William Trost Richards
1833-1905

William Trost Richards combined in his works the grandeur, atmosphere and light of the American painter, the interest in the minutiae of nature of the pre-raphaelites, and the precision and technique of the Dusseldorf School. He was a landscape artist for much of his life and is most remembered for his coastal seascapes.

Born in Philadelphia in 1833, Richards began to draw when very young. Despite circumstances that forced him at age 13 to drop out of school and support his family by designing chandeliers and gas fixtures, he studied privately, along with William Stanley Haseltine, under German artist Paul Weber. He may also have attended classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

By 1853, Richards felt ready to devote all his time to art. He set out for Europe, probably in the company of his studio-mate, painter Alexander Lawrie, and Haseltine. Traveling through Florence, Rome and Paris, he encountered American artists Hiram Powers, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze and Albert Bierstadt. He returned from Europe in 1856 with high regard for the uplifting works of Native American landscape artists, such as John F. Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church.

In 1856, he married Anna Mattock and honeymooned and sketched at Niagara Falls. They later settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Richards devoted his attention from then through the Civil War to meticulous, naturalistic landscapes, many with literary themes. He was particularly influenced by an exhibition of the works of pre-Raphaelites painters in Philadelphia in 1858.

His paintings of this period are charming; they combine, oddly, an obsessive camera-like precision with grand atmospheric effects. He worked out-of-doors as much as possible, in Pennsylvania, the Adirondacks and the Catskills.

At the end of the Civil War, from 1866 to 1867, Richards traveled with his family in Europe. After that, he began to paint his masterful coastal seascapes, which ideally reconcile his love of sharp detail with the larger scale.

He began in the 1870s to spend the summers and paint in Newport, Rhode Island. He also traveled frequently to England for further subjects and rnarkets. In 1890, he moved permanently to Newport, where he died in 1905.

Memberships:
Forensic and Literary Circle of Philadelphia
National Academy Of Design

Public Collections:
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Brooklyn Museum
Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, New York City
Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Newark Museum, New Jersey
University Of Washington, Seattle

Murray Percival Bewley
1884 –

Murray Percival Bewley (1884-), generally considered the leading Texas portraitist of the twentieth century. He was born to a prominent Fort Worth family on June 19, 1894 in Fort Worth Texas. Bewley received his first art training in Forth Worth and then in Chicago at the Art Institute, the National Academy of Design in New York and the Pennsylvania Fine Art Academy in Philadelphia. Bewley studied with William Meritt Chase, Robert Henri and Celia Beaux. He was a member of the Mystic Art Club, Mystic Conn.; Salmagundi Club, New York and Allied Artist of America, Paris.

Bewley exhibited at the Salmagundi Club in 1921 and was awarded a prize. He was awarded a prize at the 1943 Sacramento, California Exhibition. He also exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Fine Art Academy, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Bewley finally settled in Paris as a professional portrait and figure painter. He became a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salons and was awarded prizes in 1908, 1909 and 1910. He continued exhibiting at Salons through 1914. Sometime in the early 191O’s, Bewely returned to Fort Worth to paint portraits and sympathetic genre subjects. He then returned permanently to New York to paint and teach.

Public Collections:
Fort Worth Art Museum, Ft. Worth, TX
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia
Chicago Art Institute, Chicago
Art Institute, Dayton
Museum of Fine Art, Houston

Listed:
American Art Annual, edition, no. XX
Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs, Graveurs, E. Benezit, Paris, 1924
Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, Mantle Fielding, Philadelphia, 1926
Who,s Who in American Art
Art Across America, Two Centuries of
Regional Painting, vol. II

Antoine Blanchard
(1910-1989)

Antoine Blanchard was born in 1910, in a small village near Blois. Blanchard was encouraged by his parents to enter the arts at a young age. They sent him as a boy to an art school in Blois. The family then moved to Rennes so Blanchard could study at the Beaux Arts Academy. In 1932, after three years in study, Blanchard moved to Paris to attend the Beaux Arts Academy of Paris to further his education. Upon completion of his studies, Blanchard was awarded the Prix de Rome.

