talents to decamp
depicting solemn dignitaries bedecked in their best black suits. "I say to
them," he wrily complained, "I would love to paint you looking like Ajax. 5 9
But you must resemble Ajax a little bit before I can do it."
Although fashionable ladies did not turn to DeCamp for their portraits
he painted many admirable pictures of women posed for by members of his
family, friends or hired models. The superb head of his daughter, "Sally,"
JOSEPH R. DECAMP Mr. Baker — DeCamp's Father-in-Law
Courtesy, private collection
 JOSEPH
DECAMP

6i

JOSEPH R. Decamp Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt

Courtesy, Harvard University Portrait Collection. Gift of the Class of 1880 in 1909.
 JOSEPH R. DECAMP Sally JOSEPH R. DECAMP The Blue
Courtesy, Worcester Art Museum Cup Courtesy, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston. Gift of Edwin S.
Webster, Laurence T. Webster and
Mary M. Sampson, in memory of
their father, Frank G. Webster

has not been surpassed in our century as a finely interpreted characterization

wherein form, light, atmosphere and the subtlest gradations of hue have
been captured in their just relationship to one another; a formidably difficult
achievement which is perhaps the ultimate goal of impressionist painting/
The objective whose pursuit united the Boston Painters was precisely that,
namely to convey sensitively the overall impression made by a chosen sub-
ject on the artist's eye. Each of them approached it in his or her individual
fashion. "Sally" is one of the triumphant successes.
In the spring of 1919, while representatives of the victorious Allies were
gathered in Paris to draw up the Treaty of Versailles, the United States
government delegated a group of painters to portray the major participants.
John Sargent was asked to depict the assembled notabilities but, being him-
self committed to paint a huge canvas memorializing British generals, he
THE recommended Joseph DeCamp for the task. As I recall DeCamp reached
it,

BOSTON Paris in April. I happened to be on duty there myself at the moment and he
PAINTERS naturally appreciated my familiarity with the resplendent capital he had
1900- 1930 only known as a transient visitor. The war was over and my military duties
were nominal. I was therefore able to spend a good deal of time piloting my
62 former mentor through the gradually reopening museums while he waited
for the overworked statesmen to give him sittings.
The boy from Ohio who always lurked under the Bostonized exterior
of this honest artist was clearly bewildered by the surface glitter of the
 JOSEPH R. DECAMP Study for the Blue Cup, 1909
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Mary L. Smith Fund
Courtesy,
 JOSEPH R. DECAMP
The Violin Player
Courtesy, private collection

assemblage gathered on a serious errand in the world's most beautiful city

slowly recuperating from a hard-won conflict. I had warned him that he
might have difficulty getting his subjects to pose for him. He assured me
that he had accepted the assignment with the proviso that he would not
undertake the painting unless he was given sufficient cooperation to ensure
an But he was naively confident when he arrived
artistically creditable result.
that these mighty political figures laboring to shape the future course of
history would sacrifice several hours of their crowded schedules in order to
figure before posterity in awork of art. He discovered his error after several
frustrating weeks and returned home with the sketched-in project now at
the Smithsonian Institute. I reveal this facet of the episode as another sample
of the artistic integrity which characterized Joseph DeCamp and his Boston
associates.
In the history of painting DeCamp will stand with the honorable com-
pany whom we regard as its continuators, the painters who assimilated and
maintained the great functional traditions of their craft and upheld its high
THE standards of execution. He had returned from Europe in 1884 exceptionally
BOSTON well-equipped to practice as well as to teach newly developed methods per-
PAINTERS fectly adapted to attain the objectives which were attracting the vast ma-
1900-1930 jority of painters at that time, artistic goals which we now denote collectively
as Impressionism, actually perennial, but which had at that time just been
64 completely renovated and greatly extended by plein air study. Although he
contributed nothing new to the art form itself he put new ideas to good
service by painting excellent canvases which carry the stamp of his strong
personaUty.
 And yet his classroom instruction seems in retrospect inexplicably ster-
ile. He headed the painting department at the Massachusetts Normal Art
School where he was supported by a very strong teaching staff. Idolized by
his pupils and dedicated to his task, he expounded the soundest doctrine
and demonstrated excellent methods but he developed no painters compa-
rable to the little band of competent craftsmen who emerged from the Mu-
seum School. I had no experience of DeCamp's classroom instruction but I
have discussed it with painters who did. I incline to think that the predi-
lection for dexterous brushwork which was so apparent in his talk may well
have led his young disciples to skirt perilous slopes. Yet this very teacher
described to me the visit of a former pupil who had become a successful
portrait painter in New York. The young man had brought a recently com-
pleted canvas for his master to criticize. "I told him/' DeCamp related, "that
if he ever brought me another picture like that I'd kick a hole it in." He

could not abide flipness or superficiality. But his way of praising true vir-
tuosity could have been misunderstood by his pupils.

NOTES

1. William Sergeant Kendall, n.a. A highly respected painter who was

(1869- 1938).
represented in many museums: the Metropolitan displaying two
of the country's art
of his canvases. His headquarters had been in Philadelphia where he had taught at
the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. But he had recently resigned his post and moved
to Newport, Rhode Island, where I went to him for advice.
2. Formerly in the Cook Collection, Richmond, England.
3. National Gallery, London.
4. My information about DeCamp's European sojourn was given to me by his fellow
student in the Duveneck class, Charles E. Mills.

5. See above, p. 34, note 7.

6. While many of DeCamp's paintings retain their exquisite color gradations some of
the later ones painted after, say, 1912 have noticeably darkened. I attribute the change
to his having abandoned turpentine as a medium in favor of rectified kerosene at
about this date. I do not know for certain what caused this sound craftsman to make
so questionable a shift, but I suspect that he acted on the advice of a paint manu-
facturer whose opinion he trusted blindly.

JOSEPH
DECAMP

65
 EDMUND c TARBELL Margery and Little Edmund
Courtesy, National Museum of American Art. Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger
through the National Academy of Design
 IV

Edmund C. Tarbell, n.a

1862 — 1938

Th.he last time I talked with Ned Tar-

bell we were standing side by side during the preprandial ceremonies of a
club dinner. His face was ravaged by the illness which would soon carry
him off, but his mind was alert and, as we raised our cocktail glasses together,
he toasted, "Well, here's hoping I can make one that really looks like it
before I'm through." Those words from the lips of a dying painter attest his
untiring struggle to communicate the delight he took in aspects of the visible
world and his deep-seated conviction that a painter's function was to "draw
the Thing as he see It for the God of Things as They are," although Kipling's
fine but hackneyed verses would have been inconceivable on his lips. When
I heard these words read at Tarbell's funeral a few months later I wondered

whether they would have pleased him in that context, for he was not literary.
He was not literary, but he had a rare perception of beauty, which is
the poetry of painting. It was this indefinable quality which caused his fellow
painters to regard Edmund C. Tarbell as the head of the Boston School, even edmund
to name him the most eminent American painter of his generation which tarbell
not a few proclaimed him to be. True, his work was occasionally uneven in
quality and declined perceptibly during his last years, both traits being char- 67
acteristics of aging but unflinching impressionist painters.' The psychic

The portrait of Edmund C. Tarbell is courtesy of the Vose Galleries of Boston.

 tension required to observe, analyze and render in paint the jolt given to the
esthetic sense by something seen cannot at all times be maintained at its
necessary pitch by any mind and every man's
sensibilities are numbed by
advancing years. But Edmund Tarbell at the top of his form painted pictures
which are permeated by a unique blend of rare qualities in which carefully
ordered composition, lovely color schemes exquisitely rendered and subtle
depictions of the interplay of light and atmosphere combine to delight the
eye. These visual impressions are put on canvas with a personal touch which
makes every inch of the painted surface treasurable. He loved to reiterate
that he was only trying to "make it like/' an oversimplification which takes
account of neither his initial selection nor his individual way of seeing "it,"
a way which was no one else's.

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!

And the little less, and what worlds away!

Edmund C. Tarbell was bom at West Groton, Massachusetts, but he

was Boston-bred and educated at the English High School of that city. There
too, at some point of his adolescence, he worked for the Forbes Lithograph
Company. But he displayed so much aptitude while learning the lithogra-
pher's craft that his family transferred him to the school recently opened
by the Museum of Fine Arts. So it became his rare good fortune to develop
his visual habits under the supervision of that Otto Grundmann whose
exceptional qualifications for the task we have already reviewed. Tarbell
never ceased to extoll the teaching he received from this German painter
who had learned his art in Flanders. The sitter for one of Tarbell's last
portraits recorded the aging master's tribute to his first instructor and the
account^ indicates that it was he who had directed the talented lad along
the very lines most congenial to his native bent and in so doing had im-
planted the central tenet which subsequently accounted for the most dis-
The opportunity to vahdate his personal
tinctive feature of the Boston School.
inclination during hismost malleable years is perhaps the greatest godsend
which can befall a young painter endowed with a strong artistic potentiality.
In 1883, accompanied by his fellow student Frank W. Benson, Edmund
THE Tarbell crossed the Atlantic to continue his studies in Paris. Biographical
BOSTON notices invariably both painters as pupils of Lefebvre and Boulanger,
list

PAINTERS which, they both were. But the assertion merely

officially speaking, of course
1900-1930 signifies that the two young men drew, and perhaps also painted, from the
nude model in the large class officially criticized by those two celebrated
68 Frenchmen. During that particular decade this was the atelier most favored
by American art students who reached Paris without any other directives
in mind. We have no evidence that either of these two New Englanders
found the experience very rewarding. Tarbell was an entertaining raconteur
EDMUND c TARBELL Mr. Frick and His Daughter Helen
Courtesy, National Portrait Gallery
 and have often chuckled over his account of how Lefebvre and Boulanger^
I

would arrive at the Academic Julian on two mornings of each week in a

four-wheeler hermetically sealed against the inclemencies of French weather.
The two renowned teachers would then pause momentarily before the easel
of each pupil to say a few words before rattling away in their closed con-
veyance. Both artists were far more distinguished than their lineal successors
who criticized when I attended the same atelier some thirty years later but
the ritual remained unchanged. Lefebvre in particular had been an outstand-
ing figure, a member of the Institut de France and past-master of a type of
drawing which we have been taught to sneer at today but which future
centuries will surely regard as one of the great efflorescences of European
art. However, all the classes at Julian's were much too large to permit the

close contacts and interchanges between instructor and pupil which are
indispensable for effective art teaching, even when no language barrier ex-
isted. Tarbell went on to describe an incident which epitomizes the quandary
which accentuated the generation gap among painters at that critical his-
torical moment.
He happened comrade one afternoon when
to be in the studio of a
Monsieur Lefebvre dropped in to criticize a canvas the young man was
working on from a posing nude model. Picking up the palette and mixing a
tone, the master quickly brushed in a hue which, to Tarbell 's amazement,
unerringly matched the color of the posing girl's flesh. "Now will you tell

GUSTAVE COURBET The Quarry GABRIEL METSU Ihe Usurer

(La Curee) Courtesy, Museum of Fine Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Courtesy,
Arts, Boston. Henry Lillie Pierce Fund Purchased from Sidney Bartlett Bequest
 GERARD TERBORCH Cavalier
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston

me," Tarbell concluded with a rhetorical question, "Will you tell me why
in the world the man who could do that went to work and painted the chalky
nude holding up a hand mirror in the Luxembourg?" He was referring to the
then celebrated picture entitled "la Verite." I held my peace, but my own
long preoccupation with symbolism as well as with mural painting had
taught me that, had he painted "la Veiite" impressionistically, to use a word
he would not have understood in our sense of it, Lefebvre would have ended
up with the picture of an unclad woman, which was not his purpose at all.
His aim in this instance was to depict the female figure in a manner sus-
ceptible of suggesting the remoteness and dignity of a symbol. This with-
drawal from everyday reality necessitates adopting a calculated color scale
for the fleshtones and generalizing the structural forms of the body, esthetic
devices which Lefebvre utilized extremely knowledgeably, although perhaps
not triumphantly in this instance. Now, these objectives are alien to the
impressionist endeavor which, as we have noted previously, aims to report EDMUND
the immediate impact of something seen and observed by the painter in its TARBELL
envelopment of hght and atmosphere. Both ideals have suscitated great works
of art, but each should be judged by its own criteria with the painter's specific 71
intent in mind.
Now, a painter is obviously free to choose between these two mutually
incompatible goals and his preference is usually determined by his native
 KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI
Sparrows and Flowering Wisteria
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits,
Boston

KATSUSHIKA
HOKUSAI
Beating Cloth
Courtesy,
Museum of Fine Aits,
Boston

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

72

ANDu HlROSHlGE Shower on

Ohashi Bridge Couitesy,
Museum of Fine Aits, Boston
inclination. But whenever professional leadership fails to recognize these
options and explain them to its disciples the scope of art itself narrows
rapidly and disastrously. Lefebvre demonstrated in the young Tarbell's pres-
ence that he, a master of the academic tradition, so-called, had also learned
how to handle the phase of painting which his pupil wanted to learn. But
the latter's way of narrating the incident reveals all too clearly that he did
not catch that significance at the time and had not thought it through forty-
five years later. As a matter of fact, few painters of Tarbell's generation gave
any consideration to this important dichotomy and dismissed the academic
objectives impatiently out of hand.
I have dwelt on this episode because it spotlights one of the most
restricting consequences of the impressionist dispute. An anti-academism
preached by Courbet, Degas and Whistler, all of whom caustically derided
pictures carrying literary connotations, was exaggerated into something verging
on anti-intellection by the predominantly impressionist generation of paint-
ers who succeeded them and who, in pursuit of their chosen ideal, resolutely
turned their backs on a preponderant portion of the world's greatest art.
Their immediate goal cannot be faulted, but their sectarian leadership rapidly
proved counter-productive.
Tarbell's own interest concentrated on a few very great masters headed
by Velasquez, Vermeer and Chardin. His art also reflects the influence of
Ter Borch, Metzur, Alfred Stevens, Degas, Monet and the Japanese masters
of Ukiyoye, these last being exceptionally well-represented in the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts. Although his attention flagged noticeably when cer-
tain other prestigious names were cited he did not lapse into the Olympian

EDMUND
TARBELL

73

ANDO HIROSHIGE Yui Station

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
 THE WILLIAM T. DANNAT The Quartette (Un Quatuor)
BOSTON Courtesy, Metwpolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Mis. William H. Dannat
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

74
 EDGAR DEGAS Race Horscs Courtesy, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston. Purchased S. A. Denio Collection

EDMUND
TARBELL

75
JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER The Last of Old
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Westminster, 1862
Abraham Shuman Fund
 i

ALFRED STEVENS In Memoriam

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Bequest of Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

76

JEAN SIMEON CHARDIN Kitchen Table, about 1755

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mrs. Peter
Char don Brooks
 EDMUND
TARBELL

11

ALFRED STEVENS Interior Courtesy, private collection

 EDMUND C. TARBELL Roses in Blue Vase Courtesy, private collection

silence wherewith Benson closed conversations about kinds of painting which

THE lay outside his scanty bit of ground. Both men were drawn by a sure instinct
BOSTON to the nutriment on which their art prospered and rarely strayed into other
PAINTERS pastures. I daresay that some painters actually derive strength from this sort
1900- i930 of single-mindedness which allows them to concentrate undistractedly on
their chosen course. In the case of the Boston Painters their total dedication
78 to a single facet of their art,major facet though it was, limited the effec-
tiveness of their teaching, diminished their stature as cultural leaders and
lent substance to the charge of narrow-mindedness leveled at them by their
detractors, most of whom were artistically far more myopic themselves.
 EDMUND
TARBELL

79

EDMUND c. TARBELL Reverie (Kathcrine Finn), 1913

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Bequest of Georgiana S. Gary
 EDMUND c. TARBELL Girl Reading
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles Henry Hayden Fund

80
 1

EDMUND c. TARBELL My Children in the Woods, 191

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mis. W. Scott Fitz
 The most valuable painting instruction which Tarbell received in Paris
was given by William T. Dannat (i853-i929)atan afternoon painting class
whose existence I did not hear about until it was no longer possible for me
to question my elderly mentor on the subject. This unjustly forgotten Amer-
ican artist's career was apparently cut short by failing health after a brilliant
start. His "Quartette"/ which for many years I admired on the walls of the

Metropolitan Art Museum, was a masterpiece whose reported disintegration

is most regrettable. The canvas created a sensation in the Salon of 1884,

shortly after Tarbell reached Paris, so it was only natural that some American
art students, dissatisfied with the criticisms dispensed chez Julian, should
have turned to this dazzling compatriot, still in his early thirties, for counsel.
He had much to teach the bewildered boys for he had first studied in Munich
with Munkacsy (1844- 1909), a formidable executant flawed by dubious
taste and a lethal addiction to bitumen, a deleterious pigment probably
responsible for the sad condition of "Quartette."Dannat mitigated the less
desirable elements of the Hungarian's teaching by working subsequently
under the direction of Bastien-Lepage back in Paris and the latter's clear-
eyed perception of light and color becomes apparent in Dannat's later pic-
tures. The two formative teachers in Tarbell's career would therefore seem
to have been Otto Grundmann and William Dannat.
Tarbell's European sojourn spanned about five years but it was inter-
rupted by a trip home, made to consolidate his betrothal to the young woman
who had been his boyhood flame and who would become his wife shortly
after he had returned for good in the fall of 1888. When the Museum School
opened for the autumn semester of 1889 he and Frank Benson both figured
on Otto Grundmann's teaching staff. And so, when the latter died unex-
pectedly in the course of the following summer, his two former pupils, who
by that time were artists of well-recognized merit, were perfectly prepared
to take full charge of what had become a nationally renowned art school. It
was to flourish under their direction for twenty-three years, as we shall see.
Their resignation from the faculty in 19 13 will be reviewed in the chapter
dealing with Frank Benson.
In 1 9 17 Edmund Tarbell moved his family to Washington where he
took charge of the Corcoran School of Art. He taught there for five successive
THE winters, assisted by two young painters he had brought with him from
BOSTON Boston, Richard Meryman who had been his own pupil at the Museum
PAINTERS School and S. Burtis Baker, a product of DeCamp's teaching at Normal Art.
1900-1930 I never heard anything said about this enterprise which, rather surprisingly,

left no imprint on American painting. This oblivion tends to substantiate

8 2 the view that Tarbell's undeniably rare gift for teaching was operative only
when addressed to advanced pupils who had been prepared to receive his
message by preliminary instruction administered by men of the caliber of
Paxton, Hale and Benson, as they had been at the Museum School.
 EDMUND C. TARBELL Woodrow Wilson
Courtesy, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
EDMUND C. TARBELL Mr. Justice Hammond Courtesy the Thorndike Library
 During the Washington years he had invariably returned to spend the
summer at New Castle, New Hampshire. After 1922 he made that delightful
community his headquarters for the remainder of his life but maintaining
an apartment in Boston during the winter months. In the city his studio was
on Dartmouth Street and he regularly went to the Tavern Club for lunch,
capping the meal with a game of billiards, at which he excelled. Exalted by
virtually every award in the bestowal of his fellow artists, well remunerated
by the sale of his pictures, represented in the leading art museums of the
United States, Edmund Tarbell's sundown was splendid and serene. When
the Depression reduced the pressure of his portrait commissions he told me
how glad he was at long last to paint the pictures he had never found time
to carry out. He had the satisfaction of knowing that those whose opinion
he valued most, which is to say of the painters most knowledgeable in their
art, placed him at the very summit of contemporary painting.

