Hermann Dudley Murphy: Frame Maker

"Clouds and Water" by Herman Dudley Murphy
Gilded and Painted Wood Frame also by Murphy

"Still another aspect of artistic concern that links Hermann Dudley Murphy with Whistler and also with the Aesthetic Movement was his concern with the totality of the work of art - the picture complemented by a specially designed and toned frame and, indeed, hung against a background of suitable color and texture.

It was an aspect of the Arts and Crafts Movement's to insist upon the artist's involvement in the practice of the crafts in order to carry high ideals of design into every product of manufacture. He was the first American frame maker to sign his frames, making the statement that they, too, were works of art. Murphy's involvement in frame making and design is additional evidence of his preoccupation with Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts ideals which were having a considerable impact in Boston at the turn of the century. He led a veritable revolution in American framing which made Boston the center for artistic framing in the country.

Here again Murphy's interest in framing extended back into his Paris student days when he would surely have seen examples of Whistler's frames. He himself has told us that being convinced of the supreme importance of individual and proper framing to the impact of a picture, and without resources to order the finest of frames, he purchased the necessary tools and learned the skills of carving and gilding. 

His interest in frames was shared by Charles Prendergast and when in 1903 Murphy built his first house in Winchester, Massachusetts, the two men set up a frame shop in the basement, names after the Celtic name of Murphy's house, Carrig-Rohane (Red Cliff). Later, in 1905, the shop moved into its own premises in Boston and prospered considerably, bringing Murphy substantial income. To begin with frames were carved to Murphy's own designs. Later he turned his shares of the company over to his artisans and the shop entered into partnership with the Vose Gallery in Boston. Among its productions were many of the most beautiful frames executed in this century, according to a standard far in excess of anything that can be procured today."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Hermann Dudley Murphy" by William A. Coles. A good article on his frames: https://www.museumaacm.org/newsletters/newsletter07142021.html )

Hermann Dudley Murphy: James McNeill Whistler

"Henry Ossawa Tanner" by
Hermann Dudley Murphy

"In December 1886, at the age of nineteen and while still a student, Hermann Dudley Murphy made the illustrations to accompany an article entitled, 'A Whistler Sketch,' published in the journal 'American Art Illustrated.' His drawings, done after Whistler, are Murphy's earliest known work and imply a knowledge of Whistler's work at the earliest stage of his career. 

Furthermore, his understanding of and admiration for Whistler's work could soon develop much more rapidly, since the period of his study in Paris was the time of Whistler's greatest influence in the artistic community of the city, especially upon young American students. Whistler was then living in Paris, his fortunes had recovered, and official recognition had come in the very year of Murphy's arrival in Paris with the purchase of the portrait of his mother by the French government for the Luxembourg Gallery. He was also made an officer of the Legion of Honor. In the next few years Whistler's studio became a rendezvous for young Americans and it is certainly possible that Murphy could have met the 'little butterfly' at that time.

Whistler's impact upon Murphy, while it conditioned his sensibility always, is to be seen most strongly in his early portraits and landscapes with their subtle color keys, delicate harmonies, and unusual and carefully adjusted compositions. Indeed, even the artistic monogram which he combined with his signature derives from Whistler's famous butterfly. Among the portraits, that of his friend and roommate from Paris, the painter Henry O. Tanner is the most notable example of this influence. The composition derives from Whistler's self-portrait in the Detroit Institute of Arts and its crepuscular tonalities generally recall Whistler, though Murphy's picture is more strongly drawn and characterized than most of Whistler's portraits and its quietness differs from the mannerism or jauntiness of the usual Whistlerian pose. The truth is that Murphy was assimilating other influences into his work, and while he often reminds us of Whistler, he is still a very distinct artistic personality."

To be continued

 

("H.O. Tanner" by Hermann Dudley Murphy. Excerpts from "Hermann Dudley Murphy" by William A. Coles.)

