Daniel Garber: Dana Garber Applestein Video

Dana Garber Applestein tells stories about the life and art of her grandfather, the painter Daniel Garber. She gave her talk at Cuttalossa Farm, Garber's home and studio near New Hope in Bucks County.

Daniel Garber: Passing of an Era

"Geddes Run, 1930" by Daniel Garber

"The faculty and students at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts had become polarized by the early twenties. One faction was headed by Daniel Garber, and the other by Henry McCarter and Arthur Carles. Quoting a popular saying from the period, Gardner remembers, 'There were two kinds of students at the Academy: one kind went to Paris, and the other went up the Delaware.' Recalling 'a good deal of snootiness' on the part of the 'Parisian' contingent, who 'looked down on us as hopelessly old-fashioned,' a student says that the two camps kept to themselves, and interacted rarely.

Even so Garber's own sense of beauty and craftsmanship never wavered in the slightest. The judging of the Cresson prizes in the spring and the selection of work for the annual exhibition each winter put his values on the line every year, and he was not silent when confronted by what he perceived as declining standards of drawing and workmanship. Later, he believed one of his heart failures 'was brought about by the distress he felt over the looks of the paintings presented to the jury of selection and awards.'

The division increased after WWII, when Abstract Expressionism gained the favor of the students and younger faculty. Traditional genres like portrait, still-life, figure and landscape were discredited as the emphasis fell on individual expression and innovation. Attendance in the once-crowded senior classes at the Academy dropped as the advanced students began to spend most of their time working alone in spaces that allowed for experimental techniques. It was at this time that Daniel Garber resigned from the Academy. A student remembered that 'He said he never told the Academy director his real reason for resigning, which was that he was bothered so when there were such a few students in the class that it caused his heart to act up.'

Pleading poor health, and probably recognizing the passing of art training as he had known it, Garber resigned in 1950, and assumed a position as Emeritus advisor. His retirement, coincidental with the closing of Chester Springs, marked the end of an era for the Academy."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Daniel Garber: Teaching at Chester Springs

"South Room - Green Street," 1920 by Daniel Garber

"In the summertime Daniel Garber taught at Chester Springs, where he supervised one night class and then spent the following day teaching life or portrait classes and visiting the landscape painters as they worked outdoors. He made no attempt to promote his own style, insisting only on the fundamentals of technique and good habits of observation. Outdoors he was more likely to teach by demonstration than by correction, and his commentaries remained brief and vague. 

'See the light,' was his favorite expression. 'I learned from his painting, not his person,' remember one student. 'I was never close to him, but I learned more about color from Garber than any other Impressionist. For him, lessons of color mixture, layered and scumbled paint application, and the delicate observation of atmosphere, all could be learned at the the Academy annuals, or in the demonstrations Garber would give at Chester Springs.

His granddaughter, who seems to have received no special dispensation as a relative, remembers only his silent inspection, the quick corrections on the drawing itself, and the appearance of a new sheet of charcoal paper. 'Do it again,' Garber would say and leave the studio. Several hours later, as she waited 'clammy and damp' with hopeful pride and apprehension, he would return, and the scene would be replayed. After twelve or fifteen discouraging repetitions, Garber took her drawing off the drawing board and saved it. Still savoring this triumph, she adds, 'Boy, did I learn!'

Her first painting experiences were equally straightforward. After she had carefully matched a blade of grass to her palette color, and duly painted the entire scene in the same green, Garber came around and with a simple, 'No, no' proceeded to scrape out all her work. Without a word, he mixed a yellow-grey on his palette and place a few touches in the distant zones of her composition, and showed her how 'green' it really looked. Subsequently, he would take her driving with him and interrogate her about the landscape. 'Look, what color do you see?' he would ask point to the road or the trees."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Daniel Garber: Teaching at the PAFA

"The Last of Winter" by Daniel Garber

"'One of America's best loved art teachers,' Daniel Garber joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the fall of 1909. At a time of great change in style in both painting and art school instruction, Garber stood firm as a defender of the aesthetic values and the teaching system he had known in the late nineteenth century. For over forty years his well-respected presence stabilized the school, offering an inspiration or a challenge to generations of Academy students and balancing the diverse styles and personalities of the faculty.

