Frank W. Benson: Black and White

"Early Morning" by Frank W. Benson

"With the assurance of a regular salary it became possible for Benson to experiment with a variety of motifs and mediums. His early studio works were mostly figures set in richly appointed interiors. Young women in white stretch their hands out towards the glow of an unseen fire; a lady in black sits in a chair that is placed on an exotic tiger-skin rug; his daughter, Eleanor, poses with her cat. Paintings like these, as well as a steady influx of portrait commissions, earned for Benson both renown and financial rewards.

But it was his outdoor paintings that pleased Benson most. On the many hunting and fishing trips he took with his friends and family, Benson frequently experimented with wash drawings. These were done with a wash of black watercolor on white paper and were often spur-of-the-moment affairs. He left them behind at the spots he visited. He hung a few in an exhibition or two and, by 1910, they were gaining for him the same critical acclaim as his oils.

Typical of these is the dramatic, stark wash drawing of a dead goose, lying awkwardly in the shallow water of a marsh pond, that gives testimony to Benson's ability to find beauty even in death. Perhaps making a slight bow to European painters who often arranged an assortment of dead birds as still life, Benson has caught a once-vital and graceful bird in its stillness. In this work, the artist acknowledges that, while he most often found inspiration in the pursuit of wildfowl or the elegant composition of birds against the sky, he was also able to present the somber quietude that was the end result of the hunt. One can also see the influence of the black and white watercolor masters of the Far East on Benson's own wash drawings."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Sporting Art of Frank W. Benson" by Faith Andrews Bedford.) 

 

Frank W. Benson: The Museum School Curriculum

"Eleanor Holding a Shell" by Frank Benson

"By 1897, a fairly long and rigorous curriculum had been developed at the Museum School in Boston. Ideally, students - men and women of all ages - stayed in the school for seven years, gradually moving up from level to level. To quote a supplement to the 1897 annual report: 'The applicants...are placed where their capacity warrants which is ascertained after a week's work with Mr. Philip Hale. Those who have not acquired sufficient knowledge by previous training are placed in the beginners room to draw from plaster ornaments and heads. By the middle of the year, all the pupils...are in the galleries, drawing from the antique. 

This most difficult and valuable work upon which so much stress is laid in the French schools, continues until the students become sufficiently proficient to be sent up to draw the whole figure from the nude under Mr. Benson. There the pupil...begins by drawing the outlines of the figure in order to get the action; and, when fairly accomplished in this, is allowed to devote the whole week to the figure. When proficient in drawing in the character of the figure in light and shade, he is allowed to paint from still life in the afternoons under Mr. Tarbell.' The national reputations of these three successful artists brought students from all over New England and beyond, eager to study under the guidance of these famous instructors.

Benson loved to teach and felt a deep involvement with the training of young people. He touched the lives of thousands of aspiring artists. His influence can be clearly seen in the work of his pupils as well as the works of the students they later taught. Yet, with typical humility, Benson felt that he was the one who gained from his years as a teacher. A former students quoted him as saying, 'Although I may have helped others, I learned the most!'" 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Sporting Art of Frank W. Benson" by Faith Andrews Bedford.) 

Frank W. Benson: Flourishing

"Portrait of My Daughters" by Frank W. Benson

"Returning to America in the summer of 1885, Frank W. Benson set up a studio in Salem and began to seek commissions. He quickly started doing portraits and exhibiting his work widely. By 1887, as his paintings were gaining him recognition, Benson was hired to teach at the Portland Museum of Art, a few hours' train ride north. The steady job was just what he needed to convince Ellen's mother that he would be able to support a family.

The two were married in the autumn of 1888, and by the following spring, Benson was delighted to be named instructor of antique drawing at the Museum School in Boston. He was joined at the school by his old friend Joseph Lindon Smith, who also worked there as an instructor. By 1890, Benson had not only won the Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy in New York but had also become a father. In 1891 he had his first private exhibition with Edmund Tarbell at Boston's Chase Gallery. Both his family and fortunes were burgeoning. The Hallgarten was the first of a long series of awards, later earning him the sobriquet 'America's Most Medalled Painter.'

