Society Painter

In the late nineteenth century in America, William Merritt Chase’s name was synonymous with the word artist. Born November 1, 1849, Chase garnered most of the awards, presided over most of the societies, and generally introduced his presence anywhere art was discussed. In retrospect, someone such as the withdrawn Winslow Homer may seem the greater artist today, but at the time, but Chase put himself forward as what an artist should look like and how an artist should relate with the public. As seen in Chase’s painting In the Studio (above, from 1882), Chase even decked out his home and studio in the mode of a fashionable society painter. Sumptuous carpeting and lavish décor seem out of place in the paint-spattered world of what we think of as a working studio, but Chase sought to create a mood in his sitters and patrons congruous with their own upper crust expectations. For an America still striving to forge a cultural heritage on the verge of the twentieth century, Chase stepped forward and assumed leadership of what direction that culture would take.

Stylistically, Chase greatly resembles John Singer Sargent in the lightness of his touch and flair for the theatrical in works such as Carmencita (above, from 1890). The label of Impressionism sticks better to Chase than it does to Sargent, however. Thanks to his friendship with John Henry Twachtman and other American Impressionists, Chase easily slips into the category of Impressionist, which was only then gaining in popularity in America. When Chase returned from his studies in Europe in 1878, Impressionism was “the new thing” and Chase a bold experimentalist. Success and recognition, however, froze Chase stylistically. As other artists moved past Impressionism into the movements that would mark the beginning of the twentieth century, Chase failed to keep up in his own art, more content to repeat the works of the past and rest on his hard-earned laurels. It’s easy to dismiss Chase as a fuddy duddy of sorts, but his importance in the development of an arts culture in America can not and should not be denied.

Despite his own artistic entrenchment, Chase taught young artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley who took his lessons and struck out on their own path with his blessing. While Chase taught his students the old ways of painting and thinking, rival teacher Robert Henri taught his charges the new ideas of a physical approach to art totally immersed in the life of the everyman that evolved into the Ashcan School. Things actually got physical as Henri’s students sometimes rumbled with Chase’s pupils over art. (I tend to imagine this as an artsy version of the Jets versus the Sharks.) Chase, however, never entered the fray, always floating above it all. In the 1890s, Chase summered at Shinnecock off of Long Island, rejoicing in the seaside beauty and painting his family in the open air in works such as The Fairy Tale (above, from 1892). In many ways, Chase lived a fairy tale existence, carefully constructing a persona as an artist and inviting young artists to indulge in that fantasy world momentarily while discovering their own creative reality.

Music Lessons

“All art constantly aspires to the condition of music,” Walter Pater famously wrote. That phrase ran through my head when I stood in front of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother (above, from 1871), better known as simply Whistler's Mother. Standing there years ago at the Musee d’Orsay in front of one of the most famous paintings in the world, I found myself liking it even more—the opposite reaction to my encounter with the Mona Lisa. Born July 14, 1834, Whistler excelled at art of shameless self-promotion, giving such friends (and later enemies) as Oscar Wilde and Gustave Courbet stiff competition for the publicity hound crown. In his art, however, Whistler stows away his bravado and often achieves a delicate balance of harmony and tone that truly aspires to the level of compositional perfection of a Beethoven piano sonata or Mozart string quartet. Unfortunately, the titles in which Whistler hints at his intentions are such mouthfuls that shorthand such as Whistler’s Mother soon displace his original goals, which only close attention can truly appreciate. Like a fine symphony, a Whistler painting cannot be rushed.

Two years after painting his mother, Whistler attempted a similar portrait of the author Thomas Carlyle known as Arrangement in Gray and Black no. 2 (above, from 1873). The similarities between the two paintings are obvious, but the individual portraits embedded within the similar color palettes couldn’t be more individually unique. Around this time, Whistler added musical titles to non-portraits as well, such as the infamous Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, which John Ruskin mocked as “flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.” Whistler, in response, sued Ruskin, eventually winning the libel case but receiving only a farthing in damages and thus ruining himself financially. I find it truly amazing that Whistler could keep the two sides of his personality so equally—the tender colorist who painstakingly worked out fragile harmonies of tone until they rang true to his “ear” coexists with the raging public figure for whom no publicity was bad publicity. Perhaps it was the yin of the artist that allowed the yang of the public persona to exist without going entirely out of control.

