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Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening on December 8, 2009 of Charles Warren Eaton (1857-1937) and Robert Emmett Owen (1878-1957). The exhibition provides an opportunity to note points of difference and similarity between these two American artists who were born twenty-one years apart, the first associated with Tonalism and the second with Impressionism.
Born in Albany, New York, and raised in modest circumstances, Eaton moved in 1879 to New York City, where he attended the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design while supporting himself as a dry-goods clerk. Inspired by the art of the French Barbizon School and by meeting George Inness in 1882, he developed an interest in the manipulation of light, which he captured in scenes of such subjects as moonrises in winter and autumn meadows in the glow of the sunset. His connection to Inness deepened in 1888, when he moved to Inness’s former home of Bloomfield, New Jersey, and in the next year, when he rented a studio adjacent to that of Inness in Manhattan. The images Eaton created after the turn of the century of the white pine trees that stood alone over grazed land near his summer haunt of Thompson, Connecticut, earned him the epithet of “The Pine Tree Artist.” After 1900 he took annual trips to Belgium and Holland. He began visiting Italy in the 1910s, painting views of Venice and Lake Como in a brighter, Impressionist-inspired style. In addition to oils, Eaton created watercolors, and pastels, and he was an avid photographer, often using the camera as a means of obtaining and composing images for his paintings. Reserved and humble, Eaton once stated: “I seek the quietest possible places . . . Even a cow disturbs me.” His introspective and patiently observant nature is reflected in his images of tranquil moments of slow change in nature.
Born in North Adams, Massachusetts, Owen left school early to support his mother by working as a newspaper delivery boy. He then began a career as an illustrator, which he continued in Boston in 1897, where he studied at the Eric Pape Academy with the help of a scholarship. He moved to New York in 1901, continuing his training at the National Academy of Design, the Art Students League, and the Chase School, and developing an Impressionist style influenced by the work of such artists as Willard Metcalf, J. Alden Weir, and Childe Hassam. Relocating in 1910 to Bangall, Connecticut, he developed a plein-air method to capture the essential qualities of the New England countryside in all of the seasons. On returning to New York in 1920 he opened a gallery on Madison Avenue, where he exhibited and sold only his own work. The White Mountains of New Hampshire became a focus for Owen in his work of the 1920s and 1930s. After closing his gallery in 1941, Owen moved to New Rochelle, New York, where he became the artist in residence at the Thomas Paine Memorial Museum. Outgoing and gregarious, Owen created animated images, many of roads leading through wooded countrysides, that express his enthusiasm for what might lie around the next bend.
In keeping with a Tonalist perspective, Eaton expressed a yearning for a reality beyond visual apprehension, whereas Owen held to an Impressionist point of view, engaging the viewer in pure and momentary sensuous experience. For example, in Eaton’s A Belgian Farm (1902), the darkened forms on the land fade into the dimming sky at dusk, while lingering sunlight draws our gaze upward and away from our usual point of reference. By contrast in Owen’s Haystacks at Cornwall Bridge (1910s-30s), the sunlight reflected in two prominent haystacks directs our attention to their surfaces, where the colors of the sky and surrounding land intermingle. Both Eaton and Owen were saddened by the disappearance of the forms from an earlier time in American life. Eaton expressed this attitude in his pine tree paintings, such as The Woodland Sentinels (1900-10) in which a silhouetted group of spiky trees stands with lonely stoicism against the silvery twilight, while in Covered Bridge at Conway, Massachusetts (1910s-30s), Owen shields this remnant of colonial life in the embrace of energetic fall foliage.
Whether diverging or coinciding, the perspectives in the art of Eaton and Owen, as expressed through their varied stylistic means, provide an opportunity for a window into the breadth of American attitudes in late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
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