For, although the imposing nobility of the Judge Hammond portrait and
the haunting beauty of "Reverie" can hold picture lovers spellbound, only
the experienced eye of the practitioner can measure the extent of their
accomplishment. The masterly balance of the lights and dark, the exquisite
perception and truth of the tonal relationships and the broad vision which
unifies them are the major constitutents that rank these paintings among
the finest canvases painted in this century. No one since Velasquez has
handled these elusive qualities as successfully and yet the pictures in no
sense ape the mighty Spaniard. Only Edmund Tarbell could have painted
them.

NOTES

1. For a detailed exposition of impressionist painting see Chapter i.

2. In 1939, "Bostonia," the alumni magazine of Boston University, published a paper

written by a former dean entitled "Twenty-four Sittings with Tarbell," describing
his experience and reporting scraps of the small-talk exchanged between the two
participants. It usually behooves a portrait painter to keep his subject alert with
persistent chitchat as he plies his exacting trade. But Dean Warren reports numerous
comments on painting which are of great interest coming from such a source. He
tells us, for instance, how Tarbell kept within reach for reference "half a dozen
reproductions of portraits that he counted among the best ever painted; some Rem- •
EDMUND
brandts, one of Lawrence just 'for the mouth,' and particularly one of Antonio Man- TARBELL
cini's portraits of his father (Millbank Gallery)." Be it said that both DeCamp and
Paxton shared Tarbell's high esteem of this now neglected Italian. Such an accolade
from three judges so authoritative bids fair to assure posterity's recognition of its
85
recipient but all three discriminated sharply between Mancini's good and bad phases.
After praising the peasant boy in the Boston Museum to the skies Tarbell had added
that he wouldn't give five dollars for the "late" Mancini hanging beside it. In the
 same vein he differentiated "Rembrandt's good work from Rembrandt's best," as well
as "Rembrandt's worse from Rembrandt's rather better."
On a lower level Tarbell rated Wilhelm Leibl above all other German nineteenth
century painters. He considered Jongkind to be the best of all marine painters, saying
that "Jongkind pamted ships that looked like real ships." He thought highly of "some
of Twachtman's pamtmgs, done m the [French] mipressionist way, but without their
sacrifice [of the scene] to the light that reveals it," and he cited the Twachtman river
scene in the Worcester Museum as an example.
This freewheeling selective criticism is characteristic of accomplished painters
when they discuss fellow craftsmen who exploited veins the speakers had also worked
successfully and by so doing had become fully aware of the genre's demands and
possibilities. Then we are mdeed entitled to believe that a Daniel has come to judg-
ment and should listen.
Further information about Otto Grundmann's teaching and Tarbell's estimate
of It is to be found m Chapter i.
Jules Joseph Lefebvre 1836 -19 12) and GustaveBoulanger( 1824 -1888) together crit-
1

icized at one of the ateliers in the buildings all known as the "Academie Julian."
This Academie Julian consisted of several huge studios originally organized by a
certain Julian, reputedly a retired artists' model, for whom divers janitors collected
student fees, supervised the buildings, heating, etc. The celebrated painters who
criticized are said to have given their services without charge. "Chez Julian" any
newcomer could pay a fee and set up an easel whereas it was necessary to submit
letters or to pass an examination before entering the Beaux Arts studios. The atelier
criticized by Lefebvre and Boulanger was the one generally chosen by the American
students in Pans throughout the eighteen eighties. I worked at Julian's myself during
the winter of 1913- 1914. The teachers were very inferior to the above pair as artists
and I found the entire system ver>' unrewarding. But William Paxton's description
of Gerome's ateher at the Ecole des Beaux Arts m
the nineties presented a different
picture of a small class composed of pupils who had qualified for admission and who
revered their teacher and received painstaking attention from the master.
This Dannat pamtmg has recently 11975! been reported so blackened and cracked
that it IS no longer fit for exhibition. Not long after it was painted the dangers
attending the use of bitumen became so widely recognized that it was no longer used
by professionally trained pamters.

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

86
 Frank W. Benson, n.a.
1862- 1951

M
y recollections of Frank Benson as
a teacher remain vivid although I painted under his supervision for barely
three months. The announcement of his impending retirement at the close
of the current Museum School year in 191 3 came during my second winter
of drawing from life in Philip Hale's class. I promptly begged permission to
spend the spring term working in the last "portrait class" Benson would
ever criticize so that I might benefit from at least a sample of his teaching
method. It turned out to be a privilege for which I have never ceased to be
grateful.
Mr. Benson cut a very imposing figure indeed. Standing something over
six feet,with greying hair and mustache, he was always impeccably clad.
Years later I was told that when he opened his first exhibition in Boston
after returning from Paris the promising newcomer on the art scene was
approached by a visitor of about his own age. Diffidently the stranger ex-
pressed great admiration for the pictures on display and for one canvas in • frank
particular which at the time he could not afford to buy. He went on to say BENSON
that he was about to open a tailoring establishment in the city and offered
to clothe the artist for the remainder of his life, charging him only the cost 8 7
of the materials used, if in exchange he were permitted to take the coveted

The portrait of Frank W. Benson is courtesy of the Vose Galleries of Boston.

 FRANK w. BENSON Gertrude, 1899
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Mis. William Rodman Fay
painting. The proposition was a gamble for both participants but Benson
took his chance. The youthful entrepreneur's name was F.L. Dunne whose
firm for over half a century was regarded as the finest, and certainly the
most expensive, men's tailor in New England. Frank Benson lived to be
eighty-nine but I daresay that the astute Mr. Dunne felt that the trade
attracted by his handsome and celebrated customer left his establishment
on the profitable end of the bargain he had made.
This commanding personage delivered his class criticisms in measured
tones sufficiently loud to be distinctly heard by the entire roomful of stu-
dents, which that year consisted of perhaps fifteen young people. By and
large he limited his instruction to expatiating on two fundamental principles
of impressionist rendering. I will state his thesis briefly, its technical char-
acter notwithstanding, for the light it throws on the aims of impressionist
painting whose pursuit united all the artists presented in this volume.
Summarily stated, the first of his two working principles underscored
the desirability of maintaining from the very start of a painting the relative
degrees of definition which the various shapes comprised in a chosen field
of vision, present to eyes which have been focussed so as to embrace the
entire area to be depicted in a single glance. For it is this over-all aspect
which the impressionist is bent on rendering since it alone conveys the
"sense of beauty and mystery which enchants us when we look at nature,"
to use an unforgettable phrase of Frank Benson's. To transcribe this "impres-
sion instantanee," as Claude Monet called it, constitutes the gist of Impres-
sionism. And Benson's second principle came as a corollary to the first.
When the colors in the given prospect are observed simultaneously in a
mutual relationship, instead of being examined separately, they appear en-
tirely transformed. This esthetically important optical phenomenon eludes
the beginner's eye even more stubbornly than its above mentioned fellow
partner. Yet one need only juxtapose a landscape by any member of the
Hudson River School, for instance, with one by Claude Monet, Sisley or
Benson to measure the gap separating the two perceptions. The comprehen-
sive, broadly focussed look registers a superior visual truth whose splendor
has overwhelmed most of us from time to time .unawares as we gazed at
nature in certain exceptionally receptive moods. The impressionist painter's
task is to carefully analyze this truth and transpose it permanently to canvas.
In his plein air paintings Frank Benson often carried out this intent
with startling success. Painting under the open sky his fine feeling for color . frank
relations prevailed triumphantly whereas environmental conditions veiled ben son
the shapes in atmosphere and luminosity. He was never a strong draftsman
and the insecurity of his forms militates against the effectiveness of his 8 9
portraits and of his interiors when they include figures. But he has left us
a number of magnificent still lifes which are given an impressively deco-
rative cast by their color schemes, derived from assemblages of handsome
 objects broadly indicated with a full brush and a touch uniquely Benson's
own. And when on occasion he succeeded in bringing the draftsmanship of
a portrait up to the level of its handsomely observed color, perhaps because
the sitter was a relative or a close friend prepared to pose patiently, the result
is enchanting.
But around 19 19 he abandoned portrait painting and devoted the re-
mainder of his long career to depicting outdoor scenes, sometimes peopled
with figures engaged in various appropriate activities but more often enli-
vened by the waterfowl in which he delighted. He carried out these pictures
in various media: oil, water color, sepia wash, etching and dry point, all of
which found a ready market throughout the affluent twenties. For several
successive years of that decade Frank Benson reported an income in six
figures from picture sales. If one considers the purchasing power of the
American dollar at that time and the comparatively low income tax then
levied his intake must compare favorably with the earnings of the most
remunerated painters of any epoch.'
Frank Benson's artistic education closely paralleled his friend Tarbell's.
The two boys entered Boston's "Art Museum School of Drawing and Paint-
ing" on the same day in the fall of 1880. Both went to Paris in 1882 where
they attended the atelier of Lefebvre and Boulanger and, in due course, also
benefited from William Dannat's criticism. Benson summered at picturesque
Concameau in 1884 but his European sojourn was relatively brief for he
returned to Salem in 1885. We then hear of him teaching at the Portland
Society of Art in 1886. From remarks he dropped in my presence I inferred
that he found Europe unrewarding and never returned. In the fall of 1889
he rejoined his friend Tarbell in Boston where the two rising luminaries of
the art world were appointed to Otto Grundmann's teaching^ staff at the

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

90

FRANK w. BENSON Portrait of My Daughters

Courtesy, Worcester Art Museum
 FRANK w. BENSON The Silver Screen
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Abraham Shuman Collection

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

91
FRANK w. BENSON Mrs. Lothrop
Courtesy, Massachusetts Historical
Society

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

92 FRANK w. BENSON Girl in a Red Shawl

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of
David P. Kimball in memory of his wife
Clara Bertram Kimball
 FRANK w. BENSON Pintails Decoyed
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Dr. Fredrick L. Jack

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

93
 FRANK w. BENSON My
Portrait of Daughters
Courtesy, Woicestei Art Museum

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

94
*
 ,r^f^- .^^^

k.
_^ **. ^^ff

1
ti'.l
Lfc^'^
1 *^,->l
'

WW 1 F
1

^
1 ^
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i-
FRANK w. BENSON Eleanor
_.. J
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles Henry Hayden Fund
THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

95
 FRANK W. BENSON
Portrait of Katherine Gray Dodge
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Gift of Sarah Dodge and
Alice Dodge Herling

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930
EDMUND c. TARBELL The Pink Bow
96 Courtesy, private collection
 EDMUND C. TARBELL Girls Reading Courtesy, private collection

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

97

EDMUND c. TARBELL The Lesson

Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston
 EDMUND c. TARBELL Mother and Child in a Boat
Courtesy. Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Bequest of David P. Kimball
in memory of his wife Clara Bertram Kimball
THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

98
 EDMUND C. TARBELL
Mr. Justice Hammond
Courtesy, the Thorndike Library

WILLIAM M. PAXTON The Green Dolman

Courtesy, private collection
 THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930 WILLIAM M. PAXTON The Last Look
Courtesy, private collection

I 00
 THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
WILLIAM M. PAXTON The One in Yellow 1900- 1930
Courtesy, private collection

lOI
 WILLIAM M. PAXTON Nude
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Charles Henry Hayden Fund

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

102
 FREDERIC A. BOSLEY In the Apple Orchard
Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

103

HERMAN DUDLEY MURPHY PeonieS

Courtesy, private collection
 PHILIP L. HALE Girls in Sunlight
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Lilian Wescott Hale

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

104
 THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

105

LILIAN w. HALE L'Edition de Luxe

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Miss Mary C. Wheelwright
 ALDRO HIBBARD West River Bend — Townsend, Vermont
Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

106

JOHN J. ENNEKING Late Aftemoon Landscape

Courtesy, private collection
 FRANK w. BENSON Eleanor
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Charles Henry Hayden Fund

Museum School. After the latter's death during the following summer, his
one time pupils took charge of the painting department and, with Tarbell
at thehelm, conducted it with conspicuous success until 19 13. Philip Hale
joined them in 1893 and Paxton rounded out the illustrious quartet in the
fall of 1906.
The resignation of this group, exceptionally qualified by the uniformity
of their outlook to teach the art of painting concertedly, was rendered in-
evitable in 1 9 12 by a decision of the School's governing board to appoint a
director empowered to supervise all its scholastic activities. Hitherto the
department of drawing and painting had functioned as an independent entity
over which these four outstanding painter-instructors exercised complete
control. They had accepted their appointments with the specified under-
standing that their independence would not be infringed upon. And it was
precisely their freedom of action which enabled these four like-minded paint-
ers to dispense their collective instruction effectively. The intrusive control
of a non-painter in this field exemplified the tendency to institutionalize
art teaching which was eroding its effectiveness everywhere at that time.
The team initiated the rapid decline of Boston
dissolution of that superior
as a center of art instruction. The damage was accelerated by dissension . frank
among the painters themselves which left lasting scars. Hale elected to benson
remain at the school because he could not afford to sacrifice his salary.
Paxton resigned in a manner which permanently alienated his two older I O7
colleagues. The monolithic front presented by the Boston Painters was ir-
remediably destroyed. But the final steps which were to obliterate the long
and immensely generative teaching methods of which the elder Bostonians
 had been the were not taken until 1930. Iron-
last efficacious conservators
ically, that suicidal change of course was instituted by William James, an
alumnus and ex-teacher of the Museum School who had been made chairman
of the governing board m that year.

NOTE

To give the full measure of Frank Benson's success I Hst the professional honors
awarded him as follows: Third Hallgarten prize, n.a., 1889. Clarke prize, n.a. 1891.
Medal, Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. Ellsworth Prize, Art Institute of Chi-
cago. Cleveland Art Association Prize. Jordan Prizes, Boston, 1894 and 1895. Boston
Art Club Prizes, 1895 and 1896. Chronological Medal, 1896. In 1899. Carnegie In-
stitute of Pittsburgh. Silver Medal, Paris Exposition, 1900. Silver Medal, Pan Amer-
ican Exposition, Buffalo, 1901. Lippincott Prize, Pennsylvania Academy of Fme Arts,
1903. Gold Medal, Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, 1903. Gold Medal, St. Louis
Exposition, 1904. Proctor Prize, n.a., 1906. Gold Medal, Philadelphia Art Club, 1906.
Second Prize, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1907. Temple Gold Medal, Peim-
sylvania Academy, 1908. Harris Silver Medal, 1909. Palmer Medal and Prize, Art
Institute of Chicago,1 9 1 2 Logan Prize, Chicago Societv' of Etchers, 191 8. First Clarke
.

Prizeand Corcoran Gold Medal, Corcoran Galler>' of Art, Washington, 1919. Logan
Medal and Prize, Art Institute of Chicago, 1922. Gold Medal, Philadelphia Water
Color Society, 1924. Pennell Memorial Medal, Philadelphia, 1929.
Lack of space forbids my including similar Hsts honoring Tarbell and DeCamp
during those same years. Such was the professional standing of the Boston Pamters.

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

108
 VI

William M. Paxton, n.a.

1869- 1941

ton's once commented

A discerning contemporary of Pax-
that his art had been insufficiently admired because
the debatability of his very individual taste was perceptible to the most
callow gallery trotter, whereas the commanding merit of his qualities was
only fully apparent to genuine connoisseurs of painting. And so, while his
impeccable but subtly stylized draftsmanship and his deceptively effortless
execution were taken for granted, the unsurpassed truth of his color nota-
tions merely "looked right" and only the practiced eyes of experienced pic-
ture makers detected the masterly patterning which unified his arrangements.
Each of these major pictorial assets has often sufficed singly to confer lasting
fame on painters of the past. Yet during Paxton's lifetime casual visitors to
exhibitions insisted on disparaging fancied sartorial incongruities, an unu-
sual though perhaps distinguished color combination, or a minor discrepancy
in the furnishing of an interior, as if they were major flaws in his work.
With the passage of time these manifestations of a powerful personality are WILLIAM
seen to contribute a certain tang to his pictures which is not without a savor PAXTON
all its own.

The man's personal deportment, too, for all his geniality and amiability, 109
was alloyed by untoward minor traits which obscured his superior endow-

The portrait of William M. Paxton is courtesy of Mr. Robert Douglas Hunter.

