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Although Reynolds Beal created many landscapes and festive genre subjects, he was first and foremost a painter of marines, drawing inspiration from the scenery he encountered along the Connecticut, Massachusetts and Long Island coastlines, as well as from locales in Europe and the Caribbean. The eminent collector, Duncan Phillips, noted that “painting landscapes and seascapes in oil and water color is . . . for him . . . a delightful sport—an exhilarating exercise in technical resources . . . He paints sailing ships and waves with ease and charm because he knows this theme as an expert nautical observer.”
Born in New York City, Beal was a son of William R. Beal, an affluent utilities executive, and his wife, Eleanor Bell Beal. Like his younger brother Gifford (1879-1956), who also became a painter, he developed an interest in art as a child, going on to take drawing lessons in New York, possibly from Edward Valois, a lithographer.
In 1886, Beal enrolled at Cornell University, where he studied naval engineering. However, he left school two years later, without graduating, and began working at the Morgan Iron Works in New York, drafting designs for ship engines. He remained in that position until 1891, when he left because of poor health. He subsequently made a summer sailing trip to Newfoundland, during which time he made sketches of boats and other nautical subjects. Later that year, Beal enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, where he studied under the American Impressionist painter, John Henry Twachtman. Between 1892 and 1895 he attended William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art on Long Island, studying outdoor painting techniques. During this period, he also read books on French Impressionism and studied the work of marine painters such as Louis-Eugène Boudin, Richard Parke Bonnington and Johann Barthold Jongkind.
Beal also studied privately with Chase in New York, and it was probably at his teacher’s suggestion that he travelled to Europe in 1895, visiting England, The Netherlands and France. He also went to Spain, where he attending a painting class with Chase and copied oils by Old Masters such as Diego Velázquez in the Prado. Upon returning to New York in 1896, he moved into a studio at 318 West Fifty-Seventh Street. The owner of a thirty-foot yawl, Beal was an avid sailor who made cruises along the waterways of New York, sketching the boats that would serve as reference sources for his paintings.
By 1902, Beal was spending his summers in Noank, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, where he often went sketching with the Tonalist painter Henry Ward Ranger, who shared his interest in portraying the maritime environment. During these years, Beal painted depictions of boats, harbors and shipyards in Noank and nearby New London. The fluid brushwork and softly defined forms that distinguish his work from this period suggest the influence of artists such as Boudin, as well as Ranger.
Beal was at the height of his productivity during the 1910s. He had a joint exhibition with his brother, Gifford, at the Clausen Galleries in New York in 1905 and again in 1906. In 1908, they exhibited together again, this time at the Bauer-Folsom Galleries in New York, at which time a critic remarked: “Gifford is more successful with landscapes, while Reynolds finds his forte with marines.” He also exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design (he was elected an associate member in 1909) and at other local venues, such as the National Arts Club, the Salmagundi Club, the Lotos Club and the New York Watercolor Club. Beal likewise participated in exhibitions at the Society of Independent Artists and the New Society of Artists. His painting companions during these years included the American Impressionist painters Childe Hassam and Ernest Lawson.
On a visit to Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1915, Beal studied etching with George Senseney and thereafter divided his time between painting and the graphic arts. After spending several summers in Rockport, on Massachusetts’s Cape Ann peninsula, he settled there permanently in 1929, becoming a respected member of the local artists’ colony.
Inspired by Hassam’s late Impressionist style, as well as by the conventions of Japanese prints and the vanguard painting he saw at the Armory Show of 1913, Beal eventually abandoned his modified Impressionist style in favor of a vigorous Post-Impressionist manner characterized by simplified forms, a bold palette and lush paint surfaces (which prompted some critics to compare him to Vincent van Gogh). He applied this approach to marines, landscapes and joyous circus and carnival scenes he painted in and around Cape Ann and on his trips to Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America.
Beal had solo exhibitions at Vose Galleries in Boston (1916), at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1922) and at New York’s Kraushaar Galleries (1925 and 1934). However, because he was financially independent, he cared little about promoting his work at commercial galleries; during the 1940s, he distanced himself from the New York art world, preferring to spend most of his time sailing.
Beal died in Rockport on 18 December 1951. Examples of his work can be found in many public and private collections, including the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Arts Club, New York; the Rockport Art Association, Rockport, Massachusetts; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
CL
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