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| "The Fisher Boy" by Charles Hawthorne |
"My father, Charles W. Hawthorne, was the son of a sea captain, and grew up in the seaport town of Richmond, Maine. Money was scarce during his boyhood there. He put in long hours cutting ice in the river but he seemed always to have known that he wanted to become a painter.
He went to New York in 1890 at the age of eighteen, worked days in a stained glass factory and studied at night at the Art Students League. George de Forest Brush and Frank Vincent Dumond were his early teachers. To illustrate how precarious existence was for him in those days, he told of having been notified of an award which was to be given him at a formal reception. To his dismay he realized that he had no presentable shirt. Lacking funds to buy one, he ingeniously used quick-drying china white paint to cover his cuffs and shirt front. Thus attired, he claimed his prize with aplomb.
He started to study with William Merritt Chase at his Shinnecock summer school in 1896, and became his assistant the next year. I believe that it was as students there that my mother and father met; on the same Chase school literature that showed my father listed as assistant, the name of Miss Ethel M. Campbell (the future Mrs. Hawthorne) appeared as corresponding secretary. There at Shinnecock he lived in a shack on the beach where fishermen stowed their gear. Thirty years later we received a pheasant at Christmas from one of those fishermen, turned gamekeeper, ,who had seen an announcement of a national prize won by my father. This is one example of his ability to make friends. His acquaintance covered a tremendous range of diverse personalities."
To be continued
(Excerpts from "Hawthorne on Painting" by Charles Webster Hawthorne.)
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