John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, and Walter Sickert, among many others, counted Whistler as a powerful influence. When I look at one of Sargent’s bravura portraits that feature a seemingly infinite range of whites, I think of works by Whistler such as Mother of Pearl and Silver: The Andalusian (above, from 1888-1900), in which Whistler not only captures the textures of the woman’s clothes in their individuality but also brings them all together into one powerful single effect. Like the Japanese art Whistler so loved, his tonal studies posing as portraits speak in a soft voice that demand attention. Unfortunately, the brashness of Whistler’s life and the mad dash of modern living conspire to push us along as if there were nothing to see here, instead of an entire symphony crammed into a single panel.

Lifting Spirits

"Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you." Robert Henri’s words, as recorded by former student Margery Ryerson and published in The Art Spirit, continue to inspire art students and professional artists even today. When I interviewed Karl J. Kuerner, he quoted Henri more than his famous neighbor, Andrew Wyeth. Born June 24, 1865, Henri learned the classic realist technique at the PAFA and then Impressionism in Paris. By 1895, however, he disowned Impressionism in search of a style that spoke to him, arriving finally at a brand of romantic realism that became disparagingly and inaccurately known as the Ashcan School. Just one look at Henri’s Salome (above, from 1909), which shows a contemporary dancer in costume for the stage role, and you can see that Henri’s work was anything but down and dirty. Although some of his protégés—William Glackens, George Luks, and John Sloan—got gritty at times, Henri’s work exemplifies the elegance of a refined man with a common touch, who could find beauty in both Old Masters and young children playing in the street.

At the PAFA, Henri studied under Thomas Anshutz, the former assistant and (as we now know today) betrayer of Thomas Eakins. That connection gives Henri’s admiration for Eakins a whole new dimension. Eakins’ “iron will and his will to paint and to carry out his life as he thought it should go,” Henri wrote, “cost him heavily, but in his works we have the precious result of his independence, his generous heart and his big mind.” “’Integrity’ is the word which seems best to fit him,” Henri says of Eakins, adding that he considered Eakins “the greatest portrait painter America has produced.” In Henri’s portraits we see a similar integrity, yet with a freer style vastly different than that of Eakins. In The Irish Boy in Blue Denim (aka, Anthony Lavelle) (above, from 1927), Henri captures the innocence and freshness of the boy’s face, but in a style that not only harks back to his Impressionist days, but also seems influenced by all the other European modernist movements swirling around him. Henri always remained true to himself, but never failed to keep his eyes and his mind open to new experiences.

Henri the never-ending student made for one of the greatest art teachers in American art history. William Merritt Chase and Henri waged an unofficial “war” for the minds and hearts of American art students at the beginning of the twentieth century. It’s hard to declare a winner, but the track record of Henri’s greatest students—Glackens, Luks, Sloan, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, and Stuart Davis, among others—speaks for itself. Henri’s painting The Art Student (above, from 1906), a portrait of Josephine Nivison, the future Mrs. Edward Hopper, shows the affection Henri had for all his students, to whom he taught the ways of life as much as the ways of art. "Art cannot be separated from life,” Henri told them. “It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience." Such sentiments ensure that Henri’s spirit will continue to live on in the hearts of artists and art lovers.

Starting Fires

One of the best and worse things someone can call you is a “troublemaker.” It all depends on who’s doing the name-calling. During his lifetime, enough of the wrong people called Rockwell Kent a troublemaker to ensure that he was the “right” kind. Born June 21, 1882, Kent studied art under some of the greatest American teachers of his era, including William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and Abbott Handerson Thayer. Kent internalized not only the skills they taught him, but also their humanist spirit. In many ways, Kent stands as the American version of William Blake, another famous troublemaker. Kent’s Flame (above, 1928) seems like a reincarnation of Blake’s figures that yearned to fulfill humanity’s full potential against the oppressive powers keeping the everyman and woman down. Blake didn’t start the fire, but Kent kept it burning brightly in the early to mid twentieth century as America began to find its footing as a true world power.

