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.) 

Edward Seago: The Final Stage

"The Church at Porto Cervo, Sardinia" by Edward Seago

"In 1973 Edward Seago wrote: 'For the last two months I have been suffering from middle ear trouble.' Did you know that you've one in the middle as well as on either side?' It seemed the painter flatly refused to consult a specialist as his doctor had advised, probably because, since boyhood he had discounted the advice of doctors, to good effect, and he maintained that all he needed to put him right was the sunshine of Sadinia. He and his assistant Peter flew there on 11 August where Seago insisted on driving the car along fourteen miles of the Costa Smeralda to Porto Cervo. As soon as they started that final stage of the journey Peter realized that Seago could hardly see and he had to talk him round every bend of the winding cliff-top road. But he drove the car for the next month despite protests. He also ignored his friends' insistence that he should see a doctor.

He painted two or three pleasant pictures and then, one day, a picture Peter described as 'an unbelievable horror.' It was an upright landscape on a long, horizontal canvas. Later, one afternoon in mid-September, he called to Peter, 'I think I've done a rather good picture. What do you think?' Peter studied a small panel of a chain of barges. 'It's awfully difficult to tell till you've finished it,' he said. 'What are you going to do with the left half?' 'What left half?' was the answer. 'What do you mean? I have finished it.'

A fortnight later Seago collapsed. He was operated on for a brain tumour in the main hospital in Sassari. The prognosis was hopeless but two weeks later he was taken to England in a privately-chartered jet, accompanied by Peter and a leading British neurologist who had flown out to bring him back. On his return he had intensive treatment in hospital where for three months Peter hardly left his bedside. He was with him when he died there on 19 January 1974.

Once upon a time, Edward Seago had attended a gypsy funeral and had watched the ashes of a man who had spent all his life in the open air, scattered to the wind so that the tiny particles of dust were returned to the earth and to the sky. 'I should like to think that when I die,' he once wrote, 'this body of mine will be turned to ashes and cast to the winds from a high green hill.' It was Peter who made the choice. One bright winter's morning he went alone and scattered the ashes of the man he most admired over the Norfolk marshes where land and sky meet in a wide landscape such as Edward Seago never tired of painting. Just to look at such a landscape, the painter said, set his mind free."

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.) 

Edward Seago: The Last Portrait

"The Bend in the Canal, Alkmaar" by Edward Seago

"As the years passed and Edward Seago was not made a Royal Academician or given official recognition, and his work was not bought for any National Collection, his insecurity reasserted itself. Close friends sensed the bitterness behind his reluctance to be described as 'a Norfolk artist' because, he complained, few people in Norfolk liked his paintings. This false assumption was based on his inability to recognize that any local resentment to him as a man bore no relationship to the admiration and pride his paintings engendered in his native county. The indifference had built up over the years largely because, with an ever-widening circle of friends and increasing commitment, he felt compelled to discard old, out-worn friendships and, to some extent, divorce himself from local affairs. 

He protected his pictures by meticulous conditions in an otherwise extremely simple will which he made in August 1972. Firstly, he instructed that one third of all his paintings in the studio at the time of his death should be destroyed by the artistic executors. This was because he accepted the fact that even a good painter could at times produce bad pictures. Edward Tsui, a friend, was left a Boudin and three of Seago's own paintings to be chosen within one month of his death; a week later, according to the will, another friend, Jeremy Spenser, was to select three Seago paintings. After that the artistic executors were to select three more pictures for the first friend and three for the other, then the solicitor and John Erle-Drax of the Marlborough Galleries were to choose one painting, and finally the artistic executors should choose one for each of the painter's eight godchildren. The rest went to his assistant Peter Seymour, providing he survived Seago by five years, otherwise they would go to museums or public art galleries. 

About that time Seago painted his last portrait. It was of Donald Sinden in the part of Sir William Harcourt Courtley that he was playing in 'London Assurance' at the Aldwych Theatre.  Seago had seen the play and invited Sinden and his wife to Dutch House for a week. Every morning Sinden would spend an hour putting on his stage make-up and costume. He kept it on all day and posed for an hour or so at a time.