Following the apprentice tradition at the Academy, Garber began as Anshutz's assistant, teaching night school drawing classes and helping with the still life and portrait classes. Gradually he worked his way up the ladder of teaching positions, until he reached the top - supervising the senior painting classes - though he always controlled some of the basic drawing studios. Normally, Garber came in from the country on Wednesday afternoon in time for the evening life class. He spent the night in town, taught the Thursday 'antique' drawing session and then returned to Lumberville, unless special projects or winter weather kept him in Philadelphia over the weekend. 

His assistant recalled: 

'On Thursday morning a few minutes after nine Mr. Garber would come down the Academy front hallway treading firmly, his hair parted in the middle and with an expression of seriousness. He would walk through the rotunda and on to his locker in the back hall, where he would put on his rich brown smock and then continue on down the hall tying the belt of his smock and on into one of the cast drawing classes. The students were more aware of his presence than they showed. He would walk over to where a student was drawing.The student would get up out of his chair, Mr. Garber would sit down in the chair, look at the cast that was being drawn and at the drawing. Meanwhile, he would take out his pocket knife while looking at the drawing, open the knife and put a very sharp point on the charcoal - sharper than the student could get with a sandpaper sharpener. Then he would make some clear and decisive lines of correction. Then he would talk to the student a bit, modulating his voice to suit the merits of the drawing. Then he would go on to the next student, while sometimes the student for whom he had just been criticizing would leave the class for a breather, and sometimes, though rarely, to shed a few tears.'

Even for those who found his style old-fashioned and his personality 'prickly,' Garber set standards for 'superb craftsmanship and discipline."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

 

 

Daniel Garber: A Passionate Man

"Lambertville Beach" by Daniel Garber

"Family chess games were not always so serene in the Daniel Garber household. A competitive player, Garber himself was prone to slamming the chess board across the room in moments of anger; remorsefully, he would repair the battered chessmen yet again. Like most people, his life was full of illnesses, accidents, periods of debt and bad weather, and his letters reveal bouts of depression and moments of grouchiness. At the same time, the successful completion of a difficult painting or an unexpected sale would bring on an almost giddy elation.

Garber appears in the anecdotes of those who knew him as a passionate and quixotic man. An artist who had to cease much of his painting after a heart attack in 1942 because 'the excitement was more than his heart could stand' did not go placidly to his work. Yet through all these ups and downs in his life and temperament, his paintings remain determinedly balanced and serene. 

It is apparent that Garber willfully chose calmer, happier moments, and persistently ignored or transformed less beautiful perspectives. A friend remembers encountering Garber on the roadside one morning, all set up with a fresh canvas on his easel, patiently 'waiting for the sunlight to break through the mist.' 

Not all effects in nature suited his notion of art. Sometimes he had to wait or look away. While searching for his own vision of abstract beauty, Garber simultaneously had to defend representation against the stylized interpretations of the avant-garde. 'Modern art?' said Garber. 'Well, I don't just care to paint it myself. I don't like to be a snake shedding its skin every so often. I have never vacillated or changed in my work - so far as my real feeling for art is concerned.' 'Of course, I want to follow along in art; I don't want to hark back, and I think that my work is modern, in the true sense of that word.' 'The field for American art is perfectly wonderful!' he exclaimed in 1923. Modestly, sanely, insistently, Garber continues to challenge the conventions of 'so-called modern art.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Daniel Garber: Figurative Work

"The Boys" by Daniel Garber

"Though figure subjects are neither as numerous nor as constant as Daniel Garber's landscapes, they earned him a large part of his reputation between 1909 and 1924, when most of them were painted. By 1905 he was known for the 'restful and poetic' quality of his figure subjects, where the lyrical mood and abstract sense of design seen in his landscapes appears sooner and with greater clarity. 

Garber inaugurated a series of paintings featuring his wife, usually dressed in a kimono, standing against a sunlit wall. In 'Gathering Grapes,' she reaches toward a leafy grapevine. In 'The Studio Wall' of 1914 she inspects a vase filled with dried weeds. The mood of both depends on the grace of May's gesture and on the play of colored light and shadow on the wall behind her. In 'Portrait of Tanis,' the Garber's 7-year-old daughter, Garber's academic training and excellence of drawing are clearly seen. His fondness also for backlit effects and distant reflected light made a tour-de-force of academic draftsmanship and Impressionist color and texture.

