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Excerpt from Animal and Sporting Artists in America by F. Turner Reuter, Jr. © 2008:

Benson was born in Salem, MA, on 24 March 1862. He was the second of six children, all of whom were encouraged by their parents to learn by experimentation. In this vein, while his siblings dismantled their mother’s sewing machine and constructed lightning rods, he began painting birds in his teens. During these years he explored the marshes around Salem, both on foot and in small boats, shooting and sketching waterfowl. His formal education in art commenced when he was nineteen with Otto Grundeman, Frederic Crowninshield, and others at the School of Painting and Drawing of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA), where he met several future fellow members of the Ten American Painters (a group that split from the Society of American Artists in 1898 out of dissatisfaction with its standards) such as Robert Reid (qv) and Edward Simmons, as well as Edmund C. Tarbell (qv) and fellow Salem native John Redmond. Benson and Redmond began teaching drawing classes in Salem two evenings a week in 1882. In 1883, after a trip to Cuba with his father, Benson went with his friend and Museum School classmate Joseph Lindon Smith to France, where he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian under Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger and summered in Concarneau, a village in Brittany. During this period he also met John Singer Sargent (qv) and Willard Leroy Metcalf (qv), both of whom numbered among his closest friends.

Upon his return in 1885 Benson worked as a portrait painter in Salem and taught in Portland, ME, for two years. He married Ellen Peirson, a friend of his sister’s whom he had also known in Concarneau, in 1888. In 1889 he began teaching at the School of Painting and Drawing of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Benson became joint head, with Tarbell, of the school in the following year; he remained in that position until 1913, when he, Tarbell, and others resigned their positions after a disagreement with the governing council as to how to run the school. During the same period he painted in Dublin, NH, where he worked with Abbot Handerson Thayer (qv); Newcastle, NH, where he and Tarbell taught a summer open-air painting class from 1893 to 1898; Eastham, Cape Cod, MA, where in 1893 he purchased a house with two of his brothers-in-law as a hunting retreat; and North Haven Island, ME, where he spent summers with his wife and children beginning in 1901.

Benson attained his initial success as a portrait and figure painter, using interior and exterior compositions, for which he used both professionals and his children as models. While he never abandoned this sort of painting, in 1912 he began depicting game birds and waterfowl with greater frequency. In addition to painting in oils, he often drew in ink wash and composed in watercolor. At the same time he took up etching, in which he had dabbled with some success in 1882 but had not pursued since. His first known exhibition of a waterfowl scene was Swan Flight, which he showed at the St.Botolph Club in Boston in 1894. He is first known to have placed human figures in his sporting works in 1906, although it was 1914 before he started doing so regularly. His lifelong enthusiasm for angling and wingshooting provided him with the experience necessary to make such works accurate in every regard. His etchings in particular proved so popular that he nearly exhausted himself on more than one occasion in trying to meet demand. He produced over 350 individual plates in his lifetime, and a complete set of etchings and drypoints printed from these plates is in the collection of the Boston Public Library. He also made seven lithographs, of which six were wildfowl subjects, but found he had little interest in the medium. After 1921 he began working more extensively in watercolors, with the result that he was able to paint scenes from the shooting and fishing trips that he regularly took in Canada and the eastern United States. During and after the 1920s his sporting scenes attained considerable popularity. In 1935 Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling (qv) asked Benson to design the second of the Federal Duck Stamps; the result, done from his wash drawing Canvasbacks, is the rarest example of that series.

Benson was a member of the Chicago (IL) Society of Etchers and, in New York City, the National Academy of Design, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Association of Portrait Painters, the Society of American Etchers, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Ten American Painters. He exhibited several works at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, including Flying Merganser in 1920, Leaping Salmon in 1923, and Great White Herons in 1934. He exhibited somewhat less frequently at the National Academy of Design; among pictures shown there was Bald Eagles, in 1942. At the Art Institute of Chicago he showed numerous paintings, such as The Fox Hunter in 1915, Wood Duck Pond in 1923, The Crow in 1924, and Grouse Flying in 1938. He received medals for exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Watercolor Society; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, IL, in 1893; the Paris Exposition in 1900; the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY, in 1901; the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, MO, in 1904; and the Sesqui-Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1926. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England; the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, PA; the Boston Art Club; and the Society of American Artists and the American Watercolor Society, both in New York City. His paintings and etchings were in high demand for exhibition and sale; he had numerous one-man and joint shows at various galleries, and on several occasions found himself unable to fulfill a request for paintings to exhibit because everything was either sold or promised elsewhere. Institutions holding his work include the Carnegie Institute; the Buffalo (NY) Academy of Fine Art; the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Fogg Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem; the Los Angeles (CA) County Museum of Art; and the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, among many others. His murals of the Three Graces and the Four Seasons are in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Benson died in Salem, MA, on 15 November 1951.