His daughter, Eleanor, was the first of what Benson fondly referred to as his 'homegrown models.' George was born in 1891, Elisabeth in 1892, and Sylvia in 1898. Their father was to capture them often on canvas. These painting are among some of America's favorite works, icons often featured on museum calendars and notecards.

Benson's association with the Museum School was a long and fruitful one. Together with Edmund Tarbell, he turned the school into a nationally and internationally recognized institution. Barely three years after the two were hired, they send a letter to the Board of Directors outlining 'the urgency of increasing the number of teachers in their department owing to the fact that the number of pupils is nearly double what it was when they began their connection with the school.' During the nearly twenty-five years of Benson's tenure, students won numerous prizes, enrollment tripled, a new school building erected, and visiting delegations sought the secret of their success." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Sporting Art of Frank W. Benson" by Faith Andrews Bedford.) 

 

Frank W. Benson: Ellen

"After the Storm" by Frank W. Benson

"The summer between their two years at the Académie Julian, Frank W. Benson and Lindon Smith headed for the little fishing village of Concarneau in Brittany where Benson could paint boats and the sea to his heart's content. In Concarneau, Benson fell in love with Ellen Peirson, while painting her portrait as a surprise gift for her mother. He had played tennis long hours on her family's court in Salem, but it was not until she and her mother and sister stayed in France for several months that he considered her more than another of his sister's friends. This active, vibrant young woman quickly joined in the games and parties, picnics and sketching outings of the group of artists and friends that summered in Concarneau. Even Benson's models were impressed by her and described her as 'tremendously independent.'

The following fall, shortly after his return to America, Benson asked Ellen to marry him. She was the perfect partner for this forthright, outdoor man. Benson admired her spirit and intelligence, later telling one of his grandchildren that having her along on a fishing trip was as 'good as having any man.' It would be a long engagement, for Benson needed to prove to Ellen's mother that, even though he was an artist, he could earn a living.

In 1885, Benson and Lindon Smith, now living on the more 'artistic' Left Bank, submitted several canvasses to the jury of the famed Paris Salon. Neither was accepted. To his great delight, however, Benson's 'After the Storm,' a painting of two young girls looking out over a wind-tossed sea, was accepted in London by the Royal Academy. When his parents rendezvoused with him in that city on their way to enroll his brother, John, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts to study architecture, Benson was able to proudly taken them to the Academy to see his work. Although it was 'skied,' (hung just below the ceiling), Benson later told his children that he wondered then whether this canvas would be the only work of his ever to hang in Europe. He should not have worried." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Sporting Art of Frank W. Benson" by Faith Andrews Bedford.) 

 

Frank W. Benson: Academie Julian, Paris

"The Open Window" by Frank Benson

"On his twenty-first birthday Frank Benson asked his father if he could study abroad. There probably was a long pause while the fiscally conservative cotton broker thought the matter over. Ultimately, perhaps because of Benson's teaching position in Salem and this public acknowledgment of his talent, or the paycheck he was able to bring home, his father relented. In the autumn of 1883, together with his classmate, Joseph Lindon Smith, Benson sailed for Paris. His parents gave him $1,000 and told him to come home when it was spent.

Benson's days in Paris were filled with his studies at the Académie Julian. Securing rooms for themselves at No. 10 Rue Croix des Petits Champs, he and Lindon Smith spent their days drawing from the models at the Académie where criticisms were given once a week by renowned instructors from the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Such men as Bouguereau, Lefebvre, Robert-Fleury, Constant, Doucet, and Boulanger gave 'crits' to students from all over Europe and America. It was Boulanger who gave Benson the highest commendation that any of the students had ever heard from him. 'Young man,' he said, studying Benson's portrait of an old man. 'Your career is in your hand... you will do very well.'