Reversing all the effects of the daylight series with May and Tanis, Garber turned to his male friends and students, dramatically lit by artificial light. Though in oils, 'The Boys' draws up Garber's talents as a charcoal draftsman, for it represents the style of the numerous chiaroscuro studies he undertook in the evenings. It evokes a memory of Spanish painting as in Sargent's celebrated 'El Jaleo.'

In the 1920s Garber began a fresh series of his wife and daughter seen in the parlor of their Philadelphia home. The subdued Green street interiors seem to blend the chiaroscuro of 'The Boys' with the backlighting and reflections of 'Tanis.' The relaxed family interiors of Tarbell come to mind. Garber waited another ten years before making his culminating statement on the subject of domestic tranquility. 'Mother and Son,' painted in 1933, moves away from the shadowy twenties interiors, but retains some of their silky effects of reflected light."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.) 

Daniel Garber: Style

"Hawk's Nest" by Daniel Garber

"Daniel Garber's dedication to outdoor study from the motif became the foundation of his method. His buggy and later his 'trusty light truck, canvases, easel and large palette strapped to the truck sides were familiar to folk up and down the valley' as Garber roamed in search of material. Fortified with peanut butter sandwiches, he would sometimes spend all day working outdoors, usually on the same canvas. Because he liked to work directly, without preparatory drawings, Garber needed the constant presence of the motif during most of the execution of the painting. 

After interviewing Garber, a journalist wrote in 1923, 'I want to paint things as I see them,' he says, in his voice that shows just a bit of the Indiana twang, 'and I don't see them in blotches... I have too much respect for the trees that I paint, and their true forms, to make something out of them that I do not feel exists in them.' With such commentary, he allied himself firmly with the Realists of the early twentieth century.

Garber developed a larger, more even touch. In combination with his direct, opaque, and slightly dry application of paint, his technique produce the 'tapestry' effect so often praised by his contemporaries. One critic wrote, 'There is a delightfully decorative quality and an illusive charm in each of the Garber landscapes.' Another viewer praised his landscapes saying, 'Somehow it rested me more than anything else I have seen for a long time. He seems to have a high and true concept of the beautiful.' There is a serenity, an 'all's well with the world' feel.

With a balance of the the real and the ideal Garber drew closer to the personal style of his hero Julian Weir, whose pale, delicate and opaque surfaces discover the same timeless moments of beauty in the most banal country scenes."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Daniel Garber: Success

 

"The Valley - May, 1930" by Daniel Garber

"A vision of Daniel Garber hard at work at  "Cuttalossa" must lie behind any presentation of the successes that began to unfold soon after he settled there. In the spring of 1909 his painting 'Horses' was awarded the first Hallgarten Prize at the national Academy of Design. This triumph was closely followed by an invitation to join the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy, a sure sign of his arrival in establishment circles. By the end of 1910 he had won awards at all five of the major national 'salons': the Carnegie Institute, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In addition, he received a prize at the exhibition of the Art Club of Philadelphia, won international recognition in Buenos Aires, gained membership in three national art associations based in New York and enjoyed a joint show with the sculptor Charles Grafly at St. Botolph's Club in Boston.

The speed of Garber's acceptance in 1909-1910 depended on two things: the evident quality of his painting and the machinery of the American Art establishment. Both his figure and landscape work displayed exactly the right mix of technical competence, stylistic progressiveness, and sheer beauty. His connections from the Cincinnati and Pennsylvania Academies to the New Hope Impressionists and the younger realists in the stable of Macbeth Gallery guaranteed his acceptance in many quarters. His central position at the Pennsylvania Academy made for a good start.Two of his Academy pictures were invited to a 'Special Exhibition of Modern American Painters' at the Art Club of Philadelphia where they hung in company with works by Weir, Hassam, Redfield, Chase, Tarbell, Anshutz, Paxton, Melchers and Homer. 

Understanding the power of the system, he submitted his work to every imaginable exhibition. In addition to endless touring exhibitions organized by the American Federation of Arts, the system of selection-by-invitation put Garber's paintings before the public with a speed and extensiveness unknown in the nineteenth century. After 1914, when he was appointed to his first exhibition jury and began to perpetuate the system himself, 'no other PAFA faculty member served on as many art juries or exhibited as widely as Mr. Garber.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Daniel Garber: Cuttalossa

"Mother and Son" by Daniel Garber

"When Daniel Garber heard that his father-in-law had purchased a piece of land in Bucks County and bought up the tenant's remaining lease, he became 'impatient to get back and paint in this country.' By the early summer of 1907, May and Daniel were back in America, settling into their new home in the wooded glen.

