Guy Carleton Wiggins

City Storm - New York City Library - Cityscape in Snow Oil by Guy Wiggins

1918

Guy Carleton Wiggins, the son of famed Barbizon School painter Carleton Wiggins, was a prodigious talent who, at age 20, was the youngest artist to have a work in the permanent collection at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Best known for his landscape paintings of New York City’s wintry urban scenes, Wiggins is regarded as one of the finest American Impressionist landscape artists of the 20th century.

Born in 1883 in Brooklyn, New York, Wiggins displayed an early talent for drawing and, in 1900, attended the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (now the New York University Tandon School of Engineering) to study architecture and drawing. However, he shifted his focus to painting, which he studied at the National Academy of Design under teachers Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase.

Recognition for Wiggins’s artistic talent came early in his career. In addition to his work being included at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1913, Wiggins won the prestigious Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1917. He also won several awards from the Art Club of Philadelphia, the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts and the Salmagundi Club.

In 1920, Wiggins established a summer home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where he became part of a group of painters who were developing their own form of Impressionism. Wiggins, however, had already established his own Impressionistic style that was based on French Impressionism and influenced by American Impressionist Childe Hassam. 

During the 1930s, Wiggins divided his time between Connecticut and New York, painting Connecticut landscapes and New York street scenes such as his Winter in New York. Although some critics say his pastoral Connecticut landscapes were his best works, his snowy streetscapes set in Manhattan — brightened by pops of color in Wiggins’s depictions of green cars and rust-red building facades — are among the artist's most notable.

In 1937, Wiggins established the Guy Wiggins Art School in Essex, Connecticut. In the following years, he traveled nationally, painting scenes of Montana and Massachusetts as well as creating two paintings of the White House during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration. One of the paintings hung in the Oval Office during Eisenhower’s term and was eventually moved to the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Texas.

Wiggins’s paintings remain part of public and private collections throughout the United States and elsewhere, long after his death in 1962. They are also highly sought-after among collectors of American Impressionist and early 20th-century art.

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