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.)