Just below Lumberville where the narrow dirt road that goes through the Cuttalossa Glen leaves the river road, there is a picturesque old mill with a falls," remembers Francis Speight. 'From here the road winds along the creek for about a mile and a half through woods on both sides, to the upper end of the glen, where the road is two or three hundred yards from the creek and there is another old mill and an old dwelling.' In this sylvan spot, a few miles from the banks of the Delaware, Garber determinedly fashioned an environment for making art that manifested all the artistic aspirations of his paintings and his life. Soon after moving in he remodelled the old barn behind the big house into a studio, using timber from the abandoned mill. This lofty studio with its light, plastered walls and large French doors facing north became the spiritual center of 'Cuttalossa.' With his workshop and his flower garden adjoining, Garber placed himself in the midst of a creative arena that constantly reflected and supported his vision of the world. 

The scheme was perfected in the early twenties, when, with the architect McGoodwin, he renovated the big house on the property and gained a large library and generous domestic spaces for the entertainment of friends. 

Like Frederic Church at Olana, Garber imposed his aesthetic on the landscape as well as the house. He dammed the creek to create a pond, designed new farm outbuildings himself, dismantled some buildings and aloowed others to decay picturesquely. Cuttalossa became a three-dimensional self-portrait of the artist. 'It all seemed in harmony with Garber paintings and with Mr. Garber himself,' remembers Speight. 'To know me now you would have to know the place,' wrote Garber to his cousin Charles in 1929. 'Everyone knows it's half of me.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Daniel Garber: Study Abroad

"St. James Park, London"
by Daniel Garber

"In May of 1905 at the conclusion of his year of full-time classes with William Merritt Chase and perhaps with Cecilia Beaux, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art's faculty surveyed his work. Recognizing both his accomplishments and his potential, the Cresson committee awarded Daniel Garber two expense-paid years of independent study abroad, to be dedicated to refining and maturing his art.

Losing no time, Garber sailed for England almost immediately in the company of his wife May and possibly her father. Garber's work in England demonstrates the most whole-heartedly Impressionist moment in his entire career. Perhaps he actually saw the work of Monet, Pissarro and Sisley in London, or maybe the new freedom of his Cresson tour liberated older inclinations, but whatever the cause, his work from these two years has many of the hallmarks of classic Impressionism of the 1870s. Small paintings, done entirely outdoors, with quick, broken brushstrokes and bright, pastel colors dominate his work. 

After five months in England, the Garbers headed south for Italy where they spent another half-year, principally in Florence. Though the tonality of the Italian sketches changed to earth tones and winter moods, the Impressionist style and format remained. As the weather grew warmer, the Garbers moved north again and settled in Paris, where they remained for the second year of his fellowship.

While in Paris, Garber exhibited his work twice at the Salon and continued to sketch in oil and charcoal. He joined the American Artists Association in Paris, but little is known about his friends or experiences there. Judging from his painting, he was little touched by avant-garde movements in France at that time, and apparently remained unswayed by the charms of Parisian art life. Though intending to stay a third year (for his Cresson had been renewed), he abruptly changed his mind and returned to Philadelphia in the late spring of 1907."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Daniel Garber: The Move to Pennsylvania

"Little Girl Knitting" by Daniel Garber

"Doubtless the reputation of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts had some force in Daniel Garber's decision to move to Pennsylvania. It was the oldest and arguably best art school in the nation. Thomas Anshutz, William Merritt Chase and Cecilia Beaux were teaching there in 1900. When the classes began in the fall of 1899, Garber was enrolled in the night life drawing class, probably under the direction of Anshutz. 

A few months before starting at the Academy, Garber had turned up at the 'Darby School of Painting,' a new summer art school in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, run by Anshutz and another Academy instructor, Hugh Henry Breckenridge. The curriculum included cast drawing, still life and indoor figure modelling, but logically the emphasis fell on landscape painting outdoors. Garber rapidly became a star among the students and a special favorite of Anshutz, who no doubt encouraged his skill as a charcoal draftsman. At the exhibition of student work at the Academy in October of that year, Garber's group of more than twenty canvases won the first Fellowship Prize ($25), given to 'the most gifted exponent of the Darby School.'