Xanthus Smith (1839-1929) was a prolific artist who worked in a variety of media. His American Civil War paintings and drawings are his most notable body of work. As a captain’s clerk aboard the USS Wabash he participated in Union naval activities at Port Royal, South Carolina in 1862-63. His meticulous documentation of warships, encampments and naval engagements complements his other aesthetic acomplishments to make him one of the most renowned Civil War artists. Smith died in Philadelphia in 1929.

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Though born in Philadelphia, Henry Benbridge’s career flourished in the South where he fulfilled portrait commissions for distinguished citizens and society families. Formally educated at the Philadelphia Academy, Benbridge also received early artistic training in his hometown, studying with the English portraitist John Wollaston. In 1764, having reached his majority, he moved to Rome to continue his artistic pursuits. He launched his formal career in London in 1769, where he exhibited two paintings at the 1770 Royal Academy Exhibition, including a portrait of Benjamin Franklin, who was then residing in that city. Benbridge returned to Philadelphia in 1770, carrying with him letters of introduction from both Franklin and the noted artist Benjamin West.

In 1771, Benbridge moved with his wife Hetty Sage, a miniature painter, to Charleston, South Carolina. Wealthy Southern families often emulated their English cousins by commissioning fashionable portraits from leading artists, and prominent families from across South Carolina and Georgia kept Benbridge in high demand in the years before and after the American Revolution. This painting of the Archibald Bulloch family of Savannah, executed in a Roccoco manner and exuding an aristocratic air, is representative of the artist’s formal conversation portraits. An early leader of the Liberty Party in Georgia, Archibald Bulloch served as president of the Georgia provincial congress and commander-in-chief of the revolutionary state.

A colonial sympathizer, Benbridge was briefly imprisoned following the 1780 fall of Charleston to the British. By 1784, he was actively painting again in Charleston. The final two decades leading up to Benbridge’s 1812 death in Philadelphia are relatively obscure, though he did work and teach in Norfolk, Virginia, giving lessons to Thomas Sully, among others.

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Best known for his watercolors of sailing yachts executed in a crisp Precisionist style, Sandor Bernath was born in Hungary and lived in Budapest before immigrating to New York. By 1918, he had begun to establish himself in the art life of the city. Although slightly younger than Edward Hopper and the Precisionist painters Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, Bernath adopted both their aesthetic and subject matter. He made his professional debut in 1922 with a solo show at Mrs. Malcolm’s Gallery on East Sixty-fourth Street. The exhibition of nineteen watercolors included both New York and European subjects, indicating that Bernath had spent time abroad. In 1923, he turned his attention to seascapes of the New England coastline. During the twenties, he became a member of the New York Water Color Club, American Water Color Society, and Brooklyn Society of Modern Artists, and exhibited at the Whitney Museum and Art Institute of Chicago. Like many of his peers, Bernath worked as a teacher and illustrator to support himself. In the late 1920s, he moved to Eastport, Maine, where he continued to live until at least 1945. According to one source, he spent the last years of his life in South America and died in Belize in 1984.

 

While Eastport remained his primary residence, Bernath visited and painted in a number of American art colonies—including Provincetown on Cape Cod—producing streetscapes and architectural views reminiscent of Hopper. In 1935, he traveled to Taos, New Mexico and painted the church at Rancho de Taos, as well as a pink adobe structure surrounded by desert blooms. Bernath visited Charleston in 1937. Like many artists, including Hopper, he was drawn to its rural cabins, moss-hung trees, historic churches, and Civil War monuments. Accordingly, he approached the subject of The Battery with a cool palette and smoothly delineated forms. Although the sky is restricted to a small area, it is full of weather. The dramatic background reveals Bernath’s sensitivity to a particular place, season, and atmosphere.

 

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This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC

Best known for his watercolors of sailing yachts executed in a crisp Precisionist style, Sandor Bernath was born in Hungary and lived in Budapest before immigrating to New York. By 1918, he had begun to establish himself in the art life of the city. Although slightly younger than Edward Hopper and the Precisionist painters Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, Bernath adopted both their aesthetic and subject matter. He made his professional debut in 1922 with a solo show at Mrs. Malcolm’s Gallery on East Sixty-fourth Street. The exhibition of nineteen watercolors included both New York and European subjects, indicating that Bernath had spent time abroad. In 1923, he turned his attention to seascapes of the New England coastline. During the twenties, he became a member of the New York Water Color Club, American Water Color Society, and Brooklyn Society of Modern Artists, and exhibited at the Whitney Museum and Art Institute of Chicago. Like many of his peers, Bernath worked as a teacher and illustrator to support himself. In the late 1920s, he moved to Eastport, Maine, where he continued to live until at least 1945. According to one source, he spent the last years of his life in South America and died in Belize in 1984.
While Eastport remained his primary residence, Bernath visited and painted in a number of American art colonies—including Provincetown on Cape Cod—producing streetscapes and architectural views reminiscent of Hopper. In 1935, he traveled to Taos, New Mexico and painted the church at Rancho de Taos, as well as a pink adobe structure surrounded by desert blooms. Bernath visited Charleston in 1937. Like many artists, including Hopper, he was drawn to its rural cabins, moss-hung trees, historic churches, and Civil War monuments.
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This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.

The son of noted tonalist painter Walter Clark, Eliot Clark recalled his early years in his father’s studio in the Holbein building in New York City: "As a child, I grew unconsciously in the association of artists, of studio talk, and the smell of paint and turpentine." Instructed at his father’s easel, Clark exhibited two pieces at the New York Water Color Club when he was only nine years old. He later pursued formal, albeit brief, training at the Art Students League under John Twachtman. Believing, like his father, that nature herself was the best teacher, Clark quickly abandoned the classroom for independent painting excursions. He spent the winters of 1923 and 1924 in Savannah. The area’s natural beauty, waterfront, and architectural landmarks inspired him to create canvases praised for their "lyricism, romance, and wistfulness."
Clark painted landscapes in a realist style, executing broad areas of saturated color while keeping details to a minimum. He was very planar in his approach to the canvas–dividing it into obvious fore-, middle-, and background areas–and often used hills and banks of foilage to accomplish this organization. Though his early works were completed in a tonalist style, Clark increasingly painted in an impressionist vein, letting more light into his scenes and increasing the vibrancy and intensity of his colors.
In New York, Clark taught, wrote, and was active in art circles. He was elected president of the National Academy of Design in 1956. Beginning in 1932, Clark divided his time between the city and a summer home in the rolling hills of Ablemarle County, Virginia. He explored the Virginia countryside extensively, retiring there in 1959.
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Born and trained in Amsterdam, Cornelius de Beet immigrated to Baltimore around 1810, the year in which his name first appeared in the city directories as an ornamental, landscape, and fancy painter. The artist exhibited landscape and still life subjects at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1812 until 1832, and at the Peale Museum in 1822. Most of the landscapes were views of the Baltimore countryside, as exemplified by this work. Like other early landscapists, de Beet preferred truthful but artistic transcriptions of real scenes over imaginary views. One of the distinguishing characteristics of his style is the feathery brushwork which he acquired as a youth in Europe.
Widely admired for its natural beauty, Jones Falls attracted several artists. Around 1800, the English immigrant Francis Guy painted views of Pennington Mills, Jones Falls Valley, Looking Upstream, and Pennington Mills, Jones Falls Valley, Looking Downstream, as well as Jones Falls at Baltimore Street Bridge. A view of Jones Falls near Baltimore was included in Joshua Shaw’s Picturesque Views of American Scenery, an 1820 book designed "to exhibit correct delineations of some of the most prominent beauties of natural scenery in the United States."
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Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia, Containing the Whole Sea-Coast, 1757
Map, 52 ¼ x 47 7/8 inches
William P. Cumming, the foremost scholar of Southern geography, stated that modern cartography of the South began in 1757 with the publication of this highly-illustrated, accurate map of South Carolina and coastal Georgia. William Gerard De Brahm’s Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia was the first map of the Southeast created from several years of systematic scientific surveys by a highly-trained engineer. This map established a standard of quality for the maps and engineering drawings that De Brahm created in his thirty-year career and for the maps of his successors. Replete with valuable historical and geographical information, the Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia is an exemplary combination of artistic beauty and utility that is the hallmark of the finest eighteenth-century maps.
William Gerard De Brahm was born in Koblenz, Germany in 1717. The son of a court musician, he received a broad education in art, science, and theology. De Brahm rose to the rank of a captain of engineers in the army of Emperor Charles VII, but lost his commission when he converted from Roman Catholicism to an evangelical Protestant faith. In 1751, he led a group of German Protestant immigrants to the new British colony of Georgia where they established the religious community called Bethabara. James Glen, governor of South Carolina, learned of De Brahm’s engineering talent and hired him to design and construct fortifications for Charlestown, the colonial capital. Within a few years, De Brahm had worked on fortifications around Savannah and supervised construction of Fort Loudoun in Tennessee and Fort George on the Georgia coast.
King George II appointed De Brahm surveyor general of Georgia and later of South Carolina as well. In that capacity, he performed the surveys and conducted the research that found form in his Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia. After the 1763 Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indian War, De Brahm’s responsibilities as surveyor general expanded to include the new British colony of East Florida. He lost his post temporarily in a political feud and traveled to London both to recover his position and to supervise publication of a series of maps and navigational charts called The Atlantic Pilot (1772). The Pilot quickly became the most important sailing guide for the eastern seaboard and, with occasional updates, was used into the nineteenth century. De Brahm returned to the Southern colonies in 1774 and to his position as surveyor general, where he produced more maps and "Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America," a comprehensive investigation of geography, natural history, and anthropology of the Southeast.
De Brahm’s Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia was issued in London in 1757 by Thomas Jeffreys. It was published in four sheets and those originals that survive were often pasted, as this one has been, into a single large sheet. Its cartouche is highly decorated with scenes from indigo production in the Caribbean Islands and indicates that not only did De Brahm conduct extensive scientific surveys of his own, but that he also secured information from earlier mapmakers and knowledgeable residents of the area. The map is divided into an alphabetic grid system which was used to establish reference points for the plantations of 109 South Carolinians and thirty Georgians. Roadways, churches, ferry crossings, and small towns are also depicted. Another distinctive feature is the color depiction of eight townships that were part of the South Carolina government’s plan to settle white immigrants on the colonial frontier.
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Water Side—Iris Watch, 2004
Mixed media on paper, 51½ x 44 inches
Signed lower right: W Dunlap