WILLIAM M. PAXTON Woman in a Blue Wrap Courtesy, Mi. Haig Tasjian
WILLIAM M. PAXTON Sun Wave and Breeze Couitesy, private collection
WILLIAM M. PAXTON Jamcs Paxton — 1898 Courtesy, private collection
 WILLIAM M. PAXTON WILLIAM M. PAXTON Italian Girl
The Artist's OwnStudio, 1890, Paris Courtesy, private collection
Courtesy, private collection

ment of heart and intellect. Many of Paxton's acquaintances never suspected

the fine intelligence and delicate sensibility immediately beneath the brash
exterior of this sharply apparelled rotund man whose bald head and tiny
black goatee evoked the race track. Yet Paxton and his close friend Philip
Hale were the only painters in the Boston coterie who could properly be
called cultured. He was well-read in both English and French literature and
had a comprehensive understanding of several arts allied to painting. When
it came to painting itself his interest covered its entire range whereas most

of his Boston colleagues ignored artists, however renowned, whose aims

differed from their own. Indeed, in all matters pertaining to his profession WILLIAM
his thirst for knowledge was insatiable, his analytical faculty penetrating PAXTON
and he unfolded his theses, sometimes brush in hand, with a lucidity un-
matched in my experience of painters. It was a great loss to art that this
artist's tactless outbursts all too often obscured the wisdom of his argument
while his social maladroitness indisposed those whom he most needed to
persuade. Because of these comparatively slight defects Paxton, for all his
 i

WILLIAM M. PAXTON Tea Leaves

Courtesy, the Metropolitan Museum of Ait. Gift of George A. Heam
 WILLIAM M. PAXTON The New Necklace, 1910
CouTtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Zoe Olivei Sheiman Collection
WILLIAM M. PAXTON Girl Arranging Flowers Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum
 JOHANNES VERMEER
Mistress and Maid
Courtesy, the Fiick Collection

brilliant gifts, exerted little direct influence on the directions followed by

painting in his time. He could otherwise have acted as a stabilizing element
in the turbulence of the mid-century art scene and exerted his remarkable
teaching talent with determinative effect.
For William Paxton crowned the edifice of nineteenth century Impres-
sionism by carrying their logical principles to their logical conclusion. This
isnot to say that he was the greatest artist among its practitioners but that
he achieved their proclaimed objectives more completely in all respects than
anyone else. His unsurpassed visual acuity combined with great technical
command enabled him to report his impressions with astounding veracity.
Of all the painters whose color perception had been sharpened by plein air
study he was the most accurate draftsman and he never slackened his efforts
to render both shape and color just as they appeared to his Paxton
artist's eye.
opined that all painters, excepting Vermeer at the top of his form, permitted
some tonality absent in nature to tinge their pictures. He constantly pointed
out that the invisible atmospheric envelope through which we look is limpid, - w i LLIA M
"like a glass of pure water" and he responded to that challenge. His best paxton
indoor paintings are distinguished by an ambient lucidity we do not find to
a like degree in the pictures of other men. Let no one confuse this with 117
photographic imitation, which it in no way resembles. Effects of this kind
are only captured when the artist visualizes the depicted scene as an entity
all of whose colors are accurately observed in their mutual relationship, a
singularly difficult feat only understood by the talented after years of study.
 A similar relativity must be maintained in the degrees of sharpness
whereby the apparent shapes in the field of vision are defined. Even a slight
error of judgment in either of these areas may jeopardize the truth conveyed
in a painting. The entire operation calls for a very perceptive eye, consum-
mate draftsmanship and, above all, a firm intellectual grasp of the problem
involved. Comparatively few painters have carried it through even passably
well.
If the reader understandably turns away from these technicalities pro-
fessing that he looks at pictures for a private delectation, not in order to
marvel at some painter's professional prowess, I can only apologize for my
shoptalk. But it may interest him to know that pictures of lasting import
have been painted in this way and that the pleasure which countless thou-
sands have derived from them stems from the degree of success with which
their makers executed the complex procedures I have touched upon. If he
shrugs them off as "mere technique" I will paraphrase Buffon's celebrated
definition of literary style, "Le style c'est I'homme," and say that in the
visual art of painting the technique is the man. Every touch, every line,
every tone reveals the mind of the painter who made it. Perhaps the reali-
zation that this is so will increase the enjoyment which my reader will take
in looking at fine pictures.
But Paxton was likewise a master of composition, that twin supporting
pillar of the painter's craft without whose assistance even the finest repre-
sentation will not elevate a painting to the status of art.Of course, every
artist worthy of the name tries to impose some sort of order on his pictorial
material, but, in their pursuit of spontaneity, impressionistically oriented
painters have tended to slight this major constituent of their and in the
art,

early years of the century the type of carefully ordered composition whose
every element contributes to an over-all pattern which delights the eye, fell

into neglect. The Bostonians, to be sure, were among those who still con-
structed their pictures with great care, often with telling results.
Paxton was the most diligent in this respect and the most original,
arranging his mises en scene with a sure instinct at the start and then, as
the painting progressed, steadily improving the abstract pattern created by
his Hght and dark shapes. More often than the others he successfully created
THE handsome arabesques with the silhouettes made by his darks, an art of which
BOSTON Vermeer was a supreme master but which his Dutch compeers and most
PAINTERS later genre painters neglected. In conjunction with a well-balanced distri-
1900- 1930 bution of tonal masses these beautifully studied contours impart an archi-
tectonic character to the representations of incidents trifling in themselves.
118 Despite the eminently individualistic character of the effects which
Paxton obtained, with some compositional devices he learned from Vermeer,
this homage rendered master nettled demi-connoisseurs. "Pax-
to the Delft
ton does not realize that near Vermeer may be mere veneer," gibed Harley
 WILLIAM M. PAXTON JEAN- AUGUST-DOMINIQUE
The One in Yellow INGRES
Courtesy, private collection Comtesse d'Haussonville
Courtesy, the Frick Collection

Perkins, an amateur painter whose bumbling incompetence passed for avant-

gardism in 1916 and who also dabbled in art criticism. But the quip only
calls attention to Paxton's capacity for assimilation. Like every painter who
has left a permanent mark, he evolved a personal mode of self expression
by studying nature in conjunction with the works of his great predecessors.
The three whom he most admired were Velasquez, Vermeer and Ingres, and
it is not difficult to detect reverberations of all three in the Bostonian's art.

But the net result is extremely personal, albeit remarkably free from man-
nerisms of any kind.
Take "The Green Dolman" for example. While that magnificent tribute
to womanhood in its radiant maturity rivals the most extolled portrayals of
the fair sex, it resembles none of them in its color scheme or pagination.
The draftsmanship, unexcelled during our century in its classic perfection,
which distinguishes "The One in Yellow" doubtless recalls that of Ingres
but that master is in no sense parroted. The superlative drawing of the WILLIAM
outstretched arm reflects Paxton's own reaction to the beauty of the female PAXTON
form, whose nobility is accentuated by the unexpected context of the 19 14
backstage locale in which it is presented. 119
Similarly striking are the almost hieratic overtones evoked by the ges-
ture of the statuesque young woman simply arranging flowers, stylistic sug-
gestions generated by the assertion of significant shapes and emphasized by
WILLIAM M. PAXTON The Kitchcn Maid Courtesy, the Vose Galleiies of Boston I
the artfully contrived chiaroscuro of the composition. Nor can the Ver-
meerian disposition of the stabilizing verticals in "Tea Leaves" be faulted
as plagiarisms. But all these observations serve to bring out one of Paxton's
governing idiosyncracies. The intrinsic nature of the objects he elected to
paint meant comparatively little to this artist. His interest centered in the
light and dark patterns and the intriguing color schemes they created in
unison.
But above all he was fascinated by the pellucid atmosphere and light
which enveloped, transfigured and unified them. And this ambience he cap-
tured with a truth and subtlety undreamed of before pleinairism had rendered
the vision of painters more acute than ever before. This unprecedented lu-
minosity is perfectly exemplified in "The Kitchen Maid," a masterpiece
destined to remain unequalled in this respect for many decades to come.

WILLIAM
PAXTON

12 1

WILLIAM M. PAXTON The Breakfast Courtesy, private collection

LILIAN WESCOTT HALE The Welcome Courtesy, Alfred /. Walker Fine Arts
 VII

Philip L. Hale, a.n.a.

1865-1931
Lilian Westcott Hale, n.a.
1881-1963

Thhe remarkable couple who form the

subject of this chapter present a phenomenon unparalleled in the history of
painting. Both were dedicated artists whose approach to picture painting
was eminently professional. Although certain similarities are detectable in
their pictures, the authorship of each is immediately recognizable, despite
the fact that they occasionally depicted almost identical subjects. Always
the finished products carry the unmistakable stamps of their respective
creators. Perhaps the most surprising feature of the case is that the more
impressionable of the two temperaments created the more original works
of art despite the fact that her husband's thinking is everywhere perceptible PHILIP HALE
in her pictures. LILIAN HALE
Philip Hale's eclecticism drew upon an extensive arsenal of nineteenth-
century styles which he applied intelligently yet he somehow failed to evolve 123

The portraits of Lilian Westcott Hale and Philip L. Hale are courtesy of the Vose
Galleries of Boston.
 a distinctive utterance of his own. Some subtle flaw, difficult to pinpoint,
in the initial concept of his picture was all too frequently compounded by
injudicious choices and decisions made in the course of its execution. An
alert observercan usually discover minor felicities scattered throughout each
canvas but the total effect is rarely wholly pleasing or convincing. His paint-
ings enjoyed very moderate success in his lifetime' and they are not likely
to be regarded as more than period curiosities in the future. But his painterly
thinking was extremely penetrating and sufficed to give a coherence to his
wife's exquisite perceptivity which she might not have achieved by herself.
It is impossible to imagine how Lihan Westcott Hale would have painted
had her husband not been at her elbow throughout her most formative years.
We know that she first studied under Chase, although that artist's influence
is not apparent in her mature work. Chase advised her to go to Boston because
of the kinship he detected between her burgeoning talent and the radiant
art of his friend Tarbell which made the latter peculiarly qualified to foster
her particular bent. I infer from the reported facts^ that Chase's recommen-
dation enabled her to paint in Tarbell 's class without undergoing the pre-
liminary instruction ordained by the Museum School curriculum. She
presumably met her future husband while attending his admirably given
course in artistic anatomy. She was nineteen when she married.
Although this precocious art student must have benefited from Tarbell's
instruction, her husband's intellection permeates the personal art of her
maturity, intensely individual though it is. We recognize innumerable com-
positional devices and technical methods characteristically his which be-
come uniquely hers in the application, thereby acquiring a magic absent
from his pictures. We are continually delighted by the inventiveness of her
arrangements and the originality of her color schemes. She had a flair for
picking the revealing gesture which expressed her sitter and then offsetting
its dominant lines with aptly chosen surroundings so as to create a tapestry

of shapes and colors which enchant the eye. Her portraits charm us as
decorative wall hangings in the same degree that they fascinate as revelations
of character. This twofold triumph is especially noteworthy in her portrayals
of children; an exceedingly taxing feat in the performance of which Mrs.
Hale has few rivals in the entire range of juvenile portraiture.
THE To capture the elusive personality of a child on canvas makes the max-
BOSTON imum demands on a painter's resources. The subject is by nature vivacious,
PAINTERS not to say fidgety, and usually heartily disapproves of the project in hand.
1900- 1930 The delicate conformations of childhood or early adolescence and their clear
flesh tones must be observed on the wing and the desired facial expression,
124 fleetingly evoked through appropriate entertainment, provided by an artist
already overburdened with problems. In the long course of European painting
only a handful of artists have fulfilled all the requirements. The most widely
popular portraits of children are scarcely individualized renderings of the
standard child face. The celebrated children by Reynolds, Lawrence and even
Van Dyck, remarkable performances in their way, fall into this category.
More interesting because more evocative of an actual child are the strongly
personalized youngsters occasionally given us by a Holbein, a Bronzino, or
a David, let us say, but they lack the intrinsic charm of childhood. Only
Velasquez, incomparable painter of children that he was, successfully ful-

filledboth demands every time.

But Mrs. Hale, on a very different artistic ground, of course, quite fre-
quently penetrated this singularly inaccessible precinct with remarkable
success, presenting the young as we are sure they must have appeared in
the daily routine of the household, each with a characterization that is
unmistakably unique. Although she does not attain Mary Cassatt's sure
grasp of form or purity of color, to cite another great painter of children,
Mrs. Hale's drawing is always sensitive and her color interesting. Her com-
position, I repeat, is like that of no one else.
Her gift in that direction is conspicuous also in charcoal drawings which
are similarly personal and, within their restricted domain, even more perfect
in their execution. No one has handled this medium as she did. Her subjects
range from portrait drawings to still life and landscape; the two latter some-
times combined, the objects being placed on the sill of a window through
which the landscape is seen. With the simplest tools, charcoal judiciously
reinforced by Wolff pencil, she rings seemingly inexhaustible changes of
tone, accent and pattern.
Philip Hale and William Paxton were alone among the Boston Painters
in approaching their art analytically from a broad intellectual base. They
were close friends who enjoyed sifting ideas together and so they may be
held about equally responsible for the painterly cognition which they evolved.
Paxton applied his understanding to better effect in the pictures he
painted whereas Hale's ready pen cast him as writer and spokesman for the
entire group. Between 1903 and 19 13 he wrote articles for newspapers and
periodicals as well as important essays for Masters in Art, two books and a
most noteworthy volume on Vermeer.^ The last named works added sig-
nificantly to the tiny corpus of art critique which reflects the thinking of
men trained in the practice of the art itself. Men of letters. Degas opined,
explain the arts without understanding them. However that may be, painters
are wont to attach greater importance to the small existing bookshelf filled - philiphale
by their able fellow professionals than to whole libraries of books by non- Lilian hale
painters, however learned their authors might be in affiliated scholarship. -^

Regardless of whether they share their colleague's opinion, painters 1^5

immediately recognize that he is discussing solutions of problems which
they themselves confront daily in the studio. The writings of Philip Hale
 I

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

126
PHILIP L. HALE Black Hat
Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston
 ^

PHILIP L. HALE American Soldier #1

Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston
 deal with the common sense of painting and deserve the attention of all

who are genuinely interested in what artists who turned out fine pictures
were really trying to do.
The leading Boston Painters, especially those in charge of the Museum
School, have been blamed for the conspicuously limited cultural and artistic
outlook of their disciples. In my concluding chapter I shall have more to
say about the intellectual narrowness of the second-generation Bostonians,
a shortcoming which rendered them helpless and vulnerable under the ideo-
logical onslaughts of the nineteen thirties. The question I raise here is whether
the fault resided in the leadership they were given or in the character of
American Hale certainly made a sincere effort to
art students at that time.
broaden the thinking of his pupils, interlarding his criticisms with neat
citations, intriguing studio lore and apt literary allusions which more than
sixty years later I repeat verbatim to pupils today. But American boys who
attended art school in 1 912 lacked intellectual curiosity, were not readers
and concentrated exclusively on learning to render correctly what was before
their eyes. Now, this should indeed be a prospective painter's prime pre-
occupation at nineteen but thirty years later the few who were still painting
had scarcely changed. Some had been to Europe, perhaps on Museum schol-
arships, but their minds had not been enriched nor their imaginations
enkindled.
When art critics began to ignore their pictures and decried their aims,
when rewards shifted to paintings of a very different kind, these Boston-
taught artists then approaching middle age simply fell apart and the tradi-

tional knowledge which they had imperfectly acquired disintegrated. The

best of them painted ably themselves but they were powerless to vivify and
transmit the excellent teaching tradition of which they were the last recip-
ients. For this unfortunate outcome Philip Hale was not to blame.
I feel constrained to mention certain minor idiosyncrasies of Hale's

literary style lest they turn the reader away before he appreciates the real
import of his message and the astuteness of his critique. To demonstrate
what I have in mind I will cite a passage wherein he differentiates three
earlier New England painters, a matter in itself eminently germane to this
history, which exemplifies both the singularity of his exposition and the
THE painterly character of his viewpoint. It is taken from the issue on William
BOSTON Morris Hunt in the Masters in Ait series for 1909.
PAINTERS
1900-1930 One is tempted compare Hunt with two other famous
to
American portrait painters towhom numbers of this series have
128 been devoted; that is to Copley and Stuart. The work of Copley
was perhaps of these three the most studied and careful. On the
other hand, it lacked the vitality of Stuart and the almost morbid
charm of Hunt's best work. Copley, toward the end of his life,
came to work with great facility, but his work never had the del-
 icate grace which distinguishes that of Hunt. Stuart, on the other
hand, as a painter of single heads was, perhaps, better than either
of them; but one is simply from his
not disposed to judge an artist
ability to paint single heads. One wants to see what he would do
with more ambitious work. In summing up, one might say that
Hunt, while possibly not so remarkable a portraitist as the other
two men, was much better equipped for all kinds of art, and im-
measurably a more artistic personality. Stuart seems to have been
content to go on turning out luscious portrait heads to the end of
the chapter. Copley was more ambitious, but his large subject-
pieces, like the 'Major Pierson' and the 'Surrender at Camperdown,'
though interesting, were hardly remarkable works of art. On the
other hand. Hunt ranged over the whole field of art, and everything
he did, even if incomplete, was at least extremely artistic. The two
other men were each in their own way admirable workmen. Hunt,
though full of natural dispositions, was hardly workman enough
but artist to his finger-tips.

This is Hale at his best. It is packed with studio wisdom and direct
observation unobstructed by the literary cliches which gradually encrust the
reputations of celebrated painters and conceal their genuine merits and de-
fects.But the hesitant tone, the reiterated modifying adverbs, the equivocal
subjunctives, fritter away the impact of the statement for all but the most
attentive readers. When we encounter a more unbuttoned example of his
preachment we feel embarrassed rather than instructed, even though we
may recognize the rightness of his position. Take the following, for instance,
in which he chastises Royal Cortissoz, art editor of the New York Thhune,
for an ill-judged comment which he had made anent Paxton's painting. The
professional art critic had stated that Paxton's method was derived from the
work of John Sargent. Justifiably irritated by the influentially situated pen-
man's lack of discernment in the very field over which he pontificated week
after week. Hale retorted as follows:

I happen to know how Mr. Paxton paints, and his manner is

so entirely different from that of Sargent that I don't mind giving

our friend a lesson on technical subjects. In the first place, speaking
of influences, Sargent has from the method
never departed one jot philiphale
that Carolus Duran taught him. His pictures are better done be- Lilian hale
cause he is a stronger man; but his method is that of the great
Carolus. There is the same way of wiping in a dark, effective, I 29
unstudied shadow, of putting in the flat demi-teinte generale, of
cracking the sweaty highlights into the wet paint without both-
ering too much whether the value is right. . . . Now our humble
submerged Paxton is interested in the color values and spends no
 end of time trying to get them right, especially the color of the
shadows ... a matter that doesn't particularly engage the mighty
Sargent. Then, agam, Paxton thinks of the relation between the
high light and the half light in his work. And most of all he never
makes a smart brush stroke. ... It seems too bad, when the worthy
critic was writing his good Httle articles, so happy, playing with
pen and ink and making marks about the 'pitty picture' that one
should rudely call his attention to a few fundamentals in the sci-
ence of pauiting. '

It must indeed have seemed too bad to many readers who surely wished
that Hale had politely refrained from so doing. For anybody genuinely in-
terested in the art of pamting the lesson is of real consequence but the
manner of its delivery is insufferable. We can only surmise Mr. Cortissoz'
reaction. He was an amiable scholar of great charm and some literary dis-
tinction who was to keep his position on the Tribune for forty years. The
gibe cannot have endeared the Boston Painters to this arbiter of the art scene.
But when Hale took advantage of his own newspaper column to pubHcly
point out the shortcomings of his fellow painters he seriously damaged the
cause he was trying to advance. The following admonition, for instance,
appeared in his review of the Pennsylvania Academy exhibition held in 1909.

As to the poor old New Yorkers one hardly knows what to say.
They come limping along like a third rate circus with a few dingy
hand-painted strips of canvas representing bold-eyed ladies with
red lips — a tumbler here and there, or a landscape like what one
sees on the outside of an old lunch wagon. Robert Henri has a
. . .

couple of heads which are like most Henri's only more so. Mr.
Bellows, whose 'Forty kids' last year was at least a daring and a
clever performance, has a hopeless 'Coney Island' with dismal chil-
dren suffering from burnt sienna shadows.*

The butts of these artistically by no means unjustifiable strictures included

men who a year earlier had held a spectacular exhibition in New York as
THE the "Eight" and would soon win acclaim as the Ash Can School. When, in
BOSTON 1913/ the banners of Modem Painting were first unfurled in this country at
PAINTERS the Armor>^ Show, some of these same New Yorkers led the parade. Fifteen
1900-1930 years later they had acquired a large and dedicated following among younger
painters, art students and art critics. I do not mean to decry this development,
130 which accorded with the spirit of the time, but in my introductory chapter
I attempted to elucidate the gulf which separated the ideals of these rising
New Yorkers from those adhered to by the painters who had elected to settle
in Boston. Both schools were deeply in earnest and totally committed to
their beliefs.But they were far apart in temperament, in ideology and most
conspicuously in the subjects they chose to paint and these were precisely
the aspects of their work which the New Yorkers and their admirers trum-
peted. The Bostonians let their pictures speak for themselves but they firmly
believed that without good craftsmanship there can be no good painting and
felt that must also act as custodians of their means of self-expression
painters
by maintaining its quality in their work and by their teaching.
This was presumably what Philip Hale had in mind when he wrote art
criticism. But this in no way excuses the derision with which he openly
twitted his fellow workers for their technical deficiencies. In so doing he
aroused the lasting hatred of the painters and critics who were soon to
become the most influential persons on the American art scene. I have
already expatiated on the loathing for all things Bostonian he aroused in
New York art circles. His polemics were counter-productive in his home-
town for he soon lost his job on the Boston Evening Transchpt by reason of
a protest made by an influential Boston artist whose work he had
scoffed at.