Although he enjoyed his studies, Benson always found time for sport and spent as much time as possible out-of-doors. With a group of friends, he soon found a French sparring club where they practiced boxing and tried their hand at fencing. Benson sketched them. It was not just the act of a sport that fascinated Benson, but the look of the people engaged in it. He studied their movements and their positions then translated these quickly to paper. Years later, when his own daughter announced her intention to become an artist, he encouraged her to take several anatomy classes, for it was an area in which he felt he had always been weak. He found that when he tried to paint the human figure from memory, it did not go well. His sketches of people were sometimes awkward and ill-proportioned."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Sporting Art of Frank W. Benson" by Faith Andrews Bedford.) 

 

Frank W. Benson: School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Untitled (Elizabeth)," an etching
by Frank W. Benson

"Although a career as an artist was obviously not what Frank W.  Benson's businessman father would have chosen for him, his mother encouraged his interest. She was, as she said, a 'Sunday painter' and had created a small studio for herself in an attic room. It took several years for George Benson to relent.

In 1881, the elder Benson, thinking art might be a passing fancy, finally agreed to let his son attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Every morning they traveled together by train and walked to Copley Square where the Museum of Fine Arts had opened its Gothic-style building in 1876. Although not originally built to house an art school, by the time Benson entered in 1881, the building's attic and basement rooms had been full of students for four years.

Art historians would later call Benson's class the 'banner class' of the school. A number of his classmates - men such as Edmund Tarbell and Robert Reid, John Redmond and Philip Little - all later made names for themselves in the art world. Under the tutelage of Otto Grundman and Frederick Crowninshield, Benson moved from drawing from plaster casts of antique sculptures to drawing live models. In his second year, he began copying old masters in oil and studying anatomy.

He obviously excelled in his studies, for during his second year of art school, he was hired, together with his friend, John Redmond, by the Salem Evening Drawing Classes to teach their students. What is also striking is that, even as a young man, Benson strongly believed in fairness and loyalty. In his last year at the Museum School, he wrote to Dan Henderson, 'I haven't got the drawing school this winter as the committee had serious objections to Redmond, and I wouldn't serve without him.' Such a comment is typical of Benson, whose strong Yankee principles caused him to take firm stands for causes in which he strongly believed. Several times he risked his own interests or the security of a position to stand by someone he felt had been wronged."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Sporting Art of Frank W. Benson" by Faith Andrews Bedford.) 

Frank W. Benson: Love of Nature

"Bound Home," 1918 by Frank W. Benson

"When Frank Weston Benson was born in Salem, Massachusetts, Essex County was a hunter's paradise. The marshes were a bicycle trip away, the local train conveniently stopped at rich fishing spots, and upland game was plentiful within a half a day's carriage ride. The fields and marshes, the inlets and brooks that lent their names to many of Benson's later paintings were his for the tramping. His father, George Wiggins Benson, a cotton broker in Boston, gave him his first shotgun and taught him to hunt the wildfowl and shorebirds that teemed along the North Shore. His mother, a descendant of some of Salem's founding families, was an amateur painter.

Benson and his brothers and sisters inherited their grandfather's love of the sea. They were all given their own small sailboat at the age of twelve. The margins of Benson's childhood journals are filled with tiny drawings of boats tacking smartly or running before the wind, sails filled, flags flying. Pictures of sailboats filled his art school sketchbooks. The children reveled in sailboat racing: ribbons and trophies crowded their mantelpiece.

In his little boat, Benson explored the many coves and inlets, islands, and marshes that surrounded Salem. Family journals indicate that the children were encouraged to be independent and adventuresome. Each of them had a toolbox and a weekly allowance to be spent on 'things of an educational or experimental nature.' Benson's younger brothers experimented with photography in an attic darkroom and later photographed their brother at his easel.

It is only fitting that Benson's first known works in oil were of birds: a rail and a snipe hanging on a barn door. As a child he had been fascinated by birds and had decided at an early age that he wanted to be an ornithological illustrator. He haunted the halls of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and pored through the thick volumes in its library. He admired the work of Audubon, hoping to follow in his footsteps." 

 To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Sporting Art of Frank W. Benson" by Faith Andrews Bedford.)