Inscribed lower left: Water Side—Iris Watch

Born in Webster County, Mississippi, William Dunlap has spent the better part of his life in the South. After graduating from Mississippi College with a degree in art, he went on to receive a master of fine arts from the University of Mississippi in 1969. Having lived in several Southern locales outside his home state, including North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and Virginia, Dunlap closely identifies with his regional roots: "The South is my legacy—the feeling for kinfolk, for storytelling, for customs and manners, juxtaposed with the polarities of social order and races—all set in that lush breathtaking countryside."
The Southern countryside is a constant source of inspiration for Dunlap’s art. His paintings are primarily devoted to landscape themes that are fused with varied imagery. Animals (particularly dogs and birds), flowers, and still-life elements are often superimposed in a way that suggests narrative, as in Water Side—Iris Watch, a work from 2004. While Dunlap’s works appear to depict literal and familiar places, they are actually images synthesized in his mind’s eye, composites drawn from his life experiences.
As evidenced in this example, Dunlap often combines media, using aspects of painting, sculpture, and assemblage. With a carefully refined painting technique and rich palette, Dunlap juxtaposes the intricate botanical forms of purple irises against the dark foreground of a Lowcountry waterway with sun-streaked sky. The calm airless quality suggests an otherworldly atmosphere. Though his aesthetic is definitively modern, aspects of his approach hark back to historical references and traditions.
Dunlap taught at Appalachian State University in North Carolina from 1970-1979; at Memphis State University in 1979; and at the University of Alabama-Birmingham in 1980. His work has been exhibited at numerous institutions, including the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; and Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans.
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Born in Bedford, Virginia, William de Leftwich Dodge spent his adolescent years in Europe, where his mother had moved in 1879 to study painting. Living abroad, he followed his mother’s example, studying briefly in Munich and then in Paris, under Jean-Leon Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, from 1885 to 1889. This solid academic training resulted in Dodge’s mastery of the techniques required for handling various media, as well as his ability to work on a large scale. Dodge achieved early success with several classically inspired works at the 1888 Salon and 1889 Exposition.

On his return from Europe, Dodge settled in New York City and established himself as a mural painter. Known primarily for his grand allegorical decorations, he fulfilled numerous commissions for public buildings and private residences, including the Library of Congress and Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Dodge was also sought after as a portraitist and recorded the likenesses of prominent business, political, and social figures. His interest in outdoor painting was advanced in 1898, when he spent the first of three consecutive summers at the impressionist art colony in Giverny, France. Although his easel paintings are not as well known, he never abandoned this practice, composing luminous impressionist works in oil and watercolor throughout his career.

In addition to oil and watercolor painting, Dodge experimented with illustration (for Century and the Paris-based Figaro);taught at the Art Students League (1915, 1925-1929) and at Cooper Union (1916-1929); and designed and successfully tested a model airplane/helicopter that flew twenty-five feet in the Tenth Street Studio Building. Dodge also maintained an active exhibition schedule with leading institutions and galleries.

Throughout his career, Dodge continually traveled to study and paint at scenic locales. By 1903, he was reported to be one of the country’s most successful artists, artistically and financially.

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This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.