PHILIP HALE
LILIAN HALE

131
LILIAN WESTCOTT HALE
The Sailor (Her Son)
Courtesy, private collection
 NOTES

1. Philip Hale was awarded the Gold Medal at the International Exposition, Buenos
Aires, 1910. Also awards in Buffalo (1901) and St. Louis (1904); the Proctor Portrait
Prize of the National Academy
of Design (191 6), "and numerous medals at Phila-
delphia, San Francisco and Chicago." (Preface written by Franklin P. Folts for an
exhibition of Hale's work held at Vose Galleries in Boston in 1966.) Elected a.n.a.,
he never was promoted to full Academician.
2. "Lilian Westcott Hale —
Her Art," by Rose V.S. Barry. The American Magazine of
Art, February, 1927.
3. After the fan Vermeer of Delft, in its first, and by far the more comprehensive, edition.
Hale's most important contribution consists of the biographical and critical essays
in seven numbers of the series entitled "Masters in Art," first published by Bates,
Guild &. Co. They are devoted to the following painters: Fortuny, Hunt, Bastien-
Lepage, Millais, Moore, Moretto and Stevens.
4. Particularly noteworthy are the writings of E. H. Blashfield and of Kenyon Cox. In
addition to editing an American edition of Vasari's lives, an outstanding contribution
to art scholarship, Blashfield wrote admirable chapters on the great mural decorators
of the Italian Renaissance in "Italian Cities," by E. H. and E. W. Blashfield, Charles
Scribners Sons, 1912. From the same publisher came Mural Painting in America
(19 1 3)with many valuable passages. Two major papers, one on Jean Leon Gerome,
the other on Leon Bonnat, will be found in Modem French Masters, edited by John
Van Dyke. The Century Co. 1896. Together with other interesting essays by painters,
all of interest, this volume contains two by Kenyon Cox; on Puvis de Chavannes and

Paul Baudry. Separate volumes by Cox, all of the first order, are Old Masters and
New (1905) and Painters and Sculptors (1905), both from Duffield and Co. and the
Classic Point of View 1 9 1 1 Artist and Public 1 9 1 4) and Concerning Pain ting 1 9 1 7
( ), ( (

from Charles Scribners Sons. All these writings should be mandatory reading for
young painters.

5 Scrap-book clipping circa 1 906, probably from Boston Evening Transcript.

6. Boston Sunday Herald, Jan. 31, 1909.

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

132
 VIII

Their Contemporaries

-Lhe great repute which Boston ac-

quired as an art center throughout the early decades of our century was
supported by a number of able painters working in the area who shared the
ideals and aspirations remarkable nucleus we have examined in the
of the
foregoing sections. The oldest of them, William W. Churchill (1858- 1926),
calls for passing mention inasmuch as his name was justly associated with
the activities of the Guild of Boston Artists.' For its leading associates liked
and respected the man himself, giving him full credit for attempting to do
an honest job when he painted. Unfortunately, despite his considerable know-
how and his painstaking workmanship, the essentials of fine painting eluded
him. His tones were false, his forms sandpapered, his handling mechanical
and his taste deplorably banal. Edmund Tarbell affixed an undetachable label
to Churchill's artistic status when he confessed his own inability to decide
whether Bill Churchill was the best bad painter living or the worst good
one. Whether or not Churchill consulted photographs when he painted his
pictures remains irrelevant. The trouble with them is that they parade the
same optical distortions and insipidities which we regularly associate with
photography but abhor in painting.
But as we go on to cite the names of other painters residing in Boston
our list grows genuinely impressive. For example, the faculty of the Mas-
sachusetts Normal Art School,^ headed by Joseph DeCamp until his death
in 1923, rivalled the teaching staff of the Museum School and dispensed a
virtually identical doctrine. Seconding DeCamp at the state institution was
Wilbur Dean Hamilton (1864- 1948), a well qualified painter who was both
loved and respected by his pupils. He was a capable portraitist who followed
the leadership of Tarbell but who will probably be best remembered for some
carefully observed plein air scenes depicting admirably patterned groupings
of men and women arrayed in their summer finery whom he captured en-
gaged in the vacation pursuits favored in their day. The subject matter was • their
explored by many painters on both sides of the Atlantic at the time but very contemporaries
few met the multiple demands of the genre in impressionist terms as suc-
cessfully as this representative of the Boston School managed to do in these 13 3
attractive canvases.
Richard Andrew was another painter of well-rounded competence who
likewise taught at Normal Art. Andrew had a surer feeling for mural dec-
 WILLIAM CHURCHILL Leisure, 1910
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Gorham Hubbaid
 EDWARD WILBUR DEAN HAMILTON
Summer atCampobello, New Brunswick^ about 1890- 1900
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Maxim Karolik

orating than his Boston fellow painters. His wall paintings in the Boston
State House, commemorating the Massachusetts troops who fought in France
during the First World War, provides an effectively decorative solution for
the artistically intractable problem presented by his subject matter.
Still a fourth well qualified teacher on that staff was Ernest L. Major THEIR
(1864-1950). For many years a familiar figure in what might appropriately CONTEMPORARIES
have been dubbed Boston's Latin quarter, swathed in his cloak and invariably
accompanied by an oversized dog. Major incarnated the accepted image of 135
the nineteenth century artist right up to his death. In 1883 he had been the
first art student awarded a certain travelling scholarship which enabled the

recipient to study abroad. Young Major's stay in Paris had coincided with
 ERNEST L. MAJOR Resting Couitesy, private collection

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

136
 CHARLES H. WOODBURY Off the Florida Coast
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of subscribers, through Miss Martha Silsbee

THEIR
CONTEMPORARIES

137
 CHARLES H. WOODBURY Three Hills in Winter
Courtesy, private collection

Tarbell's, whom he literally idolized. Though they were never intimate

companions, then or later, both joined the class working under Dannat,
described in connection with Tarbell, and that European experience re-
mained the salient event of Major's career. He had taken over Bunker's class
in 1889. Although his work is marred by a pervasive tawdriness the kindly,
pompous man was a competent performer who took art and his'^teaching of
art very earnestly and gave his best efforts unstintingly to his pupils.
Charles H. Woodbury, n.a. (1864- 1940) stands somewhat apart among
the Boston Artists in that he was almost exclusively a marine painter but
one who delineated certain aspects of the ocean with unique distinction.
Woodbury caught the action of waves propelled by the conflicting forces of
wind, tide and current with a felicity I have found in the work of no other
man. This outstanding achievement was clearly based on unremitting ob-
THE servation of the sea, a trait which relates him to the Boston Painters with
BOSTON whom he otherwise had little in common. But he exhibited with them at
PAINTERS the Guild of Boston Artists until his death and was very active in the affairs
1900- 1930 of that organization which I shall deal with in the next chapter. Charles
Woodbury conducted a summer class on the Maine coast at Ogunquit over
138 a period of years which attracted fanatically adoring disciples.
Artistically more closely allied to the dominant coterie, there was Her-
man Dudley Murphy, n.a. (1867- 1945). This tall, red-bearded man of Irish
extraction had studied imder the formidable Jean Paul Laurens and was
ultimately elected class massier, as the senior pupil designated to enforce
 CHARLES H. WOODBURY The North Atlantic, about 1902
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Abraham Shuman Fund
and by gift of subscribers

THEIR
CONTEMPORARIES

HERMAN DUDLEY MURPHY Fishing Boats in the Adriatic

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Miss Mary Thacher
HERMAN DUDLEY MURPHY Self Portrait Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston.
Gift of Charlene Bowles Muiphy Samoiloff, daughter of the artist
 HERMAN DUDLEY MURPHY Ziiuiias and Marigolds
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles Henry Hayden Fund
 discipline in nineteenth century Paris studioswas traditionally called, a post
infrequently held by foreigners. Our American cared not a jot for the severe
grandeur of his teacher's deeply impressive historical symbolism and he
never crossed the threshold of the master's working studio or questioned
him about his intent or his procedures. A like incuriosity marked most of
Murphy's compatriots who journeyed to France in order to learn their trade
throughout the last third of the nineteenth century. All the time that Murphy
followed the counsels given by one of the most imposing artistic person-
alities in Europe his wholehearted admiration went to Whistler's achieve-
ment lying at the furthest remove of the pictorial spectrum. Irrational and
self-defeating esthetic dichotomies of this nature perplexed the minds of
many American art students bewildered by the conflicting artistic tongues
clamoring in the painter's Babel which Paris became in the eighteen-eighties
and nineties.
Although discrimination was never Murphy's forte, as the above con-
fusion implies, he was every inch an artist and eventually discovered his
true vocation, in middle life, to be painting flower pieces of a truly ravishing
beauty. While these superlative floral portrayals benefit from Murphy's un-
derstanding of impressionist representation they are in essence decorative.

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

142 LAURA COOMBS HILLS Fire

Opal (Grace Mutell), 1899
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. Gift of Lauia Coombs Hills
 LAURA COOMBS HILLS
Margaret Curzon Hale, 1907
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits,
Boston. Gift of Lauia Coombs Hills

He would arrange his blossoms with consummate taste in handsome con-

tainers set off by a sumptuous screen or a bit of fine brocade whose intrinsic
splendor he brought out by ingeniously contrived plays of lights and shad-
ows. The impression created by these arrangements well observed and skil-
enhanced by the beautifully built up surfaces of
fully painted is further
Murphy's pigment and crowned by appropriate frames of his own designing.
The resulting objets d'art provide feasts for the eyewhich are now little
known solely because they were immediately purchased and have seldom
reappeared on the market.
A like fate has overtaken the very different but no less delightful floral
pastels of Laura Coombs (1859-1952). Miss Hills first made an
Hills, a.n.a.
international repute as a miniaturist and then, like Murphy, turned to flower THEIR
painting. Hers were executed in pastel and the blossoms predominate over CONTEMPORARIES
the appurtenances. They are organized in radiant color combinations which
the pastel medium facilitated her stating with the maximum clarity without
sacrificing the delicate contours of the petals. Her exhibitions were recurring
features of the Boston art scene, impatient customers lining up outside the
doors on opening-day with every picture generally sold before noon.
LAURA COOMBS HILLS Ycllow Dahlias Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston.
Hayden Collection. Purchased from the Charles Henry Hayden Fund
 LILLA CABOT PERRY Self-Portrait
Courtesy, Heirs of Mis. Perry

Lilla Cabot Perry (1848- 1933)^ stands out vividly among the Boston
painters by virtue of her personaUty and her activities rather than through
the merit of her pictures. This extremely estimable representative of New
England culture took up painting as she neared forty, an unconscionably
advanced age at which to start an apprenticeship which needs to be begun
in adolescence. But the recorded list of her mentors is impressive. Her first
teacher was no less an artist than the brilliant Dennis Bunker when he
headed the Cowles Art School from the fall of 1884 until June 1889. The
good lady is said to have enrolled there ciica 1885. While under his tutelage THEIR
she must have been a mere tyro in elementary drawing, perhaps eked out CONTEMPORARIES
by a first stab at painting. She then betook herself to Paris where she attended
the very accessible, but inconsequential, classes at Colarossi's and at the
Academic Julian. However, the indomitable New Englander also managed
to work, miiahile dictu, for an unrecorded length of time in an atelier for
 LILLA CABOT PERRY Open Air Concert
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Miss
Margaret Perry

ladies conducted by the prestigious Alfred Stevens himself, although no trace

of that pastmaster's influence is detectable in Mrs. Perry's work. Then, and
most importantly for this chronicle, she met Claude Monet and Pissarro at
Givemy in 1889. She subsequently took a house in the village, v^here she
spent some ten summers as the neighbor and friend of the great Monet who
often dropped in for tea and talked painting. Their interchange of ideas made
Mrs. Perry one of the intermediaries who transmitted Claude Monet's
Impressionism to the Boston painters. An article-* which she wrote about
the mighty landscapist tells the reader more about the nature and methods
of French impressionist plein air painting than entire volumes penned by
art commentators.
THE While this glittering assortment of wise counsellors could not com-
BOSTON pensate for Mrs. Perry's late start in painting, she held the respect of her
PAINTERS fellow artists by her integrity and dedication. They also recognized the ac-
1900- 1930 curacy of her color notation that once lent a veracity to her outdoor works
which now has been seriously impaired by the fading of their pigments. But
146 she failed to make visual truth compelling or esthetically interesting. "She
puts down the truth in all its sordidness," as one fellow painter phrased it.
Its beauty evaded her, moreover she had but little feeling for composition

or selection and none whatever for handling paint attractively. So dreariness

pervades her conscientiously labored canvases. These harsh strictures are
unavoidable since ranking her pictures with those of the eminent painters
with whom she is very properly associated as a friend and fellow worker
does a grave disservice to the cause which her pictures all too frequently
misrepresent.
The bonds she helped between Boston and Givemy are
to establish
historically important. In point of fact, the Boston Painters were Monet's
most faithful continuators. They did not carry out this function by aping
his methods but they applied his visual discoveries to resolve pictorial prob-
lems of their own in full awareness of their debt to the great innovator.
At about the same time pictures by Monet, Renoir and Pissarro were
being exhibited in Boston. In 1883 Monet settled in Givemy where a cluster
of young Americans soon gathered. Among them Theodore Butler^ (1860-
1936) came, bringing his close friend Philip L. Hale, five years his junior, to
the fascinating little patelin. Butler in due course married Monet's step-
daughter and Hale tarried around Givemy for several successive summers
before returning to his home base armed with a very thorough understanding
of the newly developed plein airiste perception and of the various technical
devices whereby the brilliance of sunshine may be recorded with paint. Back
home Hale found that Dermis Bunker had already blazed a trail in that

THEIR
CONTEMPORARIES

LILLA CABOT PERRY Young ^ '

Violoncellist, 1892 Courtesy,

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Bequest of Dr. Arthur T. Cabot
 JOHN TOSEPH ENNEKING Spring Hillside, 1899
Coaitesy, Museam of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of beiis of George
Adams Kettell

diiection for Boston painters, Bunker having, as we have seen, spent the
suminer of 1886 in England sketching with John Sargent who had himself
recently beoi in contact with Monet. These happenings preceded Mrs. Per-
ry's arrival at Givemy by only a few years and occurred a Httle before John
Enneking ^1840—1916} finally settled down in Boston.
Tliis CMiio-boni painter had first come to the New England city in 1 87 1,
a manied man thirty -one years old with two children. But his heart was set
on European study and he sailed for Europe with a letter to Bonnat from
Fnedenc Vinton in 1 872. He did not go to Paris immediately but settled there
in due coarse to work in Bonnat 's ateUer for three years. We read that he
associated with Renoir, Manet, Monet and Pissarro, to the point of ha\TQg
actually made a dravilng of Mme. Monet and her httle son in their Argenteuil
THE garden one afternoon in 1874 when Manet and Renoir were busily painting
BOSTON there.* Certainly by the time he had settled in Boston he had assimilated
PAINTERS the inqnessionist color scale successfully enough to do a number of sensitive
1900— 1930 landscapes in the impressionist key which stand up among the good things
of their kind painted by American artists.
148 These international goings and comings also served to turn the New
FriglanH city into a mart for French impressionist pictures at a time when
paintings pitched in a high key were still controversial m
Paris and were
scarcely known at all in most of the Umted States. Before the century closed
 t- .

'v'^ .

JOHN JOSEPH ENNEKING Breaking up of Winter

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Mr.and Mis. Robeit Douglas Hunter

THEIR
CONTEMPORARIES

149
 a substantial number of Back Bay mansions housed one or more Monets.
Desmond Fitzgerald, a Rhode Island born resident of Brookline, even went
so far as to build a private picture gallery to hold his collection of French
impressionists. These magnificent imports, often on loan at the Museum of
Fine Arts to which many of them were eventually donated, were given
intensive study by painters, young and old, eager to make use Monet's
of
approach when they themselves rendered New England's sun-drenched
countryside, whose clearer atmosphere suscitated color relations strikingly
differentfrom those prevailing in Normandy.
In maintaining that the Boston School represents the last flowering of
nineteenth-century Impressionism I do not have their landscapes uppermost
in my mind. Although its leading artists all painted very capably from nature
out of doors very few specialized in landscape. In earlier chapters I have had
occasion to review plein air scenes animated with figures from Tarbell,
Benson and a few others which surpass in several respects anything being
painted abroad at the time, if we except the pictures of Mary Cassatt. This
is because the leading Boston Painters, havingfirst benefited by a training

in drawing of the so-called academic variety,were thereby enabled to assim-

ilate Giverny's heady doctrine equipped with strong grasp of form which
eluded most of the later converts who stormed the impressionist band-wagon
after rigorous study of drawing had been discredited.
The point I wish to stress is that the great Bostonians did their most
significant work indoors, having returned to their studios with a heightened
sensibility to color acquired by painting under open skies. They owe their
preeminence in large measure to that twofold initiation.
The Boston painter of that generation who adhered most strictly to
landscape was Theodore Wendel (1859-1932), whose unique contributions
to the genre are now resurgent after undergoing a prolonged eclipse. This
eclipse is easily explained. Wendel where
sold his pictures in the Boston area
their rare quality was insistently expounded by his celebrated colleagues.
These expert fellow practitioners told their acquaintances that Teddy's por-
trayals of the countryside were unparalleled in the annals of Impressionism
and quoted Claude Monet's warm endorsement of his talent.
It thereby came about that Wendels hung on the walls of many a Boston

THE mansion. However, as changing conditions restricted their living space,

BOSTON grandchildren of the purchasers, unaware of their origin, discarded these
PAINTERS unobtrusive canvases signed by an unfamiliar name and begrimed with layers
1900-1930 of dust. Fortunately a number of admirable examples have recently come to
light and more may well turn up.
11
150 I did not get to know Teddy until his later years but I met him in

DeCamp's studio when I was a beginner. I can vividly recall my mentor

introducing me to a man in his studio whom he identified as a great painter.
 THEODORE WENDEL Snow Scene, about 1881-82
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Zoe Oliver Sherman Collection