For Daniel Garber, one of the discoveries of the Darby School was Miss Mary Franklin, a student of Howard Pyle's at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. According to family tradition, he fell in love with 'May' while she was taking her turn modelling for Breckenridge's portrait class. Especially smitten by her ankles, Garber courted her from 1899 through 1901, while they were both attending night classes a the Academy. They married in 1901 after Garber convinced May's father that though he had little to offer at the time, 'I am going to be one of the great American painters.'

May, convinced that there wasn't room in the family for more than one great painter, put aside her career as an illustrator to become Daniel's best supporter and most effective critic. 'He asked her to keep him up to the mark, and she did,' recalls their daughter, 'oh, she sure did!'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Daniel Garber: Early Influences

"Up the River" by Daniel Garber

"The Frank Duveneck circle must have led Daniel Garber to another Cincinnati painter, John Twachtman, and his close friend, Julian Alden Weir. The lone indication of Garber's early enthusiasm for Weir comes from the testimony of Mrs. Garber, who remarked to her daughter that Garber briefly took on the name 'Julian' Daniel Garber in homage to Weir. His high school graduation photograph was autographed flamboyantly with 'J's' worked into both his own initials, and he enrolled at the Cincinnati Art Academy as 'J. Daniel Garber.' As late as 1900 he was still signing designs with this name. Like Duveneck, Weir has frequently been cited as one of Garber's teachers, though there is no evidence of a contact at this early date, and his influence cannot be clearly read in Garber's paintings until about 1905.

Wier, his friend Twachtman, and a loose group of painters known as the American Impressionists had recently withdrawn from the Society of American Artists in order to form 'The Ten.' Some of the paintings shown at the group's first exhibition in New York that spring were sent on to the Cincinnati Annual of 1898. Works by Childe Hassam, Edmund Tarbell, Benson and De Camp could be seen in Cincinnati, and collectively they created a model for the young Garber, who carried the aesthetics of 'The Ten' info the middle of the twentieth century.

The power of these New York and Boston painters drew Garber away from Cincinnati in 1899, perhaps because he decided that it was necessary to move east to establish his career. With the exception of Duveneck and his student T.C. Steele, who was building a small art colony in southern Indiana, few local painters of an Impressionist stamp chose to stay behind, and those who remained had usually enjoyed a period of travel and training on the East Coast or in Europe. Philadelphia was Daniel's choice to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Daniel Garber: Cincinnati Academy of Art

"Students of Painting" by Daniel Garber

"Daniel Garber's father encouraged the artist spirit within his son. After the family moved into the town of North Manchester, his father gave him the run of a small building in back of the house, where he set up his first studio. By the time he was sixteen he was anxious to pursue professional training. To Garber's surprise his father decided to let him leave, mostly because of the counsel of a respected local elder. 'If you don't, you'll lose him,' advised this friend, who was wise enough to measure correctly the determination of the young Garber.

Being freed, he was not lost to the family, but retained affectionate ties, even though he was the only one of eleven children to leave the area. With a small inheritance from his mother, he headed south to the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where he joined the summer classes of 1897. For two years, beginning in the fall of that year, he attended both day and evening classes in Life Drawing or Illustration. His daughter recalled the response of his jealous and slightly incredulous older brothers: 'There's Dan, down in Cincinnati, doin' them obscene drawings,' they would say, but the family soon learned to be proud of his success. In May of 1898 Garber won his first award, a 'Home Scholarship.'

Lost to the Indiana farming community, but found by the cosmopolitan Cincinnati art world, Garber fell into the circles of Frank Duveneck, the American Impressionists, and the sophisticated, European-trained faculty of the Art Academy. At that time the principal teachers were Vincent Nowottny, who supervised life drawing; Otto Walter Beck, who taught his evening illustration class; and Lewis Henry Meakin, who was respected locally as the 'father' of the regional landscape school. Meakin must have encouraged Garber's plein air method, and promoted a palette with stronger contrasts than the newer Impressionist manner."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Daniel Garber: Beginnings

"Tohickon" by Daniel Garber

"'Garber's art has too few faults,' complained a newspaper critic in 1921, and the same might be said about his life. Serious, hard-working, sensitive, exquisitely competent, Garber made paintings the way he created his beautiful world on the Cuttalossa Glen. Hailed as the Dean of Pennsylvania painters, Garber could rest at the end of his life and point proudly to a long list of his works in important American collections, an awesome assemblage of medals, a distinguished roster of students, a handsome crowd of great-grandchildren and a thriving flock of sheep. Said Garber, 'I am a very happy man!'