In the following years, Blanchard favored the styles of Eugene Galien- Laloue and Edouard Cortes. It was this subject; the wet streets of Paris, that Blanchard would develop his very individual style around. Although he painted the same subject as Cortes and Laloue, Blanchard introduced a much lighter palette and a completely different brush stroke. He has shared a great deal of criticism and acclaim from collectors and critics but that is the nature of his profession. The greatest of painters received both acclaim and criticism.

Suffering a leg injury late in life, Antoine Blanchard was unable to paint for the last few years of his life and died in Paris in 1989.

Charles Hawthorne
(1872-1930)

Charles Hawthorne was a painter and teacher. His name was synonymous with the colony of artists at Provincetown, MA, where numerous painters were attracted to his Cape Cod School of Art (which he founded in 1899 and directed until his death).

Hawthome was a specialist in portraits and genre pictures of Provincetown fisherman. He was a naturalist painter whose Impressionist style and technical virtuosity was similar to that of his teacher William Merritt Chase, to whom he was an assistant in the 1890s. He visited Italy in 1906-07 and also painted in Bermuda. His paintings can be found in many institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, The High Museum of Art, The National Arts Club and The National Academy of Design.

Who was who in American Art

Waugh, Frederick Judd
(American, 1861-1940)

Frederick Judd Waugh was a marine painter and illustrator born in Bordentown, New Jersey in 1861. He studied with his father, portrait painter Samuel Bell Waugh (1814-1885); at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Thomas Eakins and at the Academie Julian in Paris with Boulanger and T. Robert-Fleury (1888-1889). While sailing home from Paris across the Atlantic, Waugh became inspired to become a marine painter. Soon he depicted the New England Coast and painted in Provincetown (MA) and on Monhegan Island (ME).

He was a member of the Royal Academy, Bristol, England; Associate (1909) and Academician (1922) of the National Academy of Design; Salmagundi Club; Lotos Club; National Arts Club; fellow, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art; Boston Art Club; Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts; Washington Art Club; North Shore Art Association (1924) and American Federation of Art

Awards include medals at the National Academy (1910, 1929, 1935); Buenos Aires Exposition (1919, gold); Boston Art Club; Art Institute of Chicago (1912); Conn. Academy of F.A. (1915); Pan-Pacific Exposition (1915); Philadelphia Art Club (1924, gold); Carnegie Institute; and Buck Hill Falls Art Association (1935).

Waugh is best known for his ocean views that depict active waves crashing against jagged rocks along the New England coast. His views of the Monhegan shoreline show long distance views of the entire coast or close up views of only waves and rocks with little sky and no shoreline. Because he was an expert at painting the ocean he wrote and illustrated Painting by the Sea and Seascape Painting, Step by Step and Landscape Painting with a Knife. He also wrote The Clan of the Munes and illustrated for the London Graphic and the London Daily Mail early in his career.

Waugh exhibited extensively in the Paris Salons prior to exhibiting throughout the United States. By the time he died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1940 he was a recognized worldwide for his sumptuous ocean and shoreline vistas in oil.

Museums:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Art Institute of Chicago, IL.
National Gallery of Art, Wash., D.C.
Brooklyn Institute Museum, NY
Terra Museum of Art, Chicago
Montclair Art Museum, Canada
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England
Durban Art Gallery, South Africa
Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
Austin Museum of Art, Texas
St. Louis Museum Art, Mo
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Pa
Currier Gallery, Manchester, NH
Edwin A. Ulrich Museum, Hyde Park, NY

Alexandre Hogue was born in Memphis, Missouri in 1898. A painter, printmaker, and muralist, Alexandre Hogue was one of the early artists in Taos, New Mexico. However, he remains best-known for his Dust Bowl series of the 1930s.

