Frank Benson

WINTER WILDFOWLING

1927

Clark, Roland (American 1874-1957). JACK SNIPE. Etching, 1928. Edition of 70. Signed in pencil. 8 1/2 x 12 inches. In excellent condition.

Benson, Frank. DUSK. P.34. Etching on zinc, 1914. Edition of 50, signed and numbered 47/50 in pencil. 9 1/4 x 10 7/8 inches, plate, framed to 17 x 21 inches. This atmospheric image, ...

Clark, Roland. EVENING FLIGHT. Derrydale 11. Etching and drypoint, 1929. Edition of 75. Signed in pencil. 12 x 15 inches. In excellent condition.

Benson, Frank. RUNNING THE RAPIDS. Paff 269. Etching, 1927. Edition of 150. Signed in pencil. Printed on Whatman paper. 5 7/8 x 7 3/4 inches (plate), 8 1/2 x 10 5/8 inches (sheet). A...

Frank Weston Benson Winter Wildfowling, 1927 Signed lower left Etching on paper Image 8 1/2 x 7 inches Born in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of a long line of sea captains, Benson first studied art at Boston’s Museum School where he became editor of the student magazine. In 1883, Benson enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris where artists such as Bouguereau, Lefebvre, Constant, Doucet and Boulanger taught students from all over Europe and America. It was Boulanger who gave Benson his highest commendation. “Young man,” he said, “Your career is in your hands . . . you will do very well.” Benson’s parents gave him a present of one thousand dollars a twenty-first birthday and told him to return home when it ran out. The money lasted long enough to provide Benson with two years of schooling in Paris, a summer at the seaside village of Concarneau in Brittany and travel in England. Upon returning to America, Benson opened a studio on Salem’s Chestnut Street and began painting portraits of family and friends. An oil of his wife, Ellen Perry Peirson, dressed in her wedding gown is representative of this period. It demonstrates not only the academic techniques he learned at the Academie Julian but also his own growing emphasis on the effects of light. And yet, despite all the technical mastery displayed in the work, the painting exudes the warmth that existed between model and artist. More than a likeness, it is a study in serenity. Perhaps it was of a work such as this that Benson was thinking when he said, “The more a painter knows about his subject, the more he studies and understands it, the more the true nature of it is perceived by whoever looks at it, even though it is extremely subtle and not easy to see or understand. A painter must search deeply into the aspects of a subject, must know and understand it thoroughly before he can represent it well.” Following a brief stint as an instructor at the Portland, Maine, Society of Art, Benson was appointed as instructor of antique drawing at the Museum School in Boston in the spring of l889. Benson’s long association with the school was particularly fruitful. Under the leadership of Edmund Tarbell and Benson the Museum School became a national and internationally recognized institution. The students won numerous prizes, enrollment tripled, a new school building was erected and visiting delegations from other schools sought the secret of their success. Benson cherished his role as teacher and was held in high esteem by his students, many of whom called him “Cher Maitre.” Reminiscing about his long career with the