I was staggered have a man thus honored look at my feeble life-studies

to
and say that he wished he had been taught to draw like that. Only years
later did I understand that he was not praising my drawings but regretting
that he had not benefitted from similar instruction in his youth. Wendel
had never mastered figure drawing. He was a landscape painter first and last
but a remarkable one.
He started his career as an acrobat. It seems that the fifteen-year-old
boy had been captivated by the glamor of the tented arena and joined a circus
with which he travelled for a couple of years. The agility he acquired never
deserted him. In middle-age he occasionally entertained his companions
with surprising featS; turning egregious somersaults and handsprings, bal- THEIR
ancing a chair on his chin, juggling objects in the air while simultaneously CONTEMPORARIES
playing tunes on a harmonica and similar pranks. Pitted against Teddy at
billiards in the Tavern Club, Ignaz Paderewski, a virtuoso of another stripe, 151
became so engrossed in the close tussle that he kept a packed audience
waiting in a concert hall for thirty-five minutes. Stepping seventy, Teddy
 could still defeat much younger men on the tennis court. But his most
memorable stunts were performed out of doors as he organized his sensitive
impressions of nature's aspects on canvas.
The greater urge to be a painter lured him from the circus tent to attend
the McMicken art school in his home town There he met
of Cincinnati.
young Joe DeCamp with whom he formed an enduring friendship. This must
have happened in 1876 when DeCamp had been a full-time pupil of the
institution for a year. The two young men apparently headed for Munich
together in 1878 where they were drawn into Duveneck's orbit. They also
managed to benefit by those fabulous two summers spent at Venice, with
Florentine winters, as "Duveneck boys" in 1879 ^nd 1880.
In Venice Wendel roomed in the pensione on the Riva degli Schiavoni
where we have already followed DeCamp's misadventures with Whistler.
Teddy got along better with the pastmaster of the gentle art of making
enemies because the young student's window opened on the Grand Canal
whereas Whistler's did not. So the great man made use of Teddy's window
to etch the view. He also asked his youthful neighbor to accompany him
with a lantern when he took notes useful for painting a nocturne. Wendel
held the light while Whistler pencilled notations. I have not seen this pro-
cedure reported elsewhere.
We hear of Wendel back at Cincinnati in 1883 sharing a studio with
Carl Fitter, John Twachtman, Kenyon Cox and DeCamp. Presumably DeCamp
was responsible for his move to Boston and ultimately settling in neighboring
Ipswich. The summers of 1886 and 1887 he spent at Givemy. There he was
intimately associated with Claude Monet by his connection with those two
other American Theodores of Impressionism, Theodore Butler and Theodore
Robinson. Butler, the reader will recall, married Monet's stepdaughter. Mrs.
Perry, who became Monet's neighbor and good friend, a few years later
reported Monet's saying that Wendel was the only American painter whose
work interested him. This clearheaded lady's quotations regarding painters
are trustworthy.
To the phenomenal accuracy of his color relations the Duveneck pupil
added a finesse of handling foreign to the French master. He frequently gave
his landscapes balanced compositional patterns which the prolific Monet
THE rarely sought. Unfortunately a blue pigment on which he relied has darkened,
BOSTON thereby damaging the values of blue sky or blue water in some otherwise
PAINTERS masterly pictures.^ The best of them are unsurpassed in their kind.
1900-1930 DeCamp, be it recorded, continually deplored Teddy's fumbling sales-
manship and his addiction to landscape sites lacking popular appeal. So he
152 busied himself recommending his friend's pictures to affluent acquaintances
and many Bostonians purchased Wendels which their artistically unin-
structed descendants have now lost sight of. When these neglected canvases
come to light they may occasion surprises.
 IGNAZ MARCEL GAUGENGIGL
The Visitor, about 1925 Courtesy, Museum
of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Frederick L. Jack

Another Bostonized outsider was Ignaz M. Gaugengigl, a.n.a. (1855-

1932). This foreigner was a Viennese who had learned his trade in the im-
perial capital and his art never completely shed its central European plumage.
Also a skilled woodcarver, his manual dexterity made memorable the small
anecdotal pictures of costumed personages disporting themselves in period
settings which first established Gaugengigl's reputation. Although he is not
listed as an instructor on the records of the Museum School Gaugengigl is
reported to have been Childe Hassam's teacher in the eighteen-eighties and
must be credited for having prepared this brilliant pupil to become the skilled
workman he showed himself to be throughout the first half of his career.
Undoubtedly influenced to a noticeable degree by his painter friends in
Boston who made "Gaugie" their boon companion, this genial Austrian
managed to clear up the syrupy tonality which marred his early interiors. •

their
The excellent man's personal charm and his undeniable gift for getting a contemporaries
likeness brought him numerous portrait commissions in Boston's fashion-
able circles. But when he worked on a large scale the flaws inherent in his 15 3
early training became apparent and he never mastered the broad handling
which distinguished the work of the leading Bostonians. An unfortunate
episode clouded his last years, for the tensions occasioned by the European
 i

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900— 1930

IGNAZ MARCEL GAUGENGIGL Self-Poitrait

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of
Mrs. Henry S. Shaw
 ELIZABETH o. PAXTON The Eggplant
Courtesy, Mr. William fames Flynn

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

FREDERICK G. HALL The Rabbit

Courtesy, private collection
 THE LESLIE P. THOMPSON The Black Hat Courtesy, private collection
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

156
 1

6 il|H^HHI[^|^||||||||H|^H
^aj^^^^^^^^H^^^^^^^^w tf^^Sar

LESLIE P. THOMPSON On the Beach; Cape Ann, 191

Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

LESLIE P. THOMPSON The White Monkey

Courtesy, private collection
 CHARLES H. WOODBURY Ogunquit Beach, Bath House, 1923
Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

158
 CHARLES H. WOODBURY Ocean Waves, about 1922
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Frederick L. Jack

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

159
 THEODORE WENDEL Girl in Sunlight
Courtesy, private collection

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

I 60

THEODORE WENDEL
An Old Orchard, Ipswich, Ma. c. 19 12
Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston
 LILLA CABOT PERRY At the River's Head
— Mrs. Edith Balantyne, Epte River, Givemy, France, 1895
Courtesy, the Vose Galleries of Boston

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

161

LILLA CABOT PERRY Open All

Concert Courtesy, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston. Gift of Miss Margaret Perry
LAURA COOMBS HILLS Larkspur, Peonies and Canterbury Bells
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Purchased
from the
Ellen Keller an Gardner Picture Fund
 ADELAIDE COLE CHASE ADELAIDE COLE CHASE
The Gilded Cage: a Portrait of The Violinist
Ralph Adams Cramm, II Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts,
Courtesy, Alfred f. Walker Fine Arts Boston. Purchased from the
Charles Henry Hayden Fund,
Hay den Collection

carnage caused this lovable native of Austria-Hungary to react to the Lu-

sitania's torpedoing in 19 16 so ill-advisedly that he alienated many of his
American friends permanently.
And finally Adelaide Cole Chase a.n.a. (1868- 1944), should be listed
with this earlier age-group. She had studied under Dennis Bunker as well as
with her father, Foxcroft Cole, and acquired considerable competence as a
portrait painter. She possessed an outstanding gift for composing her pictures
in attractive color arrangements; "Much as a woman of taste trims a hat,
instinctively," a painter commented astutely. These agreeable canvases al-
ways contributed a charming note when they hung on the walls of the Guild THEIR
of Boston Artists, a notable association to which we will now turn. CONTEMPORARIES

163
 NOTES

1. Churchill was the first treasurer of the Guild of Boston Artists.

2. The Massachusetts Normal Art School was then housed in a building situated at the
comer of Exeter and Newbury streets. It later moved out to a fine structure built to
contain it on Longwood Avenue, Brookline, and changed its name to the Massachu-
setts School of Art; now the Massachusetts College of Art.
3. The statement in Mr. William Boyle's admirable book on American Impressionism
(New York Graphic Society, Boston. 1974) that Mrs. Perry, at Cowles Art School
absorbed "a kind of Bastien-Lepage piein air painting as taught by Robert W. Voimoh
and Dennis Bunker" is simply not tenable. Vonnoh ceased teaching at Cowles in
1885 when Mrs. Perry would have been struggling to leam drawing. It is virtually
impossible that Bunker taught any pupil plein air painting, a summer activity only
pursued in the country. Bunker left Cowles in June, 1889. Furthermore I have found
no evidence that he ever knew or admired Bastien-Lepage.
4. "Reminiscences of Claude Monet." The American Magazine of Art, March, 1927.
5. My only acquaintance with Theodore Butler's work is through studying a few re-
productions of his pictures. All those I have examined are strikingly devoid of talent.
Butler's name lingers in art history by virtue of his close tie with a painter of genius.
He married, successively, two of Monet's step-daughters.
6. P. 64. ]ohn Joseph Enneking by Patricia Jobe Pierce and Rolf H. Kristiansen. Fougere
Printing. Abington, Mass. 1972.
7. No attentive reader can fail to recognize the unbroken chain of personal contacts
combined with criticisms which made leading Boston painters the most authentic
transmitters of Claude Monet's concepts, pictorial approach and visual understand-
ing. We who belonged to their youngest batch of direct pupils benefitted from the
instruction of men who had worked for years in constant touch with Monet himself
and whose overall grasp of the art of painting in its totality greatly exceeded that
landscapist's scope. Some of us have successfully passed their lore on to a number
of talented pupils so the elusive and complex approach survives in the hands of
Robert Douglas Hunter, Thomas R. Dunlay, David Lowrey, Robert Moore, Paul Ing-
bretson and Jan Posvar as these lines are written.
The disastrous darkening of Wendel's blues was explained to me by the re-
nowned picture restorer, Fred Oliver, in his old age. He had known Theodore Wendel
well and had varnished many of his paintings. Mr. Oliver told me that a pigment
labelled "new blue" had been in vogue around the turn of our century when its
instability was unsuspected. Several of our landscape painters were entrapped by it.
Severe illness caused Wendel to abandon serious painting in 1917.

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

I 64
 IX

The Guild of Boston Artists

-Ln 19 1 3 some of the distinguished

painters whose achievement we reviewed met to
in the preceding chapters,
discuss the feasibiUty of forming an association with a membership hmited
to painters and sculptors working in the Boston area, whose craftsmanship
met the high professional standards then universally operative. The organ-
ization was to be financed by percentages withheld from sales made through
the gallery and by annual dues paid by the artist members as well as by an
associate membership made up of citizens interested in fostering the fine
arts. The able Mrs. Perry, the Guild's first secretary, proved indefatigable in

her efforts to enroll prominent Bostonians as associates and when the en-
terprise finally took shape the grateful artists enthusiastically declared that
without her capable assistance the scheme would have aborted.
Instead, far from stillborn, the Guild of Boston Artists' opened its doors
to the public in 19 14, happily domiciled in a fine building at 162 Newbury
Street which had been ingeniously revamped to fulfil its new function. In
that golden age of American painting Boston could boast of several ideally
disposed picture galleries, all of them illuminated from above by daylight,
as painters had always intended their pictures to be seen, and enclosed by
walls decked in neutral tones calculated to set off paintings and sculpture
advantageously.^
The architect of the new showrooms, C. Howard Walker, who had
directed the Museum School's department of design throughout that insti-
managed to combine all the best features of its predecessors.
tution's heyday,
When the Guild was inaugurated a long picture-lined corridor led from the
Newbury Street entrance to a sizable rectangular gallery on a slightly lower
level whose walls were hung with a taupe material creating a perfect back-
ground for pictures and sculpture. In this lower gallery exhibits by individual
artistswere customarily displayed for two consecutive weeks while a con- the guild
stantly changing assortment of paintings and statuary represented the mem- "
ofboston
bership in the upper corridor which all visitors had first to traverse. Each ARTISTS
exhibition opened with a well-attended reception, at which appropriate re-
freshments were served, in the entrance gallery. With its impressive window 1^5
display always on view and situated within a block of the Back Bay resi-
dential area, the Guild attracted visitors during gallery hours and business-
men had a way of dropping in on their way to their offices. The venture was
 a local success from the very start, both artistically and financially. Soon
its renown spread across the country and it became customary for galleries
situated in cities of the West and South to invite the Guild to send them
selected groups of paintings for exhibition. ^
The Guild of Boston Artists served to bring before a nationwide audience
the spectacle of a fully fledged indigenous school of painting whose prestige
was steadily being enhanced by an oncoming generation of artists trained
by its illustrious founders. The collective activities of the Guild were largely
instrumental in establishing the Boston group as representatives of the par-
ticular style and quality of painting which I have tried to define in the
foregoing chapters. Thus, viewed as an entity, the school's outstanding fea-
ture appeared to be its homogeneity. The common purpose which united
these painters was seen to be the expression of visual experience in terms
of expert workmanship in the service of uncompromising sincerity and un-
alloyed reverence for the truths of nature.
Let me once again point out that this very program has animated West-
em painting since the time of Giotto, irrespective of whatever other mes-
sages of the spirit artists may
simultaneously have wished to convey. Full
recognition of the essentially visual character of the art they practiced and
awareness of the indispensability of craftsmanship, constituted the major
planks of the esthetic platform shared by the Boston Painters. Imaginative
painting they cared little for. Not readers themselves, they considered lit-
erary connotations misplaced in their art. Furthermore their concern with
the subtlest manifestations of light and color engendered a preference for
static subjects which lent themselves to careful and prolonged scrutiny. So
the Bostonians of the second generation rarely attempted the lively gestures
or the fleeting facial expressions which animate the canvases of a Sargent,
a Boldini or a Sorolla, let us say. But the Boston Painters contributed much
else which carries a content and an esthetic interest of its own.
For one thing, their particular predilections turned them into masters
of still-life painting. Posterity is likely to conclude that at no other time
and place have so many artists carried the genre to a comparable level of
perfection in such a rich variety of styles. Let us examine the historic record.
Setting apart the towering but unaccompanied Chardin, how many painters
THE have depicted assemblages of inanimate objects in a manner which engages
BOSTON most of the major constituents that distinguish the pictures which have
PAINTERS been, over long periods of time, classed as masterpieces; organized compo-
1900-1930 sition, finely balanced tonal values and an effective pattern of abstract shapes
together with perceptively felt aspects of nature projecting what an inspired
166 painter-writer aptly termed "the impressionist unity that lifts truth into
poetry"? 4
Still life, it is true, has flourished as an art form at several periods; in
the Netherlands and Spain during the seventeenth century, in eighteenth
century France, mainly as an adjunct of mural decoration, and quite uni-
versally from the mid-nineteenth century on. But very fev^ practitioners
successfully incorporated the above qualities, which are the ones susceptible
of conferring the dignity of art on the humblest objects, as Chardin mag-
nificently demonstrated. 5 Among later artists Fantin-Latour stands out in
this respect.Also notable are early flower pieces by Renoir, the still lifes of
Emil Carlsen and William M. Chase and, in a later generation, those of
Hovsep Pushman. But in Boston we find at least seven painters who really
excelled in this deceptively simple but in fact very exacting branch of the
painter's art.
To study still lifes DeCamp and Paxton we must look, as
painted by
we must likewise do with mighty predecessors Velasquez and Vermeer,
their
at the accessories of their figure pieces where we find passages supremely
well rendered. I have already cited the remarkable still life pictures by Tar-
bell, Benson, Murphy and Hills and pointed out the striking dissimilarity

of their interpretations. I now introduce three painters belonging to the next

artistic generation each of whom treated much the same material as their
predecessors in a manner unmistakably his own.
Leshe P. Thompson, (1880- 1963), adapted the methods of his teacher,
n.a.
Tarbell, but infused his own
very personal arrangements of light and dark
masses with a stylistic breadth we do not ordinarily associate with still life.
This rare asset, unexpectedly accentuated by Thompson's somewhat idio-
syncratic perception of color, gave his compositions of flowers, bowls, por-
celains or whatever, a monumental character.
Elizabeth Okie Paxton's work in this field, based though itwas on an
equally reverent study of visual experience, could hardly differ more in its
on the beholder. Despite the fact that her art was essentially an out-
effect
growth of her husband's teaching, Mrs. Paxton (1880- 1972), had also studied
under Joseph DeCamp before her marriage. And yet the still lifes she turned
out when she had developed her own style recall the manner of neither
instructor. They are in fact like those of no other worker in the genre. For
sheer sensitivity of perception and veracity of statement her color relations
challenge William Paxton's own, as he himself proudly proclaimed. The jolt
given the beholder by her simple revelation of the beauty of commonplace
things transformed by the magic of light and shade and atmosphere is given
an additional fillip by the originality of her selective taste. the guild
We realize on second thoughts that the strangeness in her pictures stems . ofboston
from unexpected juxtapositions by lowly and very fa-
of colors furnished artists
miliar objects, so arranged that the blue markings on ordinary white kitch-
enware, for instance, and the scarlet squares of a dishcloth checkered red I 67
and white are offset, let us say, by the citron yellows of a grapefruit or a
lemon, with enchanting effectiveness. The visual impact of such colloca-
tions is conveyed with a tonal purity and a freshness which assert the con-
 ELIZABETH O. PAXTON Still-life Couitesy, private collection

trasting character of diverse white surfaces and textures with rare felicity,
a feat which has tested the sensitivity of fine colorists since Titian's time.
Mrs. Paxton's work has remained relatively unknown because her wares
usually attracted purchasers immediately.
Frederick G. Hall, a.n.a. (1878- 1946), played still other variations on
these basically familiar themes which give them a pictorial turn very unlike
the two examples we have just discussed, but equally noteworthy. Hall's
talent was preponderantly linear and descriptive as distinct from the essen-
tially painterly predispositions of the preceding pair. He was a Harvard man
THE who, as an undergraduate, had worked on the Lampoon, contributing wittily
BOSTON fanciful pen and ink drawings which gave full rein to his burgeoning talents.
PAINTERS The puckish inventiveness which delighted his admirers in these long since
1900- 1930 forgotten early efforts occasionally spices the paintings of his maturity and
emerges as a lively ingredient of Freddie Hall's equally distinctive etchings,
168 especially when these take the form of bookplates. This offbeat artist also
took an architectural course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
worked for a while in Paris chez Julian and ended up under the tutelage of
William Paxton. To this last experience he owed the impressionist quality
 ALDRO T. HIBBARD Snow Scene, about 1916
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston. Gift of Frederick L. Jack

which gives an unexpected carrying power to his oil paintings although the
teaching came too late in life for its recipient to master that illusive idiom
completely.
That multifarious educational background accounts for the special char-
acter of his still lifes. The fine adjustment of their arabesque is an outgrowth

of the pagination he learned on the Lampoon and carries the imprint of the THE GUILD
architectural designer, while the rare quality of the choice bibelots which OF BOSTON
formed his favored subject matter betoken the cultivated taste of a travelled ARTISTS
connoisseur. The still lifes of Frederick Hall are as unique in their way as
those of Elizabeth Paxton or Leslie Thompson. 169
The second generation of Boston Painters produced the school's finest
landscapist in Aldro Hibbard, n.a. (1886- 1972). He and Gertrude Fiske, the
artist with whom I shall conclude this chapter, both graduated in 19 13 from
 ALDRO T. HIBBARD Sharon Hill, Vermont Courtesy,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of John T. Spaulding

the last class in advanced painting criticized by Edmund Tarbell before his
resignation from the faculty of the Museum School took effect. They were
also the last pupils of the Boston group to attain nationwide celebrity so
they properly bring this history to Furthermore Hibbard's best work
its close.

places him squarely among the foremost American landscapists of any pe-
riod.
He had Normal Art School before entering the Museum
studied at the
School. The latter institution awarded him its highest honor, the Page Trav-
elling Scholarship. After spending his allotted time in a Europe which failed
to arouse his interest, Hibbard settled at Gloucester and dedicated himself
exclusively to landscape. At first he depicted various New England locahties

THE at diverse seasons, approaching each problem with an open mind and a fresh
BOSTON outlook. But, as his years increased, he painted almost exclusively while the
PAINTERS wooded hills and thawing streams of central New England were still partly
1900- 1930 covered by late winter snow. His earlier portrayals are unsurpassable but,
as time went on, he substituted an acquired formula, brilliant to be sure,
170 for the direct impression of the thing seen which had made the earlier
landscapes memorable. His eminence as a landscape painter was in great
part due to the strict discipline he had undergone at the two Boston art
schools in their heyday.*
 ALDRO T. HIBBARD Winter Days, about 1916
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Aits, Boston.A Gift in memory of
Elizabeth Brown Barrett

have already mentioned Leslie P. Thompson as a distinguished painter

I

of still life. But he devoted most of his time to depicting individuals, many
of them portrait orders, sometimes seated amid surrounding appurtenances
after the Boston manner. When he was blessed with a patient model who
gave him ample time he successfully endowed his presentation with the
spacial amplitude and the impressionist unity which always dignify his still
lifes.