Hermann Dudley Murphy: Paris

"Zinnias and Marigolds" by Hermann Dudley Murphy

"In 1891 Hermann Dudley Murphy went to Paris to study painting under Jean-Paul Laurens and J.J. Benjamin-Constant at the Academie Julian. Paris was at that time the obvious place for further training in art, study there having been previously pursued by such Boston painters as William Morris Hunt, Frederick Porter Vinton and, more recently, by Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson, both among the earliest students of the Museum School. William Paxton preceded Murphy in Paris by two years, influenced in that direction by his Boston teacher, Dennis Miller Bunker, himself a product of Gerome's atelier. Murphy's stay in Paris was unusually successful. 

He became massier in Laurens' atelier (a distinction very rare for an American, perhaps in part owing to his great size as well as to his talent, since the massier was expected to be a figure of authority in the often disorderly atelier) and he won four prizes each in drawing and composition. In 1895 and 1896 he exhibited in the Salon du Chap-de-Mars.

This being said Murphy does not approve of the system of prizes, and says he is prepared to speak of its evils. He agrees with the foremost educators of the day that prizes put before the student a wrong aim in working. The end becomes the great thing, and the prize more than the work that wins it. The pleasure of the doing is overshadowed by the hope of winning a prize. Most prize winners, and those who have tried unsuccessfully to become such, will agree to this. He said: 'First, I was not satisfied until I had won one prize. When I got that, I wanted to have two drawings hung - no one had - and so I worked for that, and got it; and then there was something else in similar ways to try for, and so on, and the only thing one does not think of under such circumstances is Art for Art's sake, which should really be the first thought, I believe.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Hermann Dudley Murphy" by William A. Coles and "Hermann Dudley Murphy" from "Brush and Pencil," vol. 5.)

Hermann Dudley Murphy: Illustration

"Harbor, San Juan" by Hermann Dudley Murphy

"With every month of work at the School of Fine Arts in Boston, Hermann Dudley Murphy felt surer that he had made no mistake in his choice. His teachers endorsed what he did, and he succeeded well enough from the first to pay his way by illustrations in papers and magazines. 

At this stage of his development it was his highest ambition to be an illustrator. One of the best things that came to him in this line was his appointment as artist to the expedition which investigated and mapped out the Nicaragua Canal. He said he did not know enough at that stage to save studies for future use, but was satisfied to do what came along in the day's work, while the experience and the life of freedom were of great value to him. 

It was a liberal education to the youth, to whom it opened so much that was new. His work brought him into prominence as an illustrator and had he still preferred that branch of artistic expression he might have had opportunities enough to continue in it."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Hermann Dudley Murphy" in "Brush and Pencil," 1899.)

Hermann Dudley Murphy: An Introduction

"Peony and Kwannon" by Hermann Dudley Murphy

"Hermann Dudley Murphy, one of the major figures of the golden age of the Boston School of painting, was but five years younger than Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson and two years older than William Paxton. Like them he was one of the most successful and highly esteemed American painters of the first decades of the twentieth century. In addition, through his framing reforms, he exerted an enormous salutary influence on the very look and presentation of American pictures. 

He was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1867. His father, who came from Cork, Ireland, was a shoe manufacturer, and his mother was a descendent of Governor Dudley of New Hampshire. When Hermann was sixteen he made up his mind that he would be an artist. It was the only thing he wanted to be or felt that he could be, and this he told his parents.

At the age of sixteen Hermann entered the Boston Museum School, then in the first decade of its existence. Under the direction of Otto Grundmann, it was yet to acquire the strong Impressionist orientation that came in the nineties when Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson moved into leading positions on the staff. The curriculum included exercises in drawing from memory and in composition based on assigned subjects, and studies from the draped figure. In color too, Grundmann, who had studied in Antwerp with Baron Leys, brought a Flemish sensitivity of beautiful pigments to his Boston pupils and no doubt also a reverence for the exquisite color harmonies of the Belgian painter, Alfred Stevens, who was so much admired both by the Boston painters and by Whistler. Certainly, then Murphy could have acquired a strong sensitivity to color and design in painting."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Hermann Dudley Murphy" by William A. Coles and "Hermann Dudley Murphy" from "Brush and Pencil," vol. 5. With thanks to Rehs Gallery for photo of above painting.)