The prospect of a happy and successful artist, dedicated to the pursuit of beauty and excellence, is delightful. Stocky, not very tall, ruddy-faced and just past seventy, he has all the appearance of a country squire. Without restlessness, eccentricity and anguish, Garber presents, at first view, the image of a model artist who rejects (or perhaps conquers) all the modern conventions of artistic behavior.

Born on a farm near North Manchester, Indiana, on April 11, 1880, Garber was the youngest son of a Mennonite family that traced its roots back to Pennsylvania-German immigrants in the middle of the eighteenth century. His upbringing gave him habits that indirectly influenced his painting and established the entire tone of his career. But 'looking back to that early and very simple way of life, Garber found it hard to explain just what motivated his desire to be an artist,' commented a journalist in 1940. Even the walls of his parents' home were bare of pictures or decorations.' His pictorial impulses remain a topic of much wonderment, even among the family members.

The Mennonites less successfully instilled respect for orthodox religion, however, for Garber stopped going to church at the age of ten. But much later, he would lovingly touch a small blossom from his garden and growl at his daughter, 'You only have to look at a flower to know there's a God!'

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Ella Condie Lamb: Passing On

Ella Condie Lamb

"Don't let my work hang like chain boxes around your neck.' So stated Ella Condie Lamb to her daughter toward the end of her life. Out of some need to release her children from the weight, the obligations, the sheer mass of the past, and from all the needs and wants of the previous generation, Ella had spoken.

But her children valued her art and did keep many of the private works they loved. Katharine reminisced, 'I remember when we were sorting through her things I'd look and say, 'I think I'd like that.' But then, I'd think, 'You can't keep too much. I'll just have to remember in my mind.' Ella would have been satisfied with that. Immortality was not necessary to her. To be an artist had been enough.

At some moment during the winters of her last years, Ella gazed intently through the large bay window of her beloved country home with her keenly observant artist's eye. She wrote: 

'As I look into the woodland it is as if a mighty painter had taken a brush with white paint, and yet not white, and dragged it across the soft gray, rough dry background, or canvas. Against this are the dark accents of tree trunks of all sizes and angles and curves with branches crossing and recrossing in a lovely tangled composition - each branch twig or tassel on the tips, each bush and weed with its line or cover of whiter snow - dark and light accents growing softer and softer until again merges into the grayness beyond... There is no wind. It is a white world, the snowflakes still drifting down.'

She died at The Fold one night in January of 1936 as a blizzard raged outdoors. She had had terrible neuralgia, a stabbing pain, that was just agony for her. This time she didn't survive it. Perhaps she had had a stroke. No one was able to reach Ella in time. The funeral was held at The Fold. Grandchildren Tony and David remembered it well.

'Her coffin was in the living room,' Tony recalled, 'I was really upset, I remember crying. Before the coffin was closed, Appa put in some kind of plaque or medal that Amma had won. It was something he thought was very important to her career.'

Charles lived six more years.From his wheelchair, he wrote letters to newspapers and to his children. He also made substantial notes for an autobiography. She had left him with a letter saying,

'The wind is howling tonight, but it makes me think of the old hotel in Bruges and our wedding trip. Dear, I wonder how many wedding trips are the introduction to as happy a life as ours. Hope you have been happy in spite of all the cares and anxieties - With much love, your wife'"

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)

Ella Condie Lamb: Changing of the Guard

"The Miniature Painter"
by Ella Condie Lamb

"Then came Black Thursday, the stock market crash of 1929, and the J. & R. Lamb Studios faced bankruptcy. That same year, their beautiful prize window from the Paris Exposition of 1900, 'Religion Enthroned,' was given to the Brooklyn Museum by Irving T. Bush.

In 1947, the Lamb's oldest son, Karl, wrote an account of the grave situation the Studios faced at this time and the steps he took to save the business and provide for Ella and Charles in their last years. He had been pursuing a career in chemical engineering  when he took over the Studios 'with much trepidation and anxiety.' He would guide it through financial crises and reorganization, meeting Charles' mounting medical and nursing bills, often borrowing heavily.