The rather enigmatic personality of William James (1882- 1 961), at-

tracted attention for a number of years. The son of the very distinguished
psychologist, Professor William James, and nephew of the towering novelist
Henry James, this scion of an intellectually dazzling family had rowed on
the varsity crew at Harvard and attended the Harvard Medical School before
he enrolled at the Museum School. There he impressed teachers as well as THE GUILD
fellow students with his high seriousness, his personal charm and the prom- OF BOSTON
ising character of his work which somehow suggested vast reserves of still ARTISTS
untapped talent. His never completed and rather monochromatic character
studies were highly esteemed by a small but devoted following. James re- 171
quires mention in this history owing to the paramount influence he exerted
over the decline of the Museum School, where he taught from 1913 to 1926.
In 1929 he became chairman of the School board and must be held respon-
 GRETCHEN ROGERS Woman in a Fur Hat
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Miss
Anne Winslow

sible for the change of course made in 1930 and for its consequences.
Howard E. Smith, a.n.a. (1885- ), graduated from the Museum
School with an exceptionally well-rounded training and several canvases
painted early in his career were very competent performances honored at
several national exhibitions. He failed to develop a strong artistic personality,
however, and faded from the scene. Two other promising pupils, Richard
Meryman (1882- and S. Burtis Baker (1882- 1967) were selected by
1

THE Edmund Tarbell to serve as assistant instructors at the Corcoran School of

BOSTON Art in Washington, where they taught from 19 17 until 1922. Little infor-
PAINTERS mation IS now available regarding this venture in art teaching which does
1900- 1930 not seem to have been very fruitful. Meryman returned to New England
where he had some success as a portrait painter and taught art at a boarding-
school.
Marie Danforth Page, a.n.a. (1869- 1940), had a very successful career
painting portraits. She was a regular exhibitor at the official exhibitions,
where she received a number of awards. She became best known for a fine
canvas representing a mother and her two children. Less well known outside
of Boston were two other ladies of equal accomplishment, Alice Ruggles
Sohier (1880- and Gretchen Rogers (1881 - 1967) whose preoccupation
)

with domestic affairs curtailed their production.Both exhibited paintings

of quite extraordinary distinction from time to time at the Guild. The career
of Frederic A. Bosley, a.n.a. (1881-1942), was cut short too early for him
to have given the measure of his gifts. Charles Bittinger, n.a. (1879- 1970),
specialized in painting notable examples of interior architecture. These he
rendered with an impressionist understanding of color relations and a visual
unity which allies his art to that of the Boston school.
During the nineteen twenties a number of promising young painters
were elected to membership in the Guild. They did not reach artistic ma-
turity in time to come within the scope of this history although they sub-
stantiated the quite universally received impression that Boston painting
would continue to flourish. So we close our roster with the name of Gertrude
Fiske, N.A. (1878- 1961), a Bostonian by lineage, birth and artistic education,
who in the course of her long life never stepped outside of New England's
intellectual ambience. She belonged to the relatively small group of pupils
who faithfully followed the Museum School's seven year curriculum from
start to finish. Charles H. Woodbury, however, a Boston painter of a rather
different brand from those on the School faculty, whose summer classes she

THE GUILD
OF BOSTON
ARTISTS

GERTRUDE FISKE Goat Carts, 1947

Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Andrew F. Willis,
Haiold B. Willis, Jr., and Hannah B. Wilkinson
 GERTRUDE FISKE Old Man Reading GERTRUDE FISKE Old Man — The Professor
Courtesy, private collection Courtesy, private collection

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

GERTRUDE FISKE Amusement Park

Courtesy, Mr. and Mrs. Robert f. Dodds, in
 .

attended; exerted a determinant influence on her artistic development. When

she strayed across the Atlantic Miss Fiske was accompanied by compatriots
and while abroad she consorted with transplanted New Englanders. The
great art galleries of the world barely aroused her passing curiosity. And yet
this uniformly indigenous upbringing fostered the most individuahstic painting
produced by any Boston painter of the second generation.
Although superficially the Woodbury influence appears to predominate
in Gertrude Fiske 's art the seven winters at the Museum School account
for its strong underpinnings. But the effectiveness of her pictures resides in
the originality of the artist's selectivity, especially as regards lighting, a trait
which her summary execution underscores. Her approach was instinctive
as opposed to analytical and consequently the end products are strikingly
uneven in quality. Her best canvases however bring unexpected effects to
bear which differentiate them from the work of her contemporaries any-
where.

NOTES

1 The charter members of the Guild of Boston Artists, including the painters, sculptors,
aquarellists, miniaturists and etchers were the following:
F. W. Allen, a.n.a.; Frank W. Benson, n.a.; Frederic A. Bosley, a.n.a.; Adelaide

Cole Chase, a.n.a.; William W. Churchill; Sally Cross; C. E. Dallin; Joseph DeCamp,
A.N.A.-elect; John J. Enneking; Gertrude Fiske, n.a.; Ignaz M. Gaugengigl, a.n.a.;
Arthur G. Goodwin; Philip L. Hale, a.n.a.; Margaret F. Hawley; Mary B. Hazelton;
Laura C. Hills, a.n.a.; William James; William J. Kaula; Theo R. Kitson; Louis Kron-
berg, N.A.; Philip L. Little; Mary L. Macomber; Ernest L. Major; Herman D. Murphy,
N.A.; William M. Paxton, n.a.; Jean N. Oliver; Marie D. Page, a.n.a.; Lilla C. Perry;
Bela L. Pratt, a.n.a.; M. B. Prendergast; Richard Recchia; Heloise Redfield; Gretchen
Rogers; Albert F. Schmidt; Rosamond Smith; Howard E. Smith, a.n.a.; Alice R.
Sohier; Edmund C. Tarbell, n.a.; Leslie P. Thompson, n.a.; Ross Turner; Theodore
Wendel; Charles H. Woodbury, n.a.
2. The best and largest of these exhibition galleries was in the Boston Art Club, a
building still extant today at the comer of Dartmouth and Newbury
SmallerStreets.
but equally well suited to exhibiting paintings was the gallery in the old Botolph St.

Club then at 1 Newbury Street at its Arlington Street end. In the neighborhood three
dealers, Vose Galleries, the Copley Gallery and Doll and Richards also had sizable
exhibition rooms where pictures could be advantageously shown. The vast gallery THE GUILD
operated by the Copley Society only served for large and important assemblages of" OFBOSTON
pictures. Nothing reveals more clearly the deterioration which has overtaken the ARTISTS
fine arts than the astounding fact that in 1975 there was not one gallery in Boston
where pictures can be properly shown under the daylight conditions called for by the
artists who painted them.
175
3. The Guild of Boston Artists was soon afterwards emulated in New York by the Grand
Central Galleries which originally occupied several spacious and admirably lighted
galleries situated, as its name implies, in the Grand Central Station, then on Forty-
Second Street. This organization, which several Guild members joined, was not lim-
 ited to New York painters. For a number of years it too maintained a high artistic
standard.
4. We owe this felicitous phrase to R.A.M. Stevenson who used it in his magisterial
book on Velasquez,* still the most lucid exposition of impressionist painting ever
penned. "Bob" Stevenson (1847- 1900) was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson, who
worked for a time in the atelier of Carolus Duran, next door to where he lived on
the Boulevard Montpamasse. Although he failed to become a painter of note, Ste-
venson's eye and mind acquired a professional acuity through this schooling which
made him one of the few writers who have spoken authoritatively about the art of
painting. {"Velasquez by R.A.M. Stevenson, George Bell & Co. London, 1900.)
5. The still lifes of Harnett and the painters associated with his name remain artistically
marginal despite their manual skill and occasional compositional felicity. The tricky
illusionism chiefly responsible for their popularity is a trait which has been consid-
ered an artistic defect by serious painters for centuries.
6. The subtler aspects of color perception still elude ophthamologists whereas painters
are obviously unqualified to discuss them scientifically. My own observations lead
me to believe that, when they have received a properly administered training, most
painters react to colors in virtually identical fashion. But some individualsshow an
incorrigible insensitivity to some particular hue and this slight abnormality becomes
very apparent in their painting. Such small aberrations probably account for the
silvery tonality of Corot, the increasing insensitivity to reds which mars the flesh
tones of the aging Renoir and even the prevailing brownish hues of the great Rem-
brandt. Esthetically these variations from the norm may even provide an added charm
to a painter's work. In a teacher of painting it is a serious defect which he will
unwittingly pass on to his pupils.

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

176
 X

A Summing Up
V V hat surmises, then, may be reason-
ably advanced at the present time as to posterity's ultimate appraisal of
these painters? My own close association with them inevitably trammels
my judgment and renders it suspect. Bearing in mind my probable bias, I
have endeavored first to clarify the professional objectives pursued by my
cast of characters and then to ascertain the measure of success wherewith
each attained his carefully pondered goal. Surely dedicated toilers in every
art remain indifferent to praise or blame accorded to their work unless it
implies recognition of the qualities they have been striving for.
I hope that I have demonstrated convincingly that the emotional im-

pulses, as well as the reasoning which guided our twentieth century Bos-
tonians, were those instrumental in engendering a large percentage of the
pictures hanging in our Museums which have long been acknowledged mas-
terpieces. I believe that this approach to art criticism, if it is faithfully carried
out, is the one which is most susceptible of yielding enduring judgments.
Finally a supplementary touchstone remains to be applied by comparing the
productions of the Boston Painters with the pictures which were concur-
rently on view at European art centers between 1910 and 1930, especially
during the second half of that period when the Boston School was in full
flower.
To evoke the canvases I used to see in Paris and London, and particularly
at the Venice Biennale, where in the nineteen-twenties most of the European
nations were well-represented, is to conjure up a vision of consistent decline.
Nearly all of the towering nineteenth-century masters were dead or had
ceased to paint, although John Sargent worked on at full tilt until his sudden
death in 1925 and Claude Monet outlived him by a year. By that time a few
brilliant somewhat younger celebrities were repeating increasingly man-
nered versions of the early work which had brought them fame: Besnard,
Brangwyn, Zuloaga, John, Laszlo, for example; powerful artistic personalities •
A
but insufficiently well grounded in the rudiments of their craft to maintain summing up
the impetus of their promising starts. The Londoners who corresponded most
closely to the exhibitors at our Guild were Orpen, Lavery, Sickert, Steer, 17 7
Tonks and their ilk. One need only collate pictures by those Englishmen
with canvases on which leading Boston Painters had grappled with nearly
identical problems, as they frequently did, and compare them point for point
 by professional criteria, to perceive that the Americans could handle each
constituent more sure-footedly than their British compeers.
Comparisons drawn between Guild members and their Parisian coun-
terparts likewise favor the former. A parallel organization exhibited almost
annually in Paris during the period in question and I often had occasion to
walk into their showrooms straight from the Guild, so to speak. A visitor
from Boston could hardly bemused by the cosmopolitan sophis-
fail to be
tication of the Europeans. The somber horizons and Breton costumes fea-
tured by Lucien Simon and Charles Cottet, the aroma of dix-huitieme siecle
distilled by the interiors of Walter Gay, an expatriate American, the twilit
courtyards of Henry Le Sidaner and the fantasies of Gaston Latouche, the
who sat for Jacques-Emile Blanche and the dreams of antiquity
notabilities
evoked by Rene Menard's classical landscapes, all awakened associations
absent from Newbury Street. These sometimes beguiling but decidedly an-
cillary pictorial adjuncts appear now as reverberations of all but vanished
cultures rather than as communications stemming from the esthetic merits
of the pictures themselves. My point is that a number of painters contem-
poraneously working in Boston performed more expertly in several major
categories of their art than any of the Europeans; portraiture, outdoor figure
painting, landscape, still life and, perhaps most notably of all, in the tran-
scriptions of every-day indoor activities commonly referred to as genre.
I have already intimated that the particular aura which singularized
Bostonian mores during the first quarter of our century may very well kindle
the imagination of a future age to the point of shedding accessory lustre on
the beautifully wrought visual image of it created by the local painters. If

so, it will be all to the good that their portrayal unabashedly evokes the
ambience which outsiders were wont to designate as "cold roast Boston"
rather than its fashionable or intellectual counterparts. The two latter seg-
ments were depicted respectively by John Sargent and Charles Hopkinson.
But the Boston Painters with whom we have been concerned unwittingly
projected in all its engaging insularity the most idiosyncratic of the three
facets, with a felicity seasoned by their quite unconscious kinship to it. In
fact, their own emotional blandness, which certain art critics outspokenly
censured, predisposed them to capture the cheerful environment of affluent
THE New England on which they battened throughout most of their careers.
BOSTON The Boston Painters of the first generation reached middle age before
PAINTERS the Great War darkened their distant horizons and so the horrors of that
1900-1930 conflict did not touch them directly, whereas the fallacious prosperity of
the postwar era reinforced their deliberately maintained complacency. These
178 artists seriously believed the tragic or sordid aspects of human affairs to be
as misplaced in the fine arts as they would be in well-bred dinner table
conversation and they sharply derided any implication to the contrary. How-
ever, since a like detachment remains implicit in the pictures of Velasquez,
Vermeer, Hals, Chardin and many highly respected painters of lesser stature
without having diminished their artistic standing, that particular trait will
probably not tarnish posterity's appreciation of these latter day artists either.
Being totally committed to a carefully formulated concept of their art
these painters, then in the prime of their maturity, had excellent grounds
for ignoring the modernist trends which were surfacing in their time. To
their minds the Armory Show of 1 9 1 3 represented, first and last, a repudia-
tion of visual observation as the criterion regulatingall the more developed

forms of representational art. They had seen their instinctive belief in this
basic principle confirmed by their years spent assiduously studying aspects
of nature, observing it triumphantly demonstrated in master works of the
great painters whom they admired most and applying it successfully in their
own studios while they worked valiantly at canvases which were subse-
quently widely acclaimed.
For painters to deny the primacy of trained objective observation while
simultaneously disparaging the exacting disciplines entailed by the pursuit
of visual truth seemed to our Bostonians nothing less than artistic suicide;
a view which not a few observers now think has been completely vindicated
by the recent course of art history. But, although these painters clearly
discerned the seeds of disintegration present in that early harvest of Modern
Art, not one of them suspected that their insemination would have choked
out the abundant earlier vegetation and destroyed the fertility of its seedlands
before another half century had run its course.
However, in 19 13 what these elder painters decried in the emerging
movement was the strange lingo in which its messages were couched and
the dubious grammatical base of the new dialect. The emotional drives
which prompted the more talented men exhibiting at the New York Armory,
and talent was by no means lacking in that mishmash of strangely assorted
bedfellows, escaped the New England group entirely. Their cultural limi-
tations were vividly demonstrated some three years later by their imper-
viousness to the visual splendors brought to Boston by the Russian ballets
in their prime. The revolutionary impact on European taste exerted by Sergei
de Diaghilev's multifaceted productions in which music by outstanding
composers, expert stage craft, scenery and costumes designed by noted paint-
ers, choreography and mimetic dancing all worked in unison with stunning

effectiveness marks a turning point in art history. When the dynamic im- A
pressario's triumphal tour of European capitals was interrupted by the guns summing up
of 19 14 he transported his dazzling galaxy across the Atlantic for two suc-
cessive seasons during each of which they performed to sold out houses in 17 9
Boston for a week. Paxton attended the first opening night as somebody's
guest but, although he commented shrewdly on the works given, his interest
 was not aroused and he never returned. I did not happen to see any other
local painter on my later visits to the ballets nor do I remember hearing one
speak of these epoch-making spectacles then or later.'
In our modem world rife with esthetic concepts clamoring for attention
it may well profit a painter to ignore all those which do not directly serve

the ends to which he is dedicated. Degas reportedly defended painterly big-

otry by likening its function to that of the blinders which, in horse and
carriage days, kept equine eyes undistractedly fixed straight ahead. But, while
those contraptions doubtless aided the animals to progress through traffic,

they were never donned by the coachmen who held the reins. I have opined
above that the professional single-heartedness of the turn of the century
Bostonians probably intensified the distinctive savor of their art, but I am
certain that it impaired the effectiveness of their leadership and gravely
curtailed the scope of their successors. Their cultural limitations alienated
potential disciples who were graced by an intellectual or imaginative cast
of mind and who, had they successfully assimilated the indispensable paint-
erly lore which after 1900 rapidly ceased to be available elsewhere, might
have broadened its Bostonian application sufficiently to meet the new re-
quirements of an oncoming generation.
Under the existing circumstances, aspiring painters who elected to enter
the Museum School and who followed its curriculum long enough to become
proficient practitioners, were of a different stripe. Earnest, industrious and
sufficiently gifted in strictly painterly terms a number of them were and
praiseworthy painters they became. But no pedagogic torch could have ig-

nited such nonflammable material. Meanwhile young people with temper-

aments more adventurously creative were magnetized by
intrinsically
charismatic personalities established in New York or abroad, a few of whom
were not undistinguished as artists but who definitely lacked the combi-
nation of surefooted skill mated with analytical power which makes a first-
rate teacher of painting.
Because it have dwelt at considerable length
has cast long shadows, I

on the singular chain of circumstances combined with personal idiosyncra-

cies which, with a powerful assist given by a cabal ensconced in the topmost
echelons of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1933 on, brought the
THE centuries old, gloriously fecund teaching tradition of Western painting to a
BOSTON whimpering close at Boston in our mid-century.
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

180
NOTE

Lacking a musical ear I am not competent to seek analogies between our Boston
painters and the group of eminent musicians concurrently working in the area whose
achievements contributed to building up Boston's repute as the Athens of America.
Elliot Forbes, professor of musical history at Harvard, has very kindly furnished me
with a list of the composers whom, in the perspective of 1976, he considers the most
significant. In his order of musical importance they are: Charles Martin Loeffler,
George W. Chadwick, Arthur Foote, Frederick W. Converse, John Alden Carpenter
and Edward Burlingame Hill. The first four named, at any rate, I know to have
consorted with the painter members of the Tavern or St. Botolph Clubs. Dennis
Bunker, then in his late twenties, spent the summers of 1889 and 1890 with Loeffler
at a boarding house in Medfield and while there the two young men worked at their
respective vocations side by side in a neighboring bam. The young Paxton shared a
studio for a time with Fred Converse. Joseph DeCamp painted a masterly portrait of
George Chadwick. That is the only light I can shed on the communication which
existed between the practitioners of two very different arts.
Resorting to generalities, however, I will reassert that, among our Boston Paint-
ers, only Dennis Bunker and the much later Frederick Hall could by any stretch of

the word be called musical. And in my observation insensitivity to the visual arts
seems to be a generic trait of musicians. So I hazard the guess that, when together,
members of the two professions kept on the plane of small talk and banter.
In this connection, however, it would be interesting to know how the Boston
musicians received Diaghilev's amalgams of music, miming and the visual arts which
were so strongly spiced up with the latest trends of European culture foreboding
change. Although I already knew many of the established painters in 191 6 I had as
yet made no contacts among their musical confreres. I do not know whether the
latter were more receptive to the winds of change blowing across the Atlantic than
the, by then entrenched, and parochial, local painters.