Gertrude Fiske: Lifelong Involvements

"Jade" by Gertrude Fiske

"Gertrude Fiske was one of the founding members of the Ogunquit Art Association and the Guild of Boston Artists. She participated in local civic organizations including the Weston Public Library and the Weston Historical Society, and was an active member of the Boston Society of Etchers, Concord Art Association, and the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. Her art continued to receive critical acclaim both locally and nationally, and she maintained an active exhibition schedule into the 1950s. She exhibited in more than eleven solo shows and always selected a wide cross-section of her work both in size and subject matter.

Although a tremendous body of her work survives, Gertrude Fiske's popularity waned with the decline in demand and appreciation for the Boston School's paintings after 1930. She continued to paint women and children, landscapes, and portraits through 1930, but by the 1950s, when her health failed, Fiske was no longer actively painting. She died at her home in Weston on April 18, 1961. In her lifetime, telephones, televisions, cars, and airplanes became commonplace. She was born the year Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb and died at the advent of the space age.

Gertrude Fiske was a modern woman ahead of her time committed to supporting the arts and artists through her leadership and contributions to the arts community locally and nationally. Her professional career as an acclaimed artist spanned two world wars and the Great Depression and saw the passage of women's right to vote. She saw this modern world, life, and art as being so very interconnected. In her words: 'Science has put into our hands the means by which we may veritably rebuild the world - the world of man's creation and handiwork - and the artist's conceptions - appreciated and supported by an enlightened people - can make that world beautiful in new and wonderful ways.'"

(Excerpts from "Gertrude Fiske: American Master" by Carol Walker Aten (Author), Lainey McCartney (Author), Richard M. Candee (Author) and Gerald W.R. Ward. (Editor).)

Gertrude Fiske: WWI

"The Carpenter" by Gerdtrude Fiske

"The Fiske family played their part in World War I and suffered their own tragedies. In 1916, Gerturde's sister Hannah was listed as a student at the School of the MFA in Modeling, which that year was taught by the sculptor Bela Pratt. The following year, both Gertrude and Hannah trained to be ambulance drivers. Hannah left for France and was stationed in Paris, driving the French wounded under the direction of the Shurtleff Memorial Relief organization. Gardiner and Eben, Gertrude's brothers, both served in the war as well. Eben was killed in action in 1917, and Hannah developed meningitis upon her return from France and died in 1919. 

After her mother died in 1920, Gertrude the oldest unmarried daughter, moved in to care for her father at the family home. He died in 1930, and she returned to the family home in Weston and maintained a large studio in a well-finished barn on the property.

The 1920s were marked by numerous major awards and Fiske's significant nomination as the first woman member of the Massachusetts State Art Commission in 1930. She was elected an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1922 and by 1930 had become a full Academician. Her painting, 'The Carpenter,' won the Thomas B. Clarke prize at the National Academy of Design in 1922. A contemporary reviewer remarked that its bold composition and abbreviated setting '...is the very essence of what pleases the modern public in the art gallery, the theatre and the fiction department of the library, an unremarkable figure looking remarkable through adroitly contrived placing, a background and lighting that have more to do with the effect than the figure itself.' These 'unremarkable' characters were a strong theme for Fiske in the 1920s and 1930s - portraits of older men and women always depicted with a strong play of shadow and light, expressive in their painterly style and even tender - painted at a time when her own parents were at the end of their lives."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Gertrude Fiske: American Master" by Carol Walker Aten (Author), Lainey McCartney (Author), Richard M. Candee (Author) and Gerald W.R. Ward. (Editor).)

Gertrude Fiske: Successful Professional

"Self-Portrait" by Gertrude Fiske, 1922

"Gertrude Fiske had the freedom to be an independent artist painting full-time, and she actively exhibited her best work both locally and in prestigious institutions such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Corcoran Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She painted and lived part-time in Boston and had studios in the Grundmann Building, Riverway and later Fenway Studios. In 1915 Fiske won a silver medal for 'The Shadow' at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, and that fall sent a painting to Macbeth Gallery, New York City, for the 'Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Women Artists for the Benefit of the Woman Suffrage Campaign.' Perhaps it was the changing times for independent women that are reflected in Fiske's paintings of self-reliant, modern women in her works created between 1915 and the early 1920s.