Karl's account describes the situation he had to face:

'Father was very sick with inflammatory progressive arthritis. Soon he was flat on his back for three months, and more or less crippled from then on. Father was helpless as there was no one remaining to carry on J. & $. Lamb...

I went into J. & R. Lamb with much trepidation and anxiety. Father, with all his wonderful personality and fine artistic conceptions got himself and the firm into various kinds of difficulty in later years. I had to find large sums of money for him, much more than normal, due to his illness and rapidly increasing incapacitation, which became complete several years before his death. The burden became unbearable and almost impossible by 1934...'

Karl managed to provide the income necessary to support his parents. Ella lived at The Fold until her death, as did Charles for several more years. For two years, Karl supported his own family 'by virtue of having sold some patents he had developed.' Charles wrote Karl: 'I want you always to remember, dear boy, what mother said of you. She called you a 'Rock in the Wilderness.'

Suffice it to say that the Studios recovered under Karl's direction and continued to produce many fine works. The Lamb's daughter, Katharine, gained recognition as one of the finest stained glass artists in the United States, working at the Studios until she was 83 years old."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)
 

Ella Condie Lamb: The Aftermath of War

"Donald" by Ella Condie Lamb

"At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Armistice was signed. Ella was overjoyed and added a P.S to one of her letters,

'The whistles are blowing, the chimes are ringing, sirens tooting like mad! Oh, Karl, waht does it mean? Katharine has rushed out to get a paper and some news - The German envoys were to be received by Foch this morning.... After four years at last it is over! They are not killing anyone now, and before the sun has set in France the Great War is in the past tense.... I think we cannot quite grasp the idea yet, our minds are paralyzed by the precious conditions.'

No more wars - not ever again!

However, her oldest son Karl was not coming home right away He had been assigned to the Army of Occupation and he was on the move across France into Belgium. In February, 1919, he cabled from Paris that he had been appointed to the Belgian Peace Commission. He wrote, 'I was chosen as the executive officer and assistant chief... Our job is one of the biggest and most difficult. It is the estimation of damage to all industries of the entire country...'

Ella sensed the chaotic times ahead, both for the country and the family and she wrote of these to Karl. It was hard for their second son, Donald, to adjust to civilian life. She knew Donald was disappointed that he had been made a flight instructor and, therefore, never sent to Europe to fly in combat and so to have the opportunity, as he said 'to make good over there.' Youngest son Condie also felt frustrated that he had not had a larger role in the war. He complained to Ella that he had not enlisted in the Navy early enough. Katharine, their daughter, felt that because she was a girl she was unimportant and was neglected in comparison to the boys. Ella pleaded to Karl, 'Do give some brotherly advice! I have my hands full!'

Perhaps from a sense of relief and release, and in a fine but controlled 'frenzy,' Ella painted each of her children wearing their uniforms, taking only four hours to execute each one. Possibly she wanted to assure them that the contribution of each was of equal value. In later years all of the children remarked on the speed with which she executed these portraits and the superb likenesses she achieved."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)

Ella Condie Lamb: Outdoor Painting

"October Blue and Gold" by Ella Condie Lamb

"In December of 1917, the year in which Ella Condie Lamb wrote of the 'terror and 'dread' in her heart because of the War, she mounted an exhibition of twelve 'Garden Paintings and Landscapes' at The Touchstone Galleries; it was a selection of outdoor work. From her childhood Ella had loved nature and sketched it. 

But it took the encouragement of a dear English friend, Lester Rolfe, in 1915 to return her to a more concerted effort to paint outdoors. Not only Ella but the children as well went out sketching in the fields. In the midst of the inner turmoil caused by the war, it was a restorative - a comfort and a joy with its range of color, detail and infinite variety of forms and light.

One reviewer of her exhibit, from the 'American Art News,' noted that 'Mrs. Lamb is especially fond of silver birches, and these she has painted in their changing aspects throughout the year. Probably the most striking of her paintings is 'The Blue Valley.' This picture has silver birches in the foreground, and a wonderful effect of distance looking out over the valley. As a whole, Mrs. Lamb's exhibition is extremely charming and intimate.'