Kent claimed to be a transcendentalist long after Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were gone. His illustrations to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass emphasized the transcendental aspects of those works and reinvigorated them for his generation. Kent’s striking illustrations for Moby-Dick especially contributed to the rediscovery of that work as scholars sought to shape an American culture in the 1920s to match the burgeoning American power between the wars. Kent’s Prometheus Unbound (above, from the 1920s) echoes not only Percy Bysshe Shelley’s take on the subject but also Blake’s idea of the “mind-forg’d manacles” that enslave humanity from within, i.e., the internalized constraints that we impose on ourselves and can only break ourselves. Just as Prometheus brought the spark of fire to humanity and paid for it with his freedom, Kent, too, paid for trying to light a spark in the lives of Americans, earning the brand name of communist and the unwelcome attention of McCarthyism, scourge of “troublemakers.”

Kent’s personal humanity is often lost in all the activism. In the 1920s, Kent actually published light-hearted cartoons under the pen name "Hogarth, Jr." that poked fun at the excesses of the Jazz Age. Kent travelled extensively, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego to Greenland and more, always connecting with the local people and culture, demonstrating a common touch to belie the perception of him as an intellectual “elitist.” Above all, Kent’s love for the ideal known as “America” burned so strongly that it could border on the corny. In Baker of the Bread of Abundance (above, from 1945), Kent gets almost Norman Rockwell-ish in his admiration for simple domesticity and, perhaps, even religious in his otherworldly figure hovering over the family as a makeshift household god. Despite attacks on Kent as “Un-American,” he was, if anything, hyper-American, dreaming of a utopia that the reality around him never lived up to, but which he never failed to work towards.

American Beast

When young American artist Alfred Maurer met Henri Matisse in 1904 at Leo and Gertrude Stein’s salon, he knew the direction of his art had been changed forever. Born April 21, 1868, Maurer’s father, who had been an artist for Currier and Ives, pushed him in the direction of lyrical realism akin to that of William Merritt Chase, under whom Maurer had studied in the late 1890s, and Whistler, whose style Maurer had aped time and again. Seeing Matisse’s work, however, led him not to ape Matisse but to turn into a “beast” himself, i.e., one of the Fauves (French for “beast”). Maurer’s Fauve Landscape (above, from 1907) demonstrates how Matisse’s bold color and line freed the young American from all the constrictions of his training. When the mainstream art world still looked at Fauvism and Cubism as forms of mental illness, Maurer recognized their greatness and, more importantly, brought them to America for the first time.

Living in New York in the same studio as his father, Maurer soon found like-minded artists to help him promote his new way of painting. Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen's 291 gallery held exhibitions of Maurer’s avant-garde work along with that of John Marin, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley. When the organizers of the landmark 1913 Armory Show, which introduced modern European art to mainstream America, searched for Americans to compare with masters such as Matisse and Cezanne, they picked four works by Maurer. Maurer’s Still Life (above, from 1919) shows a mix of his Cubist and Fauvist influences, taking apart the pieces of the still life yet representing them in the bold lines Matisse made famous in his works. Such success eased the fears of Maurer’s father, who feared that his son would never amount to anything in art.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Maurer continued to evolve, sponging up more and more European modernist influences. In works such as Two Girls (above, from the 1920s), the baroque grotesqueness of Germany’s New Objectivity, especially that of Otto Dix and George Grosz, seems to be on display. You can even see a touch of Amedeo Modigliani in the elongated necks of the two women. In many ways, Maurer was an ambassador of many of the cutting edge trends of European art, accepting them as his own and translating them into an American idiom. Unfortunately, after a long illness and difficult surgery, Maurer’s pain increased when his beloved father passed away at one hundred years of age. Unable to cope, Maurer took his own life two days later. Today, Alfred Maurer gets lost in the footnotes of modern art history, condemned as a poor copyist of the European masters. If nothing else, however, Maurer deserves credit for believing in his own eyes and recognizing greatness in others when he saw it.

