A notable figure in the development of Impressionism in the United States, Theodore Wendel 1 is linked with artistic activity in the Boston area during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An early member of the artists’ colony in Giverny, France, during the late 1880s, he was one of the first Americans to incorporate Impressionist strategies into his art. Upon returning to America, Wendel applied modern precepts of light and color to native scenery, creating highly acclaimed portrayals of the scenery he encountered in coastal Massachusetts.
Wendel was born in Midway, Ohio, in 1859, the son of German parents. He initiated his artistic training at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Design in 1876, where he attended classes for two years. Following this, he and another student, Joseph DeCamp, traveled to Munich, Germany, where Wendel continued his training at the Royal Academy. In the summer of 1879, he went to Polling, Bavaria, joining the group of young American artists gathered around the American Realist painter, Frank Duveneck. Wendel subsequently accompanied the “Duveneck Boys” to Italy where, for the next two years, he spent his summers in Venice and his winters in Florence. During this period, he painted in an academic style characterized by solid draftsmanship and a low-keyed palette. After meeting the American expatriate painter James McNeil Whistler, and seeing him work on his famous series of Venetian etchings, Wendel began experimenting with this medium, producing a number of lyrical and skillfully rendered prints.
Wendel returned to the United States in 1881, making his professional debut at the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia that same year. Details relative to his activity over the next few years are scare; he exhibited at the Society of American Artists in New York in 1883, while sharing living and studio space with the painter Kenyon Cox in Newport, Rhode Island.
In about 1885, Wendel made a second trip to Europe. Settling in Paris, he enrolled in classes at the Académie Julian, where he honed his skills in depicting the figure. Wendel may have made his first visit to Giverny, a small village northwest of Paris that was home to Claude Monet, in 1886, along with fellow American artists Theodore Robinson and Willard Metcalf. In 1887 and 1888, he and a number of his compatriots spent the summer there, establishing an art colony that would continue to flourish in the years ahead. In Giverny, Wendel focused his attention on landscape subjects, adopting the bright colors, fluid handling and light and atmospheric concerns of the Impressionists. Shortly after returning to America in January of 1889 he held an exhibition of his recent landscapes in his Boston studio and was immediately identified as a practitioner of Impressionism; as one local critic observed:
Mr. Wendel has been in France, painting very modern sketches in the most fashionable tones of the advanced school . . . The broad and summary manner of manipulation, the violet and bluish tones and the total absence of certain colors which once formed the main stock in trade of many landscape painters, justify us in claiming Mr. Wendel with the so-called impressionists.2
Later in 1889 and in 1890, Wendel taught and painted in Newport and in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His standing in Boston art circles was further enhanced when, in the winter of 1891, he exhibited his recent landscapes in a one-man show, garnering acclaim for his “clear color, high key, purity and luminosity” of his work. 3 His success continued: in 1892 he and the American Impressionist Theodore Robinson exhibited their work at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston and fours years later, the same gallery organized an important exhibition of Wendel’s watercolors and pastels.
Wendel may have returned to France in 1890 or 1891. From 1892 to 1897, he was based in Boston. In addition to painting, he taught art classes at Wellesley College and at the Cowles Art School. Following his marriage to Philena Stone, a former student, he made an extended visit to France and Italy during 1897-98. Returning to the United States in 1899, he settled on his wife’s family farm in Ipswich, Massachusetts, while continuing to maintain a Boston studio until 1904. In the ensuing years, Wendel produced some of his strongest work, focusing on the landscape in and around Ipswich and nearby Gloucester. One such oil, Winter at Ipswich, was awarded the prestigious Jennie Sesnan Gold medal at the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1909. In Boston, Wendel exhibited his work at the St. Botolph Club, the Boston Guild of Artists and the Copley Society. He also won prizes at the Exposicion Internacional de Arte del Centenario in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1910) and at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco (1915). Unfortunately, after suffering an infection in his jaw in 1917, Wendel decreased his painting activity considerably. He died in Ipswich in 1932.
An important exhibition of Wendel’s work was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1976. Since that time, he has been included in many books and exhibitions devoted to American Impressionism and to artistic activity in Giverny and Boston. Wendel is represented in many public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Musée d’Art Americain, Giverny, France; the Ipswich Historical History, Ipswich, Massachusetts; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.
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1. Some biographical sources indicate Wendel’s birth date as 1856 or 1857.
2. “The Fine Arts,” Boston Transcript, 21 March 1889.
3. “Mr. Wendel’s Studio Exhibition,” Boston Evening Transcript, 11 February 1891.