Fiske's paintings were favorably received by her peers, the public, and local art critics. As one wrote: 

'Largeness and serenity of vision mark the work of this painter, only a few years out of the art school and already hailed as a probably celebrity. What a brilliant emotionality can accomplish when superadded to the right technique is proved in several of her works which are making even jaded gallery trotters take notice. If justification of thorough academic training were ever needed it might be found in the quick progress of such an artist as Miss Fiske to a foremost place in a profession of steadily advancing standards...'

Even her own family were proud of her increasing fame. Her Aunt Lillian Farlow wrote to Gertrude:

'I would like to tell you how much pleasure I have in your work and how much pride in your success. It would have given my dear father and your grandfather the greatest joy and happiness. He was always so confident that women could succeed and that if not carried away but with a firmness both of sincere and honest work, their success would both only be to their own credit but to the character of all women. I am sure he would have been among your strong admirers and helpers.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Gertrude Fiske: American Master" by Carol Walker Aten (Author), Lainey McCartney (Author), Richard M. Candee (Author) and Gerald W.R. Ward. (Editor).)

Gertrude Fiske: Summer Training at Ogunquit

"On Pine Hill" by Gertrude Fiske - her home

"There was much more to Gertrude Fiske's training than the rigors of the Museum School. Every summer beginning as early as 1909, she studied and worked beside Maine marine painter Charles H. Woodbury who had established the Ogunquit Summer School of Painting and Drawing in 1898 on the rocky coast of southern Maine at Perkins Cove in Ogunquit. The fishing village on the ocean saw growth as an artists' colony during the first few decades of the twentieth century, attracting notable modernists including George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Robert Henri. Many of these summer residents were single women who lived within walking distance of Woodbury's cove and studio. They, including Fiske, either bought land from Woodbury or owned homes in proximity to the art colony. [It may also be of interest that Woodbury proposed to Fiske at some point but she turned him down - along with a number of other suitors.]

The shadow and light-infused interiors of her winter training at the Museum School were complemented by the bright, ocean-side summer classes in Ogunquit, and ultimately Fiske evolved a unique style which can be seen in her etchings and sketchbooks, as well as in the many small oil studies she produced concurrent to her larger formal oil paintings. The painterly style that would be the hallmark of her mature works can be first seen in her landscapes and beach scenes. Nothing of the modern landscape she captured was edited out - utility poles and wires, automobiles and airplanes are found in many of her painting compositions. She took the spontaneity and breadth of color found in Woodbury's marine and landscape paintings and in turn applied it to her major figurative works, creating a new, fresh, and impressionistic manner that was much unlike her earlier works. Her association with Woodbury lasted until his death in 1940, and Fiske continued to paint in Ogunquit during each summer, staying at her second home on Pine Hill Road."

To be continued

(Painting by Gertrude Fiske. Excerpts from "Gertrude Fiske: American Master" by Carol Walker Aten (Author), Lainey McCartney (Author), Richard M. Candee (Author) and Gerald W.R. Ward. (Editor).)

 

Gertrude Fiske: Education

A beautiful painting by Gertrude Fiske

Young and wealthy women of Boston were expected to be well educated, join society by 'coming out' into courtship, and subsequently enter into marriage - the idea of a working career woman was not yet considered socially appropriate. Gertrude Fiske received her education at Miss May's Finishing School until she turned eighteen. By 1896, she had passed her final examination for entrance to the newly chartered women's university - Radcliffe College - but for reasons unknown she never attended. Through the turn of the new century, she continued as a keen equestrian and a serious golfer, winning the Amateur Golf Championship of Massachusetts in 1901.

In 1904, Fiske enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, at the age of 25 and concentrated solely on her art. She was one of the few students to stay for the full seven-year curriculum. The school opened in 1877 in the basement of the new MFA and was established to provide a formal arts education previously unavailable outside of New York or Philadelphia. By 1900, 86 percent of the student body were women and many of them went on to find professional success during this time, but not all women entered the school with the goal of becoming professional artists.