Ella's landscapes are not grandiose canvases - perhaps she had enough of executing works of great size in her mural work. Her visions are intimate and are expressive of her sympathetic response to her immediate environment or of her need to express freedom. They are fully three-dimensional - having none of the flat, two dimensional design aspect which she was constantly required to use in her professional work. To use perspective in her landscapes was for her a release."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)

Ella Condie Lamb: "The War Bride"

"The War Bride" by Ella Condie Lamb

"The loneliness of the months to follow I dread. I must live from day to day, from letter to letter, work and dream of the future when this bitter war is finished - when the world is free. God keep them, and all sons, in His Hand. And I must work, work, work..."

Ella Condie Lamb wrote these words in her diary in 1917. On April 6, 1917, the United States had declared war on Germany, officially entering World War I, and soon afterwards their son Karl was sent to France as a captain in the Gas Defense section of the Chemical Warfare division; Donald was training to be a pilot in California, and Condie had joined the Navy and was in training at Cornell.

Ella and Charles were experiencing the intense, anxious life of parents whose family was disrupted and disoriented by war. Her letters to Karl describe her worries and feelings of dread, telling her eldest son all that was in her heart and all that was taking place at home, including the shock of seeing the returning wounded soldiers, often crippled and sometimes blind. She wrote to one of her sons every day. She wanted to be cheerful, but could not keep silent about the tragic deaths of the sons of friends and the crippling of many young men.

Her personal revolt against war's glamorization took the form of an allegorical painting, described in "Art and Archeology:"

'There was issued from Washington the request to all American Artists to give visible expression to the cause for which American troops were sent to fight overseas. The invitation was received by Mrs. Lamb in her New York studio and accepted seriously because her three sons had entered the service. 

To Mrs. Lamb, therefore, the thought of what war meant to the sacrifice of the family, took the form of 'The War Bride,' who, with the baby the young father overseas had never seen, looks away from the morning paper which rests on her knees, and wonders whether the father will ever come back to see his child. Her wonderment takes the form of a vision of the father in his uniform, with the figure of nation personified behind him and pointing to the crucifix which hangs on the wall behind the bed, as emblematic of the possible sacrifice which must be made on the part of many to realize the hope of the freedom of the world.'

Her painting was exhibited on Fifth Avenue for the Liberty Loan Drive in the windows of Marcus Jewelers, where it 'was the whole thing.' and then at Macbeth's Gallery. People felt that it was 'very impressive and beautiful, the kind of thing that has large and universal significance.'

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)

Ella Condie Lamb: How Did She Manage?

"The Open Book" by Ella Condie Lamb

"One cannot help but wonder how the artist Ella Condie Lamb navigated her way through the sea of demands inevitably created by household, family, and social life. Somehow she found a way to sail her artistic ship. By 1901 she and Charles had had four children and she had produced a great deal of work. The last child, Condie, was born in 1900, soon after the completion of the mosaic mural for Sage Chapel at Cornell. There were now two households to manage, one in New York and one in Cresskill. 

Her children remembered how. 'It took hard work,' wrote Karl. 'It took determination, an orderliness of mind, spirit, and character; and of course, a great love of what she was doing.' 'She set a certain time to work,' said Donald:

'She was very disciplined about that... I remember the lists. It's amazing how much she did do. But she did have help. Mother at that time had a cook, a maid, and a mother's helper. Three, always. This was when, as I remember, she locked herself in the studio, nine to one.'

She wrote to a Mr. Wood, who had asked how she had managed to lead the life of a professional artist while caring for family and household:

'My dear Mr. Woods, My answer to your question in regard to mothers continuing their work without neglecting their children is too long for me to 'jot down' as it is one I have had to solve for myself. A wife and mother can continue her work, but it depends upon the woman, the kind of work desired, and certain conditions.

The exceptional woman can do it. It would be harder for a musician or actress or any profession involving tours away from home or for a businesswoman with longer hours, than for a writer or artist, personally I cannot do more than three or four hours a day of concentrated creative work, which leaves plenty of time for the family.

The conditions are

1. perfect health and steady nerves
2. adequate training before marriage, not only in her own profession so that work can be attacked quickly and skillfully but also in the science of motherhood
3. great system and executive ability so that no time need be wasted or strength squandered and the ability to jump into work when the opportunity comes.
4. means to secure house workers and train assistants to supervise the children, and good schools
5. power to limit oneself to these two interests
6. last, but by no means least, the husband who is in sympathy with his wife's aspirations and a source of inspiration and help to her, as she should be to him..."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)