A
SUMMING UP

181
 Biographical Notes

Certain of the Painters mentioned in this book are not, at present, widely
known. To assist the reader I am including biographical information about
these men and women which has been drawn from the standard reference
texts of the period. am indebted to Mr. S. Morton Vose, II, and his staff at
I

the Vose Archive for their help in sorting through the often conflicting
information.
All of the portraits of artists in this section of biographical notes are
reproduced by courtesy of the Vose Galleries of Boston with the following
exceptions: Lilian Westcott Hale by courtesy of Nancy Hale; Gertrude
is

Fiske is by courtesy of H. B. Willis, Jr.; William M. Paxton is by courtesy

of Robert Douglas Hunter; Elizabeth O. Paxton is by courtesy of a private
collection.

Elizabeth Ives Hunter

SAMUEL BURTIS BAKER

Born Boston, 1882

Died Washington, D.C., 1967

Studied E. L. Major
J. R. DeCamp
E. H. Barnard

Taught: Corcoran School of Art

and Sciences,
Asst. Prof. Dept. of Arts
George Washington University
Washington, D.C.

Memberships: Guild of Boston Artists

Salmagundi Club, New York
Washington Art Club
BIOGRAPHICAL
Washington Society of Arts
NOTES
Collections: Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Macon (GA) Art Institute
Massachusetts State House, Boston
183
Harvard Law School, Cambridge
New Hampshire State House
Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, VA
National Academy of Design
 CHARLES BITTINGER
Bom: 1879

Died: 1970
Studied: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1897- 1899
Ecole des Beaux Arts, Pans, 1901-1905
Studio of Delecluse and the Academic Colarossi, Paris

Memberships: National Academy of Design, A.N. A., 19 12

Salmagundi Club, New York City
Association of American Artists
St. Botolph Club

Guild of Boston Artists

Collections: Allegheny College, Meadville, PA

Museum, St.
City Art Louis, MO
Boston Athenaeum
MetropoHtan Museum of Art, New York City, NY

EDWIN ROWLAND BLASHFIELD

Bom: 1848

Died: 1936
Studied: In Paris with Leon Bonnat, Gerome and Chapu.
MembeTships: Academy of Design, A.N.A.,
National 1882; N.A., 1888
Numerous other organizations.
Collections: MetropoHtan Museum of Art, New York City and most other
major museums.
Mural decorations in Hbraries and State Capitols throughout the
country including the central dome at the Library of Congress.

Publications: Wrote Mural Painting in America (1913) and edited Vasari's

Lives of the Artists.

FREDERIC ANDREW BOSLEY

Bom: 1 88
^"^ Died: 1941
BOSTON
Studied: School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, under Tarbell and
PAINTERS Benson.
1900 — 1930 Spent two years in Europe on a Paige scholarship from the
Museum School.
184 Taught: The Boston Museum School from 1913-1929
Memberships: The Guild of Boston Artists

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 5

DENNIS MILLER BUNKER

Born: 1861 in New York City
Died: 1890 in Boston

Studied: National Academy of Design in New York City.

Julien-Herbert and Gerome in Paris.

Taught: Cowles Art School

Collections: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
Museum Boston
of Fine Arts,
L.D.M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum, Portland, ME
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

THEODORE EARL BUTLER

Born i860

Died 1936

Studied With Claude Monet at Givemy

Memberships Societe des Artistes Independents, Paris.

Exhibited National Academy of Design, 1889

191 3 Armory Show

ADELAIDE COLE CHASE

Born: 1868

Died: 1944
Studied: With Tarbell at the Boston Museum School
With Carolus Duran in Paris
With Bunker in Boston
Daughter of Joseph Foxcroft Cole (1837- 1892)

Memberships: Society of American Artists

NationalAcademy of Design (A.N.A., 1906)
The Copley Society
The Guild of Boston Artists
Awards: Silver Medal Panama-Pacific Exposition in 191

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

BIOGRAPHICAL
NOTES
WILLIAM WORCESTER CHURCHILL
Born 1858
185
Died 1926

Studied In Paris with Boimat

Memberships: Guild of Boston Artists

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

KENYON COX
Born: 1856

Died: 191

Studied: Carolus Duran and Gerome in Paris

Frank Duveneck in Cincinnati and at the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts

Memberships: National Academy of Design (A.N. A., 1900; N.A., 1903)

Society of Mural Painters
National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Letters

Awards: Second Hallgarten Prize, National Academy of Design, 1899

Temple silver medal, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
1891
Medal of Honor for Mural Paintmgs, Nev^^ York Architectural
League, 1909
Isidor medal. National Academy of Design, 19 10

WILLIAM TURNER DANNAT

Bom: 1853

Died: 1929

Studied: Royal Academy in Munich

Carolus Duran, Paris

Memberships: Legion of Fionor

Chevalier 1889 —
Officer 1897 —
Commander 1901 —
Awards: Third Class Medal at the Salon of 1883
National Academy of Design, 1888

Collections: Luxembourg Museum

Chicago Art Institute
Musee D'Art Modeme, Paris

FRANK DUVENECK
Born: 1848, Covington, Kentucky
Died: 19 19, Cincinnati, Ohio
Studied: With Wilhelm von Dietz
Taught: Frederic Porter Vinton
Joseph R. DeCamp
Memberships: American Artists of New York
Cincinnati Art Club
National Institute of Arts and Letters
National Academy of Design (1906)

Collections: Cincinnati Museum Association

Art Association of Indianapolis
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

JOHN JOSEPH ENNEKING

Born 1840

Died 1916

Studied With Bonnat in Paris

Associated with Renoir, Manet, Monet and Pissarro

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Worcester Art Museum

GERTRUDE FISKE
Born 1878

Died 1961

Studied Under Tarbell, Benson, and Hale at the School of the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston

Memberships: National Academy of Design

Guild of Boston Artists
Massachusetts State Art Commission
Concord Art Association
Ogunquit Art Association
Awards: Silver Medal at the Pan-Pacific Exposition, 19 15
National Academy of Design, 1922, 1925, 1926

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

IGNAZ MARCEL GAUGENGIGL BIOGRAPHICAL

Born. 1855 NOTES
Died. 1932

Studied With von Dietz 187

Taught Childe Hassam
Collections Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
 EMIL OTTO GRUNDMANN
Born: 1848

Died: 1890

Studied: Royal Academy at Dresden

Dr. Julius Hubner
Taught: Edmund C. Tarbell
Frank W. Benson

Position: 1877- 1890, he was Director of the School of the Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston.

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

FREDERICK GARRISON HALL

Bom: 1879

Died: 1946

Studied: Harvard University with W. M. Paxton in Boston

With Henri Royer at the Academie Julien, Paris
Memberships: The Guild of Boston Artists

Collections: The Art Institute of Chicago

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Print Department
The Library of Congress
The Uffizi Gallery, Florence

EDWARD WILBUR DEAN HAMILTON

Bom: 1864

Died: 1948

Studied: Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris

Taught: Rhode Island School of Design

Massachusetts Normal Art School

Memberships: Copley Society

Guild of Boston Artists
St. Botolph Club

Awards: Atlanta Exposition, 1895

Pan-Pacific Exposition, 19 15 — Gold Medal
Collections: Rhode Island School of Design
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Lincoln College, Oxford, England
 1 1

ALDRO THOMPSON HIBBARD

Born: 1886

Died: 1972

Studied: Massachusetts Normal Art School

School of the Boston Museum under E. L. Major, J. R. DeCamp,
E. Tarbell

Memberships: Guild of Boston Artists

National Academy (A.N. A.)
North Shore Art Association
Copley Society
Rockport Art Association
Connecticut Academy of the Fine Arts
New Haven Paint and Clay Club
Southern Vermont Artists
Academic Artists
Allied Artists of America

Awards: National Academy of Design, 1921, 1927, 1931

Medal, Perm. Academy of the Fine Arts, 1922; prizes in 1927
and 193
Springfield Artists League, 193
New Haven Paint and Clay Club, 1933, 1941
Connecticut Academy of the Fine Arts, 1937
Golden Gate Exposition, San Francisco, 1939
Academic Artists Show, 1953, 1958
Palm Beach Art Center, 1936
North Shore Art Association, 1956 and prior
Rockport Art Association

Collections: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Portland (ME) Museum of Art
Addison Gallery of American Art
Currier Gallery of Art
Rochester Atheneum
San Diego Fine Arts Society
and others.

LAURA COOMBS HILLS

Born: 1859 BIOGRAPHICAL
Died: 1952 NOTES
Studied: Cowles Art School
Art Students' League 189
Helen M. Knowlton
 Memberships: National Academy of Design (A.N.A., 1903]
Guild of Boston Artists
Society of Miniature Painters

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

WILLIAM JAMES
Bom: 1882

Died: 196

Studied: Harvard University

School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Positions: Faculty School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 191 3- 1926
1929, became Chairman of the Board of the Museum School

Memberships: Guild of Boston Artists

Collections: Fenway Court, Gardner Museum, Boston

Providence Art Museum
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Harvard University

WILLIAM SERGEANT KENDALL

Bom: 1869

Died: 1938 ^
Studied: Art Students' League
Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia
Luc Olivier Merson at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris
Position: Director Yale School of Fine Arts

Memberships: National Academy of Design (A.N.A., 1901) (N.A., 1905]

Collections: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
THE Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

190
ERNEST L. MAJOR
Bom: 1864

Died: 1950
 5

Studied: Boulanger and Lefebvre in Paris

Academy Julien
Art Students' League, New York City
Corcoran Art School

Taught: Cowles Art School

Massachusetts Normal Art School

Memberships: Guild of Boston Artists

RICHARD SUMMNER MERYMAN

Born 1882

Died
Studied School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with Abbott Thayer,
Frank Benson and Edmund Tarbell

Taught: Director of Corcoran School

Permsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Memberships: Guild of Boston Artists

Century Association, New York City
Salmagundi Club, New York City

Awards: Medal, Pan-Pacific Exposition, 191

Sesqui-Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia, 1926

Collections: Washington, D.C. Public Library

Army Navy Club, Washington, D.C.
Madison (Wisconsin) Historical Society
Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts
Groton (Massachusetts) School
U.S. Navy

FRANCIS D. MILLET
Born: 1846

Died: 1912

Studied: Harvard University

Lerins and Dekeyser in Antwerp, Belgium

Memberships: National Academy of Design (A.N. A., 1881) (N.A., 1885]

Collections: Trinity Church, Boston

Tate Gallery, London
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
 HERMAN DUDLEY MURPHY
Born: 1867

Died 1945 [
Studied School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
With J. P. Laurens in Paris
Memberships: National Academy of Design
Massachusetts Art Commission
National Arts Club
Salmagundi Club
Boston Arts Club
Society of Arts and Crafts
Copley Society
Guild of Boston Artists
St. Botolph Club, Boston

North Shore Arts Association

Awards: 1892-3 — 4 prizes in composition at the Academic Julien
1 90 —
1 Bronze Medal, Pan-American Exposition
1904 — Silver Medal for Portrait, Bronze Medal for Watercolour,
Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis
191 5— Silver Medal for Landscapes, Silver Medal for Water
color, Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco
1922 — Peterson Prize, Art Institute of Chicago
193 — Prize for
1 North Shore Art Association
Still Life,

1933 — Ranger Purchase Prize

1937 — Buck Hill (PA) Prize Wilmington Society of Fine Arts
Prize

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"^
The Art Institute of Chicago
The Cleveland Museum of Art
The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts
The New Britain Museum of American Art
The National Academy of Design
The Portland (Oregon) Art Museum
Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester
The St. Louis Art Museum
The Springville Museum of Art, Utah

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930 MARIE DANFORTH PAGE
Born 1869
192 Died 1940
Studied School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Memberships Guild of Boston Artists

 5

ELIZABETH OKIE PAXTON

Bom: 1880

Died: 1972

Studied: Cowles Art School

Joseph DeCamp
WiUiam M. Paxton
berships: Guild of Boston Artists
North Shore Art Association
Rockport Art Association

Awards: Silver Medal Pan-Pacific Exposition, 191

Alice Worthington Ball Prize, North Shore Art Association, 1927
Richard Mitton Prize, Jordan Marsh, 1932 and 1933
National Gold Medal, Council of American Artists' Societies

Collections: Concord Art Association, Concord, MA

LILLA CABOT PERRY

Born: 1843

Died: 1933

Studied: With Dennis M. Bunker and Robert W. Vonnoh in Paris at the

Colarossi and Julien Academies and with Alfred Stevens,
Claude Monet and Pissarro

Memberships: Guild of Boston Artists

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

GRETCHEN W. ROGERS
Born: 1881

Died: 1967

Studied: School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Memberships: Guild of Boston Artists

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Colby College Art Museum
BIOGRAPHICAL
HOWARD EVERETT SMITH NOTES
Born 1885
193
Died
Studied: Art Students' League with George Bridgeman
School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with Edmund Tarbell
 With Howard Pyle
Also in France, Spain and Italy

Memberships: National Academy of Design, A.N.A.

American Watercolor Society
Chester County Pennsylvania Art Association

Awards: National Academy of Design, 1908, 1930, and Gold Medal, 1920
Wanamaker Prize, Philadelphia, 1909
Medal, San Francisco Exposition, 191

Collections: Permsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

De Cordova and Dana Museums
University of Nebraska
Brown University
State House, Boston, Massachusetts
State House, Sacramento, California
U.S. Treasury Department
Crocker Art Gallery

ALICE RUGGLES SOHIER

Born 1880

Died
Studied School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts under Edmund
Tarbell

Memberships: Guild of Boston Artists

LESLIE PRINCE THOMPSON ^

Born 1880

Died 1963

Studied Massachusetts Normal Art School under E. L. Major and

Edmund Tarbell

Taught: School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Memberships: National Academy of Design
Guild of Boston Artists
THE St. Botolph Club
BOSTON
Awards: Medal, St. Louis Exposition, 1904
PAINTERS Pan-Pacific Exposition, 19 15
1900- 1930 Permsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1919
Sesqui-Centermial Exposition, Philadelphia, 1926
194 National Academy of Design, 191
Newport Art Association, 19 14
Permsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1927
Boston Art Club, 1928

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 1

THEODORE WENDEL
Born: 1859

Died: 1932

Studied: Frank Duveneck

Associated with Monet
Memberships: Guild of Boston Artists

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, E

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Colby College Art Museum

CHARLES H. WOODBURY
Born: 1864

Died: 1940
Studied: Boulanger and Lefebvre in Paris

Taught: Director of Summer Art School in Ogunquit, ME for many years

Memberships: National Academy of Design; A.N. A., 1906; N.A., 1907
Guild of Boston Artists
1883 Elected Member of Boston Art Club
1899 Elected to Society of American Artists
1900 President of Watercolor Club of Boston
1906 Elected Associate of National Academy of Design
1907 Elected Member of National Academy of Design
19 1 5 Board of Managers, Guild of Boston Artists
1930 Active Member of Boston Society of Watercolor Painters
Member New York Watercolor Club
Member Ogunquit Art Association
Awards: 1878 First Prize, Lyim High School
1880 Second Prize for Amateurs, Lyim Art Exhibition, for
Sunset in Lynn Harbor
1 88 Passes first jury, Boston Art Club
1883 First Prize for drawing Swampscott Trees, Dixon Pencil
Company, $6.00
1884 Purchase Prize, Boston Art Club, for Low Tide or The
Tide River —
Win ter, $250
1895 Gold Medal, Atlanta Exposition, Georgia, for Mid Ocean
1895 Third Prize, 52nd Exhibition of the Boston Art Club, for
Hedgerows
BIOGRAPHICAL
1895 Bronze Medal, Mechanics Fair, Boston, for Sand Dunes,
NOTES
Holland
Collections: Abbot Academy, Andover, Massachusetts
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts
Adler Planetarium, Chicago, Illinois
Art Institute of Chicago
Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts
 Boston Public Library, Wiggin Collection
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
City Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri
Cobbett School
Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Danforth Museum, Framingham, Massachusetts
Detroit Institute, Detroit, Michigan
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University
Isabella Stew^art Gardner Museum, Boston
John Herron Art Institute
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,
Massachusetts
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island
Southwest Missouri State Teachers College, Springfield,
Missouri
State of Utah Collection, Salt Lake City, Utah
Telfair Academy, Savannah, Georgia
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
Chelsea Naval Hospital, Chelsea, Massachusetts
Chicago Art Museum, Chicago, Illinois
Colby College Art Gallery, Waterville, Maine
Dunaway Memorial Center, Ogunquit, Maine
First National Bank, Portland, Maine
Ogunquit Museum of Art, Ogunquit, Maine
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
Museum of San Francisco
Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
Wellesley College Art Museum, Wellesley, Massachusetts

THE
BOSTON
PAINTERS
1900- 1930

196
 Index of Paintings

{Note: The various typefaces used for page references indicate the following: roman, citation
in text; italic, black-and-white illustration; boldface italic, color illustration.)