His formal art education was at the College of Art and Design in Minneapolis where he was a student of Frank Reaugh. In 1921, he moved to New York City where he lived for four years, but he frequently returned to Texas to paint in the summers as well as making numerous trips to Taos. He was also an illustrator for the Dallas Times-Herald.

He headed the art department at the University of Tulsa from 1945-1968, having taught earlier at Texas State College for Women in Denton and the Hockaday School for Girls in Dallas.

His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris, and important regional museums such as the Philbrook and Gilcrease. Two of his major paintings were featured in the 1999 exhibition, American Century: Art & Culture: 1900-1950 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Joseph Stella was born in Muro Lucano, Italy, and moved to New York City in 1896. He attended the Art Students League under William Merritt Chase and made a name for himself in the early 1900’s as a social-realist illustrator.

From 1909 to 1912, he was in Europe and associated with the modernists including Matisse and Modigliani. He was greatly influenced by fauvism, cubism, and futurism and made a radical change to a more abstract style.

Stella returned to New York to exhibit several paintings in the 1913 Armory Show. Stella, along with recent New York arrivals Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, became associated with the Walter and Louise Arensberg group.

From 1927 to 1934, he was in Rome and Paris, and in 1940 traveled to the West Indies. Although most of his Futurist paintings were done between 1912 and 1923, he continued to reinterpret those subjects until his death in 1946.

His work is included in the collections of most major American museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Oliver Clare was born in 1853, to the renowned still‑life artist George Clare.  The Clare family members were Victorian artists who specialized in, and were well known for their highly finished and precisely detailed still life and flower paintings.

 

Oliver spent most of his artistic life in Birmingham. Though there are no records indicating where he received his training, one can be quite certain that most, if not all, of it was from his father.  Their stippling technique and choice of subject matter are almost identical.

 

While Oliver lived in Birmingham he was commissioned by a local health firm “Health Food Stores” to paint still‑lives to be reproduced on postcards and posters.

 

Clare exhibited many paintings throughout his lifetime and is most often associated with the Artists of the West Midlands and the North.  He exhibited: eighteen works at the Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham; three at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and six at the Manchester City Art Gallery. Throughout the late 1870’s and early 1880’s he lived in London where he exhibited several works there at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street.

 

Clare took an interest in animal painting as well as still life painting and Grant M. Waters, in his book Dictionary of British Artists working 1900 ‑ 1950 noted Clare’s affinity towards animals and stated:

 

          He (Oliver) was particularly gifted with animals.  He taught his dog to stoke the fire and collect fruit from the greengrocer.  On the night he died (in 1927), he sang ‘Abide with me'[:] his dog died that same night.

Vincent Clare was born in1855 and spent most of his life in London at Fern Cottage, Nursery Road, Southgate. One will often find that Vincent’s paintings are signed and inscribed, with his address, on the reverse.

         

Like his father (George) and brother (Oliver), Vincent became quite well known for his still life and flower paintings. His technique was similar to his father’s, however, his brushstrokes were slightly freer and at times he would work with a more pastel palette.

 

Though Clare lived in London, he never exhibited there. His only recorded exhibitions were in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, where he showed three works.  It is also believed that he did exhibit with his brother, Oliver, in the Midlands, but there are no records to substantiate this.

John Audubon was born in 1785 in Les Cayes, Haiti. He is the foremost painter of wildlife to date. He had been a bird collector as a boy but undertook the role of shop owner until the age of 35. At this point, Audubon began systematically recording birds in watercolor across the Northeast. He collected all bird specimens and had an assistant to gather flowers and plants to be used in his pictures. In 1826 Audubon traveled to Great Britain in search of a publisher, returning to Florida only during the winter to include more birds in his monumental project. Birds of America was completed and published in 1838. The watercolor illustrations displayed 489 different species and were sold by subscription at $1,000 each. Robert Havellur provided all the engravings to accompany the work. Audubon also published Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America in 1848, which contained 150 more paintings of wildlife.