Fishke studied under noted Boston School painters Edmund C. Tarbell and Frank W. Benson. She took advantage of the full formal curriculum which included Antique (the study of classical sculptures) and Life (live models) with Philip Leslie Hale, Still Life with Mary Brewster Hazleton, Modeling with Bela Pratt, and Advanced Painting, Portrait and Master Class with Tarbell. Her early paintings reflect the rigorous academic and traditional instruction of the museum school and her teachers' influence - this 'Boston' style with an emphasis on light-filled rooms, finely detailed, and expertly crafted portraits and figure paintings, elegant women posed, poised, and gracious. After Fiske completed her studies, she took a trip to France, a visit captured by bright, scenic oil sketches recording her travels."

To be continued

 

(Excerpts from "Gertrude Fiske: American Master" by Carol Walker Aten (Author), Lainey McCartney (Author), Richard M. Candee (Author) and Gerald W.R. Ward. (Editor).)

Gertrude Fiske: American Master

"Zinnias" by Gertrude Fiske

Several years ago I had the opportunity to see an exhibit of paintings at the Dayton Art Institute from the collection of the National Academy of Design, the first institution in the United States founded and led by professional artists (1825). Two very striking pictures in particular had me stop in my tracks. They were painted by an artist I had never heard of, a woman named Gertrude Fiske. Since then I've wanted very much to learn more about her and just yesterday morning received a copy of an article from Carol Walker Aten that she had written for a book entitled "Gertrude Fiske: American Master," which had accompanied an exhibit of her work. Carol has graciously given me permission to post excerpts from her article, and my heartfelt thanks go out to her.

Gertrude Fiske (1879-1961)

"Boston, Massachusetts, at the end of the nineteenth century was a bustling, growing, and vibrant city. A commitment to the fine arts, music and literature, higher education, and modern transportation, and even the recent arrival of electricity had vastly transformed the very appearance of the city a quarter of a millennia after it had been settled. The last few decades of the century saw a cultural construction boom with the creation of institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fenway Court, the Boston Public Library, the Boston Symphony, Emerson College, Northeastern University, and Simmons College for Women. It was here that future artist Gertrude Horsford Fiske was born on April 16, 1879, to Andrew Fiske, a prominent Boston lawyer and Gertrude Hubbard Horsford Fiske. Five siblings followed: Augustus, Eben, Gardiner, Cornelia and Hannah. The young family would spend the spring and fall at their family home 'Stadhaugh' in Weston and summers at their cottage 'Nine Gables,' in Cataumet, Massachusetts."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Gertrude Fiske: American Master" by Carol Walker Aten (Author), Lainey McCartney (Author), Richard M. Candee (Author) and Gerald W.R. Ward. (Editor).)

Birge Harrison: Teacher

"Winter Sunset" by Birge Harrison

"There are two things that Birge Harrison will talk about, even write about. The 'mood' in painting is one, and the other is the Woodstock School of Landscape Painting that he founded near his Catskill home. To be exact it is the landscape department of the Art Students' League of New York. The establishment of this successful school was a violent hobby that he rode for a period of five years, and takes an occasional canter upon today. He himself holds the successful building up of this little group of seven students to a school of over 150 serious men and women to be the most important and valuable work of his life. Although we may not entirely agree with him in this, it was certainly a notable achievement and one which is sure to prove of inestimable value to the future of American art.

I have found much of interest and value in his printed talks on landscape painting ["Landscape Painting," 1909], talks that he delivered before the Woodstock School. He has the great gift of being able to impart what he knows in vivid, picturesque, inspiring language. No one can read anything that Birge Harrison has written without realizing that he is a gifted master of the art of word painting as well as a master of the brush. It must be conceded that he has practiced as he has preached insofar as he counsels the firm adherence to one's own individual vision of nature, for no painter of this generation has stood more aloof from the general crowd of the painting fraternity, has more simply and sincerely followed the lead of his own personal genius than Birge Harrison.

His work is truly original. It is not indeed of the kind that strikes the visitor first on entering a public gallery, but it is beautiful with a far subtler and finer kind of beauty. It is rather like the modest and delicate primrose which hides itself away under a hedgerow by the wayside. Having once discovered one of his pictures amid the hurly-burly of a general exhibition, one returns to it again and again with ever-growing pleasure and delight."

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer.)

