Hermann Dudley Murphy: Florals

"Flower Still Life with Satyr at the Window"
by Hermann Dudley Murphy

"Hermann Dudley Murphy returned to floral painting in the twenties. This third and last phase of his career, which continues to his death, brought him his greatest fame and fullest admiration, both from the public and from his fellow painters. For a colorist of Murphy's quality the attraction of flowers as subjects must always have been considerable. They also allowed him to exercise his capacities for arrangement and design to the full.

It is in these pictures, later in his career, that Murphy comes closest to the Boston school ideals and practices, incorporating impressionist perception in his portrayals. It should also be noted that in this vein he was entering a genre very well practiced in Boston by such superlative floral and still-life painters as Laura Coombe Hills, Elizabeth Okie Paxton (the wife of William Paxton), Frederick G. Hall, Leslie Thompson, and Lilian Westcott Hale. Indeed, early twentieth-century Boston  shared with seventeenth-century Holland a taste and an aptitude for the depiction of the poetry of objects, whether in still lifes or full interiors. Murphy brought to its finest realization this thoroughly Bostonian taste. His achievement in this vein has been aptly described by R.H. Ives Gammell in his study of the Boston painters:

'[Murphy[ was every inch an artist and he discovered his true vocation in middle life to be painting flower pieces of a truly ravishing beauty. While these superlative floral portrayals benefit from Murphy's understanding of impressionist representation, they are in essence decorative. He would arrange his blossoms with consummate taste in handsome containers set off by a sumptuous screen or a bit of fine brocade, whose intrinsic splendor he brought out by ingeniously contrived play of lights and shadows. The impression created by these arrangements, well observed and skillfully painted, is enhanced by the beautifully built up surfaces of Murphy's pigment and crowned by appropriate frames of his own designing. The resulting objects d'art provide feasts for the eye which are little known solely because they were immediately purchased and have seldom reappeared on the market.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Hermann Dudley Murphy" by William Coles.)