A quintessential New England painter, Abbott Fuller Graves was associated with the artistic life of Boston and Kennebunkport, Maine. His oeuvre includes landscapes, floral still lifes and genre scenes, as well as portrayals of sunlit gardens and the flower-bedecked doorways of Colonial mansions and cottages.
Graves was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, on 15 April 1859, the son of James Griswold Graves, of English descent, and his wife, Eliza Nicholls (Fuller), whose Puritan ancestors included the first physician of the Plymouth colony. As a boy, he dabbled in watercolor painting, depicting motifs such as farmhouses and the family dog. He initially planned to become an architect, going on to study at the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. However, upon experiencing financial problems, he left school and went to work in a local greenhouse where, in conjunction with his task of making arrangements for events such as weddings, he developed a love of flowers. In about 1877, he began painting blossoms in his spare time. One year later he made his professional debut at the Boston Art Club, exhibiting an oil painting entitled Roses. In 1881 he opened a studio and proceeded to make a name for himself as a flower painter, attracting patronage from the historian Samuel Adams Drake, among others. Graves also gave lessons in the art of painting flowers, and through this means met Montie Mayo Aldrich, the daughter of the actor Louis Aldrich, who became his wife in 1886.
In 1884, Graves travelled to Paris, where he refined his skills as a flower painter under the tutelage of Georges Jennin. While in France, he also met the Boston painter,
Edmund C. Tarbell, who became a good friend. After a trip to Venice, Graves returned to Boston in 1886 and joined the faculty of the Cowles Art School, teaching flower and still-life painting. He went on to establish a name for himself in local art circles, exhibiting at venues such as the Boston Art Club, the Paint and Clay Club, the
Copley Society and the Society of Boston Water Color Painters. He remained in Boston until 1887, when he made a second trip to Paris, studying figure painting at the Académie Julian under Fernand Cormon, Jean-Paul Laurens and others. In 1889, Graves exhibited at both the Paris Salon and the Universelle Exposition. As noted in one biographical source, it was said that at this stage of his career, “The color, the texture, the grace, and . . . the more subtle characteristics of his compositions, are reproduced with the hand of a master and the feeling of a poet.”
Graves returned to Boston in 1891. He spent the summer of that year in the coastal town of Kennebunkport, Maine, where he taught painting classes in oil and watercolor. He continued to make seasonal visits there in the ensuing years, painting appealing genre scenes featuring the genial farmers, fishermen, firemen and old sea captains of Kennebunkport. Many of his portrayals of small-town life were reproduced on calendars, postcards, magazines, and as lithographs.
Graves went back to Paris in the fall of 1902, moving into a house located in the midst of the Latin Quarter. Over the course of the next three years, he was active in the American Art Association of Paris, serving as Assistant Treasurer and Chairman of the Art Committee. While living abroad, he travelled and painted in Holland and in St. Ives, on England’s Cornish seacoast. Upon returning to the United States in 1905, he settled permanently in Kennebunkport, where he built a Prairie-style home and studio that he called Westlook. It was around this time that Graves turned his attention to depictions of flower gardens and the flower-framed doorways of local homes, painted in a colorful Impressionist manner that revealed his growing interest in translating the effects of vibrating sunlight into paint. In 1914 he travelled to Venezuela to paint tropical flower gardens and in the ensuing years he made several trips to the sun-drenched Caribbean and Florida. After 1922, Graves spent his winters in New York City, where he belonged to such venerable arts organizations as the
National Academy of Design, the
National Arts Club, the
Salmagundi Club and
Allied Artists of America.
Graves died in Kennebunkport on 15 July 1936. In an obituary appearing in the New York Times, he was described as a painter “specializing in Colonial doorways and in gardens, and for his fine still life and figure paintings. Mr. Graves’s canvases of flowers were much admired.”
Examples of Graves’s work can be found in public collections across the country, including the
Mead Art Museum,
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts; the
Terra Foundation for the Arts, Chicago; the
Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York; the
Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, Maine;
Ball State University Museum of Art, Muncie, Indiana; the
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; the
Hermitage Foundation Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; the
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine;
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey; the Strong Museum, Rochester, New York; and
Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis, Missouri.
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