Birge Harrison: Quebec

"Sunrise from Quebec" by Birge Harrison

"Birge Harrison's passionate love for the white beauty of the snow has led him very far North at times. During several winter seasons he made his headquarters in and around the picturesque old city of Quebec. It seems as if in and about that old city Birge Harrison found his best inspiration. 

During the winter of 1910 he had the good fortune to inhabit a tower room in the Chateau Frontenac, that most beautiful of hostelries, which clings like a swallow's nest to the cliffs above the picturesque old city. The front windows of this circular apartment looked down over the snow-laden roofs of the lower town, and on across the vast St. Lawrence to the heights of Levis on its further shore; while the windows to right and left commanded the ice-bound river for many miles both up and down stream. Here he secured the motives for a remarkable series of pictures. In each it is a panoramic or bird's eye view of the great river with portions of the lower town, or the wharves in the immediate foreground. 

He approached each theme with the true poet's vision, and because of the very sincerity of his approach, added to each much of his own personality. He taught his own students to "Remember that art is nature as the artist sees it... Be reverent before nature and honest with yourself and your art will ring true every time. All of you, it is true, will not sing the song of the nightingale because you are not all born nightingales, but the blackbird's lay is sweet, and the thrush and the oriole fill the woods with melody. Even the homely robin and the linnet have modest little notes of their own which are pleasant to the ear of a dewy April morning.'

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer.)

Birge Harrison: On Beauty

"Hazy Moonlight" by Birge Harrison

"Birge Harrison is catholic in regard to the selection of subjects for his brush. In this he appears to be governed solely by the one word 'beauty,' and all that word imports and implies. In his own book on landscape painting he has stated his creed upon this matter so admirably that I cannot do better than to quote his own words: 

'Nature,' he says, 'is not all beautiful by any means, but why should we choose to perpetuate her ugly side? I believe it to be one of the artists' chief functions, as it should be his chief delight, to watch for the rare mood when she wafts aside the veil of the commonplace and shows us her inner soul in some bewildering vision of poetic beauty...'

In this it will be seen that he is at odds with that large group of artists whose slogan is 'Art for Art's sake.' And in this connection he goes on to say:

'When I was a student in Paris away back in the seventies, a group of young artists who were at that time making some stir in the art world asserted, with a great deal of unnecessary noise and bluster, that good painting could glorify the most revolting subject; the subject was nothing, the craftsmanship everything. I remember that I was temporarily caught up in the swirl of the movement and that, for a time, I ran with the shouting iconoclasts. The memory of this makes me still lenient with any youngster who raises the old cry, false as it is. It is a phase, one of the growing pains of adolescence, which is normal and to be expected...'"

He encourages the artist to foster his sense of beauty in the chapter on "Vision" in his book:

"By the grace of God many of us are born with the sense of beauty; and even if we are gifted with but a tiny spark, this spark can be fostered until it grows into a clear and luminous flame whose light will transform the most commonplace scene or object into a vision of infinite loveliness. If we look always for beauty we shall come at last to find it in the most unexpected places and under many strange garbs. But true vision means not only the power to see and to recognize beauty, but the power to see it stripped of all vulgarities and inessentials; the power to see the soul of the thing and to grasp its essential beauty.

For any landscape has a soul as well as a body. Its body is our great rock-ribbed mother earth with her endless expanses of fields and hills, of rivers and surging seas. Its soul is the spirit of light - of sunlight, of moonlight, of starlight - which plays ceaselessly across the face of the landscape, veiling it at night in mystery and shadow, painting it at dawn with the colors of the pearlshell, and bathing it a midday in a luminous glory. He who paints the body alone may be an excellent craftsman, but the true artist is he who paints the beautiful body informed and irradiated by the still more lovely and fascinating spirit - he who renders the mood."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer and "Landscape Painting" by Birge Harrison.)

 

Birge Harrison: Back East

"A Wintry Walk" by Birge Harrison

"Birge Harrison returned East in 1896, settling in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It is from this year therefore, that we must date the beginning of his career as a painter of American Landscape.

