Frank W. Benson: "The Guild of Boston Artists" by R.H. Ives Gammell

"Reverie" by Edmund Tarbell,
first president of the Guild of Boston Artists

We have just read about the formation of the Guild of Boston Artists, with Frank W. Benson being one of its founders and its second president. It has also been brought to my attention that it was NOT begun as a reaction to any discrimination from out-of-state exhibitions but for very different reasons. The following excerpt from a paper written by R.H. Ives Gammell explains its beginnings.

THE GUILD OF BOSTON ARTISTS

BY R. H. IVES GAMMELL 

1942

 

"TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO a group of artists working in Boston decided to form a professional group which they would call the Guild of Boston Artists. The primary purpose of this move was to enable these painters and sculptors to maintain a gallery of their own in which they could exhibit their work. Expenses ‘were to be met by deducting a percentage from the sales made in the gallery, by dues from the active members, and through a group of associate members as well. For active membership there was to be one essential qualification, the professional competence of an artist in his particular field. To be a member of the Guild of Boston Artists a painter or a sculptor. must know his trade. This, at least, was the intention of the founders.

 

That was in 1914. The concept of making professional knowledge and skill the common denominator for an association of artists seemed then, less eccentric and subversive than it would seem to many people today. It was, in point of fact, merely trying to do in Boston what had been done in Europe for several hundred years, wherever artists congregated in sufficient numbers. Organized first as confraternities or guilds, later as academies, these groups of professional workers in the arts had always tried to maintain certain standards of craftsmanship as well as to cooperate for their own mutual protection and advancement. Conditions in twentieth century Boston were very different from those which had made the earlier guilds necessary in their day. It would have been impossible to pattern the new institution after its predecessors. But the name made an appeal to the organizers because of its association with high professional standards. And it was to the painter’s guilds of seventeenth-century Holland that the founders of the Guild of Boston Artists looked with the greatest sympathy." *

 

* If you would like a pdf of the entire essay, click here.