Kenyon Cox was a painter of ideal figure subjects, landscapes, and portraits and he achieved national fame as a muralist. He was also a gifted writer and critic who became one of America’s most outspoken champions of traditional art.
Cox was born into a prominent family in Warren, Ohio: his father, Major Jacob D. Cox, was a lawyer who served as governor of that state and as secretary of the interior for President Ulysses S. Grant, while his grandfather, on his mother’s side, was a well-known evangelist who founded Oberlin College.
Cox began drawing as a boy, when a serious illness kept him bedridden for much of the time between the ages of nine and thirteen. Desirous of becoming a professional artist, he went on to study at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati from 1869 to 1873. In 1874, he attended Frank Duveneck’s life class at the Ohio Mechanics Institute, where his fellow students included John Henry Twachtman and Robert Blum.
In 1876, along with Blum, Cox enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he was taught by Christian C. Schussele, a painter of literary and historical subjects. However, finding his course work boring and feeling that Schussele was out of touch with the latest trends in art, Cox began cutting his classes in order to sketch, read, or visit local galleries. Realizing that the most advanced training could be in France, he left Philadelphia in the fall of 1877 and went to Paris.
Cox initially worked in the atelier of the noted portraitist Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, the teacher of John Singer Sargent, who advocated a painterly technique that Cox eventually found antithetical to his love of drawing. Seeking to refine his draftsmanship, he attended classes at Académie Julian, receiving criticism from William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jules Lefebrve, and Gustave Boulanger. In 1879, he was accepted into the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he spent three years studying under the famous history and genre painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose emphasis on drawing, composition, and finish made a lasting impression on Cox. During these years, he painted portraits, immersed himself in the cultural life of Paris and made trips to London and Brussels. He was also among the many American painters who frequented the artists’ colony at Grèz-sur-Loing.
Cox returned to America in 1882. After a brief visit to Cincinnati, he moved to New York and began exhibiting with the Society of American Artists, a progressive organization comprised of European trained artists. He also showed his work at the National Academy of Design. During these years, Cox painted portraits, plein air landscapes, and sensuous academic nudes, the latter causing quite a stir in the art world but prompting few sales.
Cox began writing about art during his years in Paris. He continued this activity on a broader scale in New York, supplementing his income by writing critical reviews, first for The Nation and eventually for an array of journals and newspapers. Using his writings as a forum to express his increasingly conservative views about art, he went on to become a spokesman for conventional ideals. Indeed, in his view, good art was based on simplicity of design, solid draftsmanship, an ideal rendering of the figure, and a knowledge of the art of the past—values that reflect the legacy of his period of study under Gérôme.
A master draftsman, Cox augmented his earnings as an easel painter and commentator by doing illustrations for periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly and Scribner’s. In 1884 he joined the faculty of the Art Students League of New York, remaining there until 1909. It was at the League that he met Louise Howland King, a student who went on to become a noted portraitist, photographer, and wood carver. Four years after their marriage in 1892, the couple built a summer house in Windsor, Vermont, near Cornish, New Hampshire. Cox spent over twenty seasons there, painting landscapes and portraits and doing much of his writing. He became an integral member of the Cornish art colony, fraternizing with friends and neighbors such as the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the painter Thomas Dewing, and the illustrator Maxfield Parrish.
Cox achieved his greatest fame during the 1890s when he executed decorative mural commissions for the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.; the Iowa and Minnesota capitols; the Essex County Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey; the Appellate Court Building in New York; and many other important public structures. Classical in conception and inspired by renaissance models, his murals were much admired for their simple designs and subtle coloration.
Cox belonged to the leading art organizations of his day, including the National Academy of Design, the National Society of Mural Painters, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won a number of awards and honors, including the National Academy’s second Hallgarten Prize (1889), a medal at the Paris Salon of 1889, a silver medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1891), and a medal at the Universal Exposition, held in Paris in 1900. In 1909, he received the Medal of Honor for Mural Painting from the New York Architectural League.
Cox was a prolific penman who wrote about artists ranging from Raphael and Michelangelo to Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, and Paul Manship. His numerous books include Old Masters and New (1905), Painters and Sculptors (1907), The Classic Point of View (1911), and Concerning Painting: Considerations Theoretical and Historical (1917). By the end of his career, he had acquired a reputation as a staunch conservative who vilified modern art movements such as Cubism and Futurism and who condemned the art displayed at the Armory Show (International Exhibition of Modern Art) of 1913.
Cox also produced a fascinating body of correspondence during his student days in France; published in 1986 as An American Art Student in Paris: The Letters of Kenyon Cox, 1877-1882, these missives throw much light on the daily activities of Cox and other American expatriate painters studying in the French capitol during that period. His post-1883 letters were published in 1995 as An Artist of the American Renaissance: The Letters of Kenyon Cox, 1883-1919.
Cox died in New York City in 1919. His work can be found in major collections throughout the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the National Academy of Design, New York; the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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