He was at once fascinated by the beauty of the New England winter, especially when all nature was glorified and transfigured by the white beauty of the snow. To him this was a never ceasing wonder and delight. He saw it with the fresh vision of a child, who for the first time opens its eyes upon the world. To him the snow was not white only, but took on the wonderful tones of azure, of mauve and of pale and ethereal rose and amber. He painted it as he saw it, in the opalescent radiance of dawn, in the golden glow fo sunset, or under the pale mystery of twilight skies.

The original talent he showed in his snow pictures caused them to receive almost immediate recognition. The keynote of his work was the love of beauty, but this, most fortunately, was backed by craftsmanship of the first order. His long training enabled him to place his impressions upon canvas with admirable simplicity and directness, without fumbling or uncertainty in his technique. 

A close scrutiny of his canvases reveals the fact that he has command of all the methods of the impressionist and the luminarist school, but his technique is never obtrusive. It is the beauty of the scene itself which first appeals to us in one of his pictures, and it is only a second and much more sophisticated examination which shows us the process by which his atmospheric unity is achieved. Millet once said that technique should never open shop for itself; that it should always hid itself modestly away behind the idea to be expressed. In the work of Birge Harrison's later period this first law of all truly great art is never transgressed.

For him it is the intrinsic beauty of the subject, the effect or the mood to be rendered which is of the first importance, and he holds any technique bad which obstrudes itself between that and the observer; and that technique is only truly great which is sufficiently great to make us unconscious of its presence. Velasquez's work is preeminent not because its technique is apparent on the surface, but on the contrary, just because with him the method retires modestly into the background and one sees first of all the somber Spanish Grandees or the sober and beautiful children living and breathing upon his canvas."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer.)

Birge Harrison: Infirmity

"Clair de Lune sur la Riviere" by Birge Harrison

"Four years after going to Paris, that is, in 1880, Birge Harrison achieved his first success with a picture entitled "Novembre." It was a delightful composition, painted entirely in the open as the Plein-air School was in full vogue. Later the French Government bought this work and it now hangs in the Museum at Marseilles. It was for this picture that the artist received a medal at the Universal Exposition of 1889.

Just at this moment, at the very opening of his career, and when success seemed assured to the young painter, his health gave way, and he was forced to abandon all serious work. Then followed a series of nomadic years, during which his only artistic produce was a series of illustrations for articles on travel written by himself. His wanderings led him more than once around the world, and included leisurely travel in many far lands. He touched all of the countries bordering on the Mediterranean and spent some time in India, Australia and the South Seas. He passed two years among the Pueblo and Navajo Indians in Northern New Mexico, and finally settled for five years at Santa Barbara, in Southern California.

These ten long and apparently unproductive years were not all wasted, for when with improved health he finally took up his work again, it was with a broadened vision and a mind enriched. The period of seeming idleness was in reality a period of incubation. His artist's eye had been always on the alert, studying, observing, comparing and sifting. Besides this, he had acquired a wide-ranging habit of mind which counted for much in the development of that later and finer art upon which his future reputation as a painter will stand."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer.)

Birge Harrison: Studies in France

"Novembre" by Birge Harrison

"It was not until 1874 when Birge was 20 years old that he settled down to serious study and then entered the school of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. From there he went to Paris in 1876 with John Sargent, who had come to Philadelphia in that year to visit certain relatives residing in the old Quaker City. When they reached Paris, Sargent and he entered the atelier of Carolus Duran, where they were fellow students of Abbott Thayer, Will Low, Theodore Robinson, Carroll Beckwith and the late Frank Fowler. What a brilliant group of young Americans they were, who first gave us a national standing in the world of modern art!

A little later they were joined by such men as Augustus St. Gaudens, John Alexander, Tryon, Tarbell Arthur Hoeber, Robert Reid, John Twachtman and many others whose names have since become famous over two continents.

Arthur Hoeber wrote about this particular period of Birge Harrison's career. He said, 'No more delightful, hard-working crowd of artistic men perhaps were ever gathered in the four walls of a studio, than this care-free group of  Americans, Englishmen and Frenchmen. There were delightful summers spent at Grez, that paradise of the artist, down in the department of the Seine and Marne. There Mr. Harrison was fortunate enough to pass a season wtih Robert Louis Stevenson and Mrs. Osborne, the lady who was subsequently to become the wife of the novelist.

