|
Charles W. Hawthorne, a specialist in portraits and genre scenes and one of America's foremost native realists, was born in Lodi, Illinois, in 1872. He grew up in Richmond, Maine, where his father was the captain of a ship engaged in the New England coastal trade. During his teenage years, he worked as an ice cutter, spending much of his time among the seafaring people he would later depict in his paintings. At the age of eighteen, he decided to pursue a career as an artist. He received his initial art instruction at the Art Student's League in New York, where his teachers included Frank Vincent Du Mond, George de Forest Brush and H. Siddons Mowbray. In the summer of 1896, he attended William Merritt Chase's summer school at Shinnecock, Long Island. During the fall of that year, he helped Chase organize his New York school. He also served as Chase's assistant at Shinnecock in 1897.
In the summer of 1898, Hawthorne traveled to Holland for additional study. He stayed in the village of Zandvoort, near Haarlem, where he spent his time painting the local villagers and fishing folk. During this sojourn, he also saw and was strongly influenced by the dark, tonal style of Frans Hals. Returning to New York, he did not resume his association with Chase. Instead, acting upon the advice of various friends and colleagues, he visited Provincetown, Massachusetts, with the intention of establishing his own summer school. Captivated by the locale and its resemblance to his boyhood Maine, he opened the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899, an institution that would flourish under his direction until the end of his life.
Frequently described as a conservative painter, Hawthorne adhered to a solid, academic approach throughout his long and successful career. His careful, well-painted portraits of New England's rugged Yankee and Portuguese fisherfolk reflect the influence of both Hals and his former teacher and mentor, Chase. Although Hawthorne experimented with a modified form of Impressionism around 1910, he found the style, with its emphasis on light and color, unsuitable for the depiction of a hardy, often tragic seafolk who daily risked their lives at sea. Indeed, it is this overriding concern for naturalism that places Hawthorne within the forefront of American realist tradition.
Hawthorne was the recipient of many awards throughout his career. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, the American Watercolor Society, the National Arts Club and the Century Association, to name only a few. In addition to his teaching at Cape Cod, he also gave instruction at the Art Students League, the National Academy of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago. He died in 1930. Representative examples of his work can be found in major public and private collections throughout the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
CL
ŠThe essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery. It may not be reproduced without written permission from Spanierman Gallery nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to Spanierman Gallery.
|