Separation Anxiety

Cecilia Beaux, Les Derniers jours d'enfance (The Last Days of Infancy), 1883-5. Oil on canvas, 45 3/4 x 54 in. Gift of Cecilia Drinker Saltonstall, 1989.21

Eleanor Roosevelt called her in 1933 “the American woman who had made the greatest contribution to the culture of the world.” William Merritt Chase believed her to be “not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived.” Today, only specialists in American art know much of Cecilia Beaux, subject of the first full retrospective of her work in more than thirty years at the PAFA. Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter looks back at this forgotten, yet significant artist in the history of American portraiture as well as women’s art, asking not only why she was significant, but also why she has become forgotten, while the reputations of contemporaries such as John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt never faded.

Sylvia Yount, former curator at the PAFA and now at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, curated the exhibition and edited the catalogue. Her essay, titled “Family Pictures,” provides a look back at the era that Beaux worked in and presents a fascinating portrait of the portraitist. Beaux began her studies at the PAFA, choosing to study under William Sartain rather than the controversial instructor Thomas Eakins. “A curious instinct of self-preservation kept me outside the magic circle” of Eakins’ influence, Beaux wrote. “I watched him from behind staircases, and corners.” Sartain was a life-long friend of Eakins and studied beside him in Paris, so their styles were quite similar. Beaux’s first big splash in painting, The Last Days of Infancy (above), has an Eakins-esque quality via Sartain, but also, as Yount shows, is an “imaginative response” to Whistler’s Arrangement in Gray and Black: Portrait of the Artist's Mother, better known as Whistler's Mother. In The Last Days of Infancy, Beaux paints her sister Etta with her first-born nephew Harry at three years of age. By titling it The Last Days of Infancy, Yount writes, Beaux “encourage[d] viewers to interpret the work not simply as a personal, family image but as a universal statement about a particular stage of childhood and the complex changes that accompany it.”

This universal appeal comes with a complex psychological dynamic between mother and child. Whereas her contemporary Mary Cassatt depicted mothers and children in intimate and even pseudo-erotic ways, Beaux’s pair seem strangely disconnected. As Nina Auerbach in her essay “The Queen Stands Alone” writes, “Neither benevolent nor cruel, it contains neither union nor abuse; love expresses itself in separation, not in mingling. Even Beaux’s children connect only warily.” As beautiful as Beaux’s portraits can be, it is this sense of coldness and separation verging on unexpressed anxiety that prevents the viewer from engaging with the subject. Yount describes Beaux’s personality as complex: “a demanding, domineering woman who both loved and manipulated her family; a warm, engaging friend who craved social interaction but cultivated a lonely and aloof independence; a romantic soul who rejected courtship and marriage.” Perhaps Beaux kept her distance from the equally enigmatic Eakins because she sensed a similar soul.

Cecilia Beaux, A Little Girl (Fanny Travis Cochran), 1887. Oil on canvas, 36 x 29-3/16 inches. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, gift of Fanny Travis Cochran, 1955.12

Beaux entered the art world as the portrait took hold of the American imagination. In “Cecilia Beaux and the Rise of American Portraiture in the 1890s,” Kevin Sharp traces how Sargent’s portrait tours of the United States in the 1880s and 1890s stoked the flames of a national mania for portraiture. Thanks to Sargent and Manet, the portrait evolved from a document commemorating the subject into a window into the subject’s soul, animated by “narrative twists of genre painting.” The Last Days of Infancy falls under this category of genre/portraiture, as does A Little Girl (Fanny Travis Cochran) (above). “The artist was always drawn to engaging children who, like herself at their age, promised to become trail-blazing adults,” Yount writes. In the direct stare of young Fanny you can almost see the militant social activist she would become, fighting for the rights of factory workers suffering under deplorable conditions. With an almost inhuman lack of sentimentality, Beaux shows the power and potential of the developing young mind and spirit.