The winters in the old Carolus class in the rue Notre Dame des Champs were thoroughly enjoyable. The days were supplemented by afternoons in the famous Cour Yvon that met from four to five o'clock in the Hemicycle in the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Here drawing was done by the more advanced men and competition was great."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer.)

Birge Harrison: Poet Painter

"Winter Landscape" by Birge Harrison

"When I [Charles Louis Borgmeyer] was in Paris last year, Alexander Harrison asked me why I did not write about some of our Americans, who were just as good artists, often better, than those of whom I wrote. So I approached Mr. Birge Harrison with a dictagraph concealed in my pocket and this is the substance of our many talks:

It was fascinating to hear him speak of his father, who was a Philadelphia merchant, a man of broad and liberal cultures, an accomplished linguist, a musician and a passionate lover of flowers and of all things beautiful in nature. He was also an enthusiastic gentleman-farmer, dividing his time between his city counting-house and his farm in the environs, where he carried out some of the very earliest experiments in genuine scientific farming.

It was upon this farm in Germantown that the three brothers, Alexander, Birge and Butler passed their boyhood days. A close friend of the Harrison family was the distinguished engraver, John Sartain. He was a most sympathetic and kindly critic of the boys' early efforts; and it was doubtless his confidence in their genuine artistic vocation which prompted the elder Harrison to urge his sons, one after another, to adopt painting as the serious profession of their lives. This was certainly a very unusual attitude for any parent to assume at that time.

As a boy, Birge Harrison, with his inseparable companion, a sketchbook, in hand or pocket, haunted the studios of the few artists of note who at that time lived in Philadelphia. There was the famous Thomas Sully, for instance, who was still painting valiantly at 90; William Trost Richards, who Birge Harrison thinks has never been surpassed as a draughtsman of the sea; Hamilton, another marine painter, and Peter Rothermel, whose vast pictures of the Battle of Gettysburg made a sensation in its day."  

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer in the "Fine Arts Journal," Vol. 29, 1913.)

Dennis Miller Bunker: And What of Eleanor?

"Wisdom of Law" by Henry O. Walker

How terribly sad for Eleanor Hardy Bunker to have lost her husband of only three months to influenza. Dennis Miller Bunker had written her frequently when they were apart. Some of the letters speaking of their relationship were quite imaginative and beautiful. He wrote her:

"I wish often for the magic lamp of Alladin and the magic carpet that one had only to speak to be obeyed. I wish those days would come when we might sit on our carpet and be transported over the seas and mountains and cities wherever we wished to go - where we could ride on the backs of enormous genies with great black and blue wings and fly so fast and far the stars would seem like one stream of white fire - where we would go there would be no cold nor wind but always summer and green - and a white palace with a thousand steps and a thousand domes and a thousand white horses in the stables..."

They had been very happy together, and this classic beauty had posed for a commission that Dennis Miller Bunker had just received from Standford White. One can only imagine her grief when their dreams were completely shattered.

Three years later in 1893, she married Charles Platt, a close friend of her husband whose wife had also died in childbirth several years before. Platt was an artist, landscape designer, and architect. Among his works were the gardens at the Larz and Isabel Anderson estate and the Brandegee estate, both in Brookline, and the Freer Gallery of Art building in Washington. They had five children. Among them were William (1897-1984) and Geoffrey (1905-1985), who followed in their father's footsteps and practiced architecture in New York City.

A friend of the Platts, the muralist Henry O. Walker, used Eleanor as the model for the mural "Wisdom of the Law" in the appellate court building in Madison Square in New York (1898-99). In 1968, her son Geoffrey, as the first chairman of the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission, was in the courthouse facing a challenge to the preservation law when he looked around (reported the New York Times) "to find a very familiar face staring at him from the courtroom wall. He said ‘There was mother, and I knew everything would be all right.’" 

Eleanor's second husband Charles died in 1933. She lived for twenty more years before dying in 1953 at the age of 84.

(Info from the Brookline Historical Society website: https://brooklinehistoricalsociety.org/archives/slideShowPeople.asp?ID=Hardy01 and the SNAC Cooperative website: https://snaccooperative.org/view/3428010 )