FRANK W. BENSON JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY

Eleanor 95, 107 The Ascension 9
Gertrude, 1899 88 Mrs. Richard Skinner (Dorothy
Girl in a Red Shawl 92 Wendell), 1772 9

Mrs. Lothrop 92 Watson and the Shark 6

Pintails Decoyed 93
Portrait of Katherine Gray Dodge 96 GUSTAVE COURBET
Portrait of My Daughters 90, 94 The Quarry (La Curee) 70
The Silver Screen 91
Still Life —Flowers and Tea Set 22 THOMAS COUTURE
Portrait of a Lady 50
EDWIN ROWLAND BLASHFIELD
Lady in a Satin Gown, 1873 46
D ANN AT
WILLIAM T.
The Quartette (Un Quatuor) 74, 82, 86
LEON BONNAT
Portrait of Mrs. Francis Shaw 14
JOSEPH R. DECAMP
FREDERIC A. BOSLEY
Mr. Baker —DeCamp's Father-in-Law
60
In the Apple Orchard 103
The Blue Cup 36, 62
The Guitar Player, 1908 39
DENNIS MILLER BUNKER
Portrait ofTheodore Roosevelt 59, 61
George Augustus Gardner, 1888 19
Sally 37, 59, 62, 62
1890 16
Jessica,
Study for the Blue Cup, 1909 63
Meadow Lands, 1890 17
The Violinist 38
The Pool, Medfield, 1889 18, 35
The Violin Player 64

JEAN SIMEON CHARDIN

Kitchen Table, about 1755 76
EDGAR DEGAS
Race Horses 75 INDEX
ADELAIDE COLE CHASE OF
The Gilded Cage: a Portrait of Ralph FRANK DUVENECK PAINTINGS
Adams Cramm, 11 163 Caucasian Soldier, 1870 12
The Violinist 163 Girl Reading, 1877 11
Italian Peasant Woman 40 197
WILLIAM W. CHURCHILL Pastel Self -Portrait 13

Leisure, 1910 134 Sketchof aTurk, 1876 10

 JOHN JOSEPH ENNEKING LAURA COOMBS HILLS
Breaking up of Winter 149 Fire Opal (Grace Mutell), 1899 142
Late Afternoon Landscape 106 Larkspur, Peonies and Canterbury
Spring Hillside, 1899 148 Bells 162
Margaret Curzon Hale, 1907 143
GERTRUDE FISKE Yellow Dahlias 144
Amusement Park 1 74
Goat Carts, 1947 173 ANDO HIROSHIGE
—
Old Man The Professor 1 74 Shower on Ohashi Bridge 72
Old Man Reading 1 74 Yui Station 73

IGNAZ MARCEL GAUGENGIGL KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI

Self-Portrait 154 Beating Cloth 72

The Visitor, about 1925 153 Sparrows and Flowering Wisteria 72

WILLIAM MORRIS HUNT

JEAN LEON GEROME
The Belated Kid, 1857 23
L'Eminence Grise (Gray Eminence) 55
Girl Reading, 1853 50
Girl with Cat, 1856 51
EMIL OTTO GRUNDMANN
Interior 42
JEAN-AUGUST-DOMINIQUE INGRES
Interior of a German House 27 Comtesse d'Haussonville 119
Study of a Hindu 26
Union Army Veteran 26 WILLIAM SERGEANT KENDALL
The Critics 54
LILIAN WESTCOTT HALE
Celia's Bower frontispiece JOHN LA FARGE
L 'Edition de Luxe 105 Adoring Angels (Study for the
The Sailor (Her Son) 131 Ascension) 20
The Welcome 122 Girls Preparing Kava 20
Vase of Flowers 21
PHILIP L. HALE
American Solider #1 127 ERNEST L. MAJOR
Black Hat 126 Resting 136
Girls in Sunlight 104
GABRIEL METSU
The Usurer 70
FREDERICK G. HALL
The Rabbit 155
FRANCIS DAVIS MILLET
Grandpa's Visit, 1885 24
THE EDWARD WILBUR DEAN HAMILTON Seacoast 24
BOSTON Summer at Campobello, New
PAINTERS Brunswick, about 1890-1900 135 CLAUDE OSCAR MONET
1900- 1930 Grand Canal, Venice 28
ALDRO T. HIBBARD
Sharon Hill, Vermont 1 70 HERMAN DUDLEY MURPHY
198 Snow Scene, about 1916 169 Fishing Boats in the Adriatic 139
West River Bend — Townsend, Vermont Peonies 103
106 Self Portrait 140
Winter Days, about 1916 171 Zinnias and Marigolds 141
ELIZABETH OKIE PAXTON The Pink Bow 96
The Eggplant 155 Reverie (Katherine Finn), 1913 79, 85
Still-life 168 Roses in Blue Vase 78
Woodrow Wilson 83
WILLIAM M. PAXTON
The Artist's Own Studio, 1890, Paris GERARD TERBORCH
113 Cavalier 71
The Breakfast 121
Girl Arranging Flowers 116,119 LESLIE P. THOMPSON
The Green Dolman 99, 119 On the Beach, Cape Ann, 1911 157
Italian Girl 113 The Black Hat 156
The Kitchen Maid 120, 121 The White Monkey 157
The Last Look 100
The New Necklace, 1910 115 DIEGO RODRIGUEZ DE SILVA
Nude 102 Y VELASQUEZ
The One in Yellow 101, 119, I \9 Don Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf
James Paxton— 1898 112
Sun Wave and Breeze 111 JOHANNES VERMEER
Tea Leaves 114, 121 Mistress and Maid 117
Woman in a Blue Wrap 110 Officer and Laughing Girl 9

LILLA CABOT PERRY FREDERIC PORTER VINTON

At the River's Head — Mrs. Edith La Blanchisseuse 41
Balantyne, Epte River, Givemy, Alexander Moseley 49
France, 1895 161 The River Loing at Grez, France 44
Open Air Concert 146, 161 Sketch of a Doorway 15
Self-Portrait 145 William Warren, 1882 45
Young Violoncellist, 1892 147
THEODORE WENDEL
GRETCHEN ROGERS Girl in Sunlight 160
Woman in a Fur Hat 1 72 An Old Orchard, Ipswich, Ma. c. 1912
160
ALFRED STEVENS Snow Scene, about 1881-82 151
Interior 77
In Memoriam 76 JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER
The Last of Old Westminster, 1862 75
EDMUND C. TARBELL The Little Rose of Lyme Regis, 1895
Mr. Frick and His Daughter Helen 69 58, 59
Girl Reading 80
Girls Reading 97 CHARLES H. WOODBURY
Mr. Justice Hammond 84, 85, 99 Ocean Waves, about 1922 159
The Lesson 97 Off the Florida Coast 137
INDEX
Margery and Little Edmund 66 Ogunquit Beach, Bath House, 1923 158 OF
Mother and Child in a Boat 98 The North Atlantic, about 1902 139 PAINTINGS
My Children in the Woods, 1911 81 Three Hills in Winter 138

199
 General Index

as masters of still-life painting, 166-

Academie Julian, 70, 86, 145, 168 170
Alexander, John, 56 period of prominence, 1

Andrew, Richard, 133, 135 reasons for eclipse, 1-3, 128

Appleton, Thomas, G., 48 uniting objective, 62
Archives of American Art, The, x Boston Public Library, 5
Armory Show of 1913, 179 Boston School, The, 8, 67, 68, 150, 173,
Art Academy of Cincirmati, 54, 55 177
Art Museum School of Drawing and State House (Boston), 135
Pamting, 90 Bouguereau, William, 33
Ash Can School, 3, 4, 130 Boulanger, Gustave, 68, 70, 86, 90
Boyle, William, 163, 164
B Brackeleer, 22
Baker, Samuel Burtis, 82, 172, 183 Brangwyn, 11
Barry, Rose V.S., 132 Bronzino, 125
Bastien-Lepage, 82, 132, 164 Brooks, Van Wyck, 5
Bates, Arlo, 34, 52 Brown, Robert, x
Bellows, 130 Bunker, Dennis Miller, 16, 17-20, 34, 35,
Benson, Frank W., ix, 4, 21, 22, 25, 34, 68, 55, 59, 138, 145, 147, 148, 163, 164,
78, 82, 87-96, 107, 108, 150, 167 181, 185
professional awards, 108 Butler, Theodore Earl, 147, 152, 164, 185
as teacher, 89
Besnard, 77
Biddle, George, 4
Bittinger, Charles, 173, 184 Carlsen, Emil, 167
Blanche, Jacques-Emile, 178 Carpenter, John Alden, 181
Blashfield, Edwm Howland, 44, 46, 132, Cassatt, Mary, 125, 150
184 Chadwick, George W., 181
Boldini, 166 Chardin, Jean Simeon, 32, 73, 76, 166, 179
Bonnat, Leon, 14, 15, 16, 44, 47, 48, 132, Chase, Adelaide Cole, 34, 163, 185
148 Chase, William M., 4, 17, 124, 167
Bosley, Fredenc Andrew, 103, 173, 184 children, as subjects of painting, 124-125
Boston Art Club, 15, 175 Churchill, Wilham W, 34, 133, 134, 163, GENERAL
Boston Pamters, 1-3, 28, 78, 107, 108, 185, 186 INDEX
118, 125, 130, 131, 138, 146, 150, 177, Colarossi, 145
178 Cole, Foxcroft, 163
as continuators of Monet's work, 147, Converse, Frederick W., 181
201
164 Copley, John Smgleton, 6, 7, 9, 128, 129
esthetic platform, 166 Copley Gallery, 1 75
limited range of interests, 78, 180 Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1
 Corcoran School of
172
Corot, 176
Cortissoz, Royal, 129, 130
Cottet, Charles, 178
Courbet, Gustave, 29, 57, 70, 73
Couture, Thomas, 48, 50, 55
Cowles Art School,
Cox, Kenyon, 132, 152, 186
D J.,
Art (Washington), 82,
Gammell, Robert Hale Ives, ix-xi
on education of painters, x-xi
Gardner, Mrs. Jack ilsabella Stewart), 18
Gaugengigl, Ignaz Marcel, 153, 154, 187
Gay, Walter, 178
Genteel School, 3
18, 59, 145, 164 Gericault, 56
Gerome, Jean Leon, 17, 55, 59, 86, 132
Giotto, 48, 167
Glackens, William
4

Dannat, William Turner, 74, 82, 86, 90,

Grand Central Galleries, 175, 176
Grundmarm, Emil Otto, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27,
138, 186
34, 42, 59, 68, 82, 86, 90, 188
David, Louis, 22, 125
as teacher of painting, 25-26
Da\^es, Arthur, 4
Da\ds, Charles H., 34
Guild of Boston Artists, 133, 138, 163,
165-176
de Boisbaudran, Lecoq, 25
charter members, 175
DeCamp, Joseph R., ix, 4, 5, 18, 32, 34,

36-39, 50, 53-65, 82, 85, 133, 150, 152,

members' work compared with
Europeans', 177, 178
167, 181
uniting purpose, 166
de Diaghilev, Sergei, 179, 180, 181
Degas, Edgar, 25, 73, 75, 125, 180
De\sing, Thomas, 4, 34 H
Doll and Richards, 175 Hale, Lilian Westcott, frontispiece, 4, 122,

Dunlay, Thomas R., 164 123, 124, 125, 131, 132

Dimne, F. L., 89 Hale, Phihp L., ix, 4, 26, 34, 43, 82, 87,

Duran, Carol us, 34, 129, 176 104, 107, 113, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127,

Duveneck, Frank, 8, 10-13, 15, 17, 18, 34, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 147

40, 47, 48, 52, 55, 56, 57, 152, 186, 187 professional awards, 132

"Duveneck Boys," 56, 152 as writer, 125, 128-131

Hall, Frederick Garrison, 155, 168, 181,
188
Hals, Frans, 56, 179
Ecole des Beaux Arts, 1 7, 86 Hamilton, Edward Wilbur Dean, 33, 133,
"The Eight," 4, 130 135, 188
Enneking John Joseph, 106, 148, 149, 164, Hammer Galleries of New York, x
187 Harnett, WUliam, 32, 176
Hassam, Childe, 4, 34, 153
Hawthome, Charles W., ix
Fantin-Latour, 167 Henn, Roben, 4, 130
THE Fiske, Gertrude, 169, 173, 174, 175, 187 Fiibbard, Aldro Thompson, 106, 169, 170,
BOSTON Fitzgerald, Desmond, 150 171, 189

PAINTERS Folts, Franklm P., 132 Fiill, Edward Burlingame, 181

1900- 1930 Foote, Arthur, 181
Forbes, Elhott, 181
Forruny, 132
202 Fragonard, 56
French Academy, x
French impressionist
collections, 148, 150
Hills, Laura Coombs, 4, 142, 143, 144, t
162, 167, 189, 190
Hiroshige, Ando, 72, 73
Hokusai, Katsushika, 72
Holbem, Hans, 125
art, in U.S. Hopkmson, Charles, 3, 178
Hudson River School, 89
Hunt, William Morris, 15, 16, 22, 23, 43, Manet, Edouard, 148
44, 48, 50, 51, 52, 128, 129, 132 Massachusetts College of Art, 163
Hunter, Robert Douglas, 164 Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
168
I Massachusetts Normal Art School, 65, 82,
Impressionism, 28-32, 50, 64, 71, 89, 117, 133, 163, 170
150, 166, 176 Massachusetts School of Art, 163
American, 163 "Masters in Art" series, 132
ultimate goal, 62 McKnight, Dodge, 3
Ingbretson, Paul, 164 McMicken School of Design (Cincinnati),
Ingres, Jean- August-Dominique, 54, 119 54, 152
Menard, Rene, 178
T Meryman, Richard, 82, 172, 191
James, Henry, 17, 171 Metcalf, Willard L., 4, 34
James, William (artist), 108, 171, 172, 190 Metropolitan Art Museum, 82
James, William (psychologist), 171 Metsu, Gabriel, 70
Japanese Masters of Ukiyoye, 73 Metzur, 73
John, 77 Millais, 132
Jongkind, 86 Millet, Francis Davis, 22, 24, 26, 34, 191
Jung, Carl, x Mills, Charles, 8, 52, 56, 59, 65
Modem Art, 1 79
K Monet, Claude, 20, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34,
Kendall, William Sergeant, ix, 53, 54, 65, 73, 89, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 164, 177
190 Moore, Robert, 132, 164
Kipling, Rudyard, 67 Moretto, 132
Kronberg, Louis, 34 Movalli, Charles, xi
Munkacsy, 82
Murphy, Herman Dudley, 34, 138, 139,
La Farge, John, 20, 21, 22 140, 141, 142, 167, 192.
Laszlo, 77 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 5, 43, 73,
Latouche, Gaston, 178 150
Laurens, Jean Paul, 47, 48, 138
La very, 11 N
Lawrence, 85, 125 National Academy of Design, 1, 50
Lawson, Emest, 4 New England conscience, 7
Lefebvre, Jules Joseph, 68, 70, 71, 73, 86, Noble, Thomas S., 54, 55
90
Leibl,Wilhelm, 47, 86 O
Le Sidaner, Henry, 178 Oliver, Fred, 164
Leys, Henry, 22, 34 Orpen, 11
Loeffler, Charles Martin, 181
Lofftz, 47
Loring, William, ix Paderewski, Ignaz, 151 GENERAL
Lowell Institute, 44 Page, Marie Danforth, 172, 173, 192 INDEX
Lowrey, David, 164 Paxton, Elizabeth Okie, 155, 167, 168,
Luks, George B., 4 169, 193
203
Paxton, William M., ix, x, 31, 55, 82, 85,
M 86, 99, 100-102, 107, 109-121, 125, 129,
Major, Emest L., 136, 190, 191 130, 167, 168, 179
Mancini, Antonio, 85 Pennsylvania Academy of Art, 1, 65, 130
 Perkins, Harley, 118-119 Stuart, Gilbert, 59, 128, 129
Perr>', Lilla Cabot, 30, 34, 145, 146, 147,
148, 152, 161, 164, 165, 193 T
Peto, 32 Tarbell, Edmund C, ix, 4, 5, 6, 21, 25, 33,
Piloty, 47, 52 34, 66-85, 90, 96-99, 107, 124, 133, 138,

Pissarro, 146, 147, 148 150, 167, 170, 172

plein air technique, 28, 64, 89, 117, 121, Tavern Club, 18, 52, 85, 151, 181

133, 147, 150, 164 teacher-disciple relationship, 48

Portland Society of Art, 90 "Ten American Pamters," 4
Posvar, Jan, 164 TerBorch, Gerard, 71, 73
Prendergast, Maurice B., 4 Thompson, Leshe P., 33, 156, 157, 167,
Pushman, Hovsep, 167 169, 171, 194
Titian, 29, 168

R Tonks, 77
Raphael, 7 Trubner, 47
Reid, Robert, 4, 34 Turner, Ross, 56
Rembrandt, 3, 56, 85, 86, 176 Twachtman, John W., 4, 86, 152
Renou-, Pierre Auguste, 32, 147, 148, 167, Twilight of Painting (Gammell), x
176
Reynolds, Joshua, 125 V
Rimmer, Dr., 44 Van Dyck, 125
Ritter, Carl, 152 Van Eyck, 22
Robiason, Theodore, 152 Velasquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y, 7,
Rogers, Gretchen, 172, 173, 193 9, 29, 31, 43, 48, 53, 54, 73, 85, 119,

Roosevelt, Theodore, 59 125, 167, 176, 179

Venice Biennale, 1 77
"laVente," 71
St. Botolph Club, 18, 59, 175, 181 Vermeer, Johannes, 9, 29, 73, 117, 118,
Sargent, John Singer, 5, 6, 8, 18, 19, 20, 119, 125, 167, 179
34, 62, 129, 130, 148, 166, 177, 178 Vinton, Frederic Porter, 15, 16, 17, 18, 34,
School of the Museiim of Fine Arts, 41, 43-52, 59, 149
Boston, ix, 21, 22, 25, 59, 65, 82, 87, von Diez, Wilhelm, 47, 56
107-108, 124, 153, 165, 170, 171, 172, Vonnoh, Robert W., 164
173, 175, 180 Vose Gallenes, 132, 175
Shinn, Everett, 4
Sickert, 77 W
Simmons, Edward, 4, 34 Walker, C. Howard, 165
Simon, Lucien, 178 Watteau, 33
Sisley, 89 Weir, J. Alden, 4
Sloan, John, 4 Wellesley College, 59
THE Smith, Howard Everett, 179, 193, 194 Wendel, Theodore, 8, 150, 151, 152, 160,
BOSTON Smithsonian Institute, 64 164, 195
PAINTERS Sohier, Alice Ruggles, 173, 194 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 57, 58,

1900- 1930 SoroUa, 166 73, 75, 142, 152

Squarcione, 25 Woodbury, Charles H., 137, 138, 139, 158,
Steer, 77 159, 173, 195, 196
204 Stevens, Alfred, 34, 73, 76, 77, 132, 146 Worcester Museum, 86
Stevenson, R. A. M., 176
Story, Juhan, 56 Z
Strahiiber, 47 Zuloaga, 77
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R. H. Ives Gammell, pictured above in a 1950
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(the editor of this volume), died in 1981 at
the age of 88.

Painter, teacher, critic, he left behind him

not only the evidence of his own work but
a phalanx of younger artists who studied at
his atelier and whose works confirm the
strength and promise of their mentor's creed.
Added to this is the testimony of his four
published books plus numerous unpublished
—
essays and manuscripts of which the pres-
ent volume is the most significant and
timely.

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