Cecilia Beaux, Mother and Daughter (Mrs. Clement Acton Griscom, 1850-1925, and Frances C. Griscom, 1879-1974), 1898. Oil on canvas, 83 x 44 in. Gift of Frances C. Griscom, 1950.15

Beaux achieved her greatest success, both financially and critically, from grand portraits of high society, such as Mother and Daughter (above), the dual portrait of Mrs. Clement Acton Griscom and her daughter Frances. These two women, bedecked in furs and finery, represent the same social class that Beaux belonged to. She was one of them—a powerful tool in obtaining commissions. But even as she painted that class, it was dying out. Beaux documents the actual passing of her era in such works. Auerbach perceives these two women as being “as distant from each other as they are from us. Their bodies are close together, but their flat eyes look in different directions, preventing unity.” Beaux shared this same stoic disconnect in her own life and art, disdaining modern art trends and expressing “a revulsion from cubism” and the other modern art movements that were supplanting portraiture. As the times and the prevailing tastes of those times shifted, Beaux remained entrenched in her ways and beliefs, allowing the parade to slip past her, all at the cost of becoming nearly forgotten.

Cecilia Beaux, New England Woman (Mrs. Jedediah H. Richards), 1895. Oil on canvas, 43 x 24 1/4 in. Joseph E. Temple Fund, 1896.1.

The longer that you look at the works of Cecilia Beaux, the more you learn to appreciate her skills. New England Woman (Mrs. Jedediah H. Richards) (above), with its bravura show of lavender, blue, pink, and green in building up the subtleties of the woman’s white dress, stands up to anything done by Whistler and Sargent (a friend and mentor to Beaux) in the same vein. Behind that amazing technique, a psychological depth arises that Sargent and Whistler rarely attempt. Like the figures in portraits by Eakins, the people in Beaux’s paintings are “incessantly themselves, never devolving into types,” as Auerbach argues. That psychological aspect provides the one modernist touch to Beaux’s work that makes her seem stunningly contemporary despite her commitment of classical realism. The same anomie that plagues Beaux’s subjects, and perhaps plagued Beaux herself as she faced the difficulties of becoming a self-supporting female artist in the early twentieth century, finds a corollary in much modern portraiture. The separation anxiety Beaux and her generation felt as the world they knew slipped from their fingers finds a strange partner in our own uncertain, anxious world today.

[Many thanks to the PAFA for providing me with a review copy of Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter and for the images from the exhibition.]

Playing the Part

When anyone searched for the center of the art world in late nineteenth century New York City, they didn’t need to look any further than the studio of William Merritt Chase. Born November 1, 1849, Chase’s studio was itself a work of art, as his 1882 painting In the Studio (above) shows. Chase filled his workplace and home with every exotic item he could find—rugs, furniture, clothes, musical instruments—all to help him shape the perception of what an artist’s studio should look like. Chase dressed the part, as well, sometimes even living beyond his means to create the proper impression for patrons and fellow artists. While contemporaries such as Winslow Homer kept lower profiles (Homer was once mistaken for a bank executive), Chase’s flamboyant lifestyle and personality paved the way for later American artists to play the part of the larger than life artist.

Fortunately, Chase’s talents backed up his image. In works such as Idle Hours (above, from 1894), we see Chase bringing his European training back home to America with decidedly Impressionist overtones. Chase studied in several places in Europe, perhaps most notably with Jean-Leon Gerome in Paris. Chase’s work always reminds me of that of John Singer Sargent, if Sargent had gone as consistently Impressionistic in his oils as he did in his watercolors. When John Henry Twachtman dies in 1902, the remaining members of The Ten, the anti-academic band that broke off when the American academies rejected Impressionism, ask Chase to join. Regardless of his sales or social status, Chase always remained a central figure in American art during his lifetime.

When his fortunes as a painter began to fail, Chase turned to teaching, becoming one of the most influential instructors of his time in America, second perhaps only to Robert Henri. Edward Hopper studied under both Henri and Chase, taking the best of both worlds into his unique style that would dominate the first half of the twentieth century. In the Self-Portrait of 1915, Chase seems chastened, no longer the brash showoff of the 1880s with the fancy clothes and showplace studio. The stereotypical artist of the late nineteenth century redefines himself here as the old sage, teaching the next generation how to paint. Posing beside a canvas, Chase seems ready to demonstrate for his students, with the details of his studio in the background painted sketchily for being less important than the task at hand.