He described how after a painting session Seago would light up his pipe, glare at him and the portrait from different parts of the studio and then study them both through a two-foot mirror to get a reverse and more objective view. In the then end there were two portraits: one a full-length study of the vain, extrovert character in the play with his arms outstretched, the other a head and shoulders of the actor sitting as he would have been after the show, not the part he was playing."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.) 

 

 

Edward Seago: As a Host

"Venice" by Edward Seago

"Edward Seago invariably contrived that the stream of visitors to Dutch House, his home and studio, had every opportunity to see him paint. His desire for an audience arose, perhaps, not from vanity but from a positive need for constant reassurance and admiration, to combat the persistent feeling of insecurity that no financial reward appeared to allay. He disliked being alone and, moreover, enjoyed sharing with friends his own passionate love of painting so that, just as a great musician in the role of host might offer to entertain his guests by playing to them, Seago was also happy to display to them his own greatest gift.

Friends accepted as a matter of course that after dinner everyone adjourned to the studio to talk or watch television. After a time their host would move over to his easel and begin painting. Occasionally someone would stroll across and watch and offer not too critical comments. Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, two of Seago's many stage friends, recalled the first time they stayed at the Dutch House. After dinner the painter said, 'You've only seen my finished work, would you like to see me painting?' Denison watched a familiar scene on the Grand Canal in Venice re-created, with lightning brush strokes, in less than half an hour. As the picture took shape he asked if some of the smaller insignificant buildings, at the left of the church of St. Mara del Giglio, were products of the painter's imagination. 'No, no, no,' Seago protested. 'They're exactly correct. I have a total mental photograph of the place.'

Invariably he used oils when painting in front of his friends. 'With oil I can be totally relaxed,' he told Denison, 'but with watercolours, I'm as taut as a bowstring.'

With the help of his assistant Peter Seymour he was a good host and revelled in the role, although he always assumed his guests would be happy to fit in with all his activities and accept him on his own terms. He provided an idyllic setting where it was easy to relax surrounded by fine paintings, including several Boudins, and a collection of early English watercolours. Meals were produced by the gardener's sister, the inimitable Miss Thompson, who lived in the village but as a young girl had learned to cook in the kitchens of great London houses."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)  

Edward Seago: 'Seagoland'

"A Rainy Day in Istanbul" by Edward Seago

"The time had come when Seago rarely used 'Capricorn.' He parted with her and in 1958 acquired a studio in Sardinia with a magnificent view of the Mediterranean from his balcony. He had, since 1960, discarded his technique of painting directly from nature, and out of doors he made only color notes and pencil sketches from which to create the finished picture in his studio. Indoors he could portray his personal experience of places or subjects that had once sparked off his imagination and be undisturbed by superficial visual distractions which intruded when he set up his easel outside. Applying this technique, when he was in Sardinia he often painted Norfolk scenes and home in Ludham he worked on the views from his Mediterranean holiday home.

Once on his way to Sardinia, he made a detour to visit Istanbul, where from his bedroom balcony at the Park Hotel, he had an incredible view of the Bosphorous. He made watercolors and pencil sketches there to translate into oil paintings and then went into the streets and filled his sketchbooks [pocket-sized, 4.5" x 7"] with meticulous drawings; street scenes where the houses were correct to the smallest window, a stretch of wall exact to every stone, crowded squares where every person was represented by a tiny pencil stroke. At a time when he had never painted more freely and with such apparent immense facility, his sketchbooks represented a discipline he practiced consistently until the end of his days.

The later sketch books, however, represented exercises in technique rather than memory training because, by that time, the image of ever place or subject he had ever seen and wanted to paint was stored in his mind in complete detail. The wealth of images, he told his friend, the actor Peter Cushing, was stored in 'Seagoland' from where he drew on it at will. His challenge was to express the image on canvas. Sometimes he painted a real landscape from memory; at other times he created a composite imaginary picture which he described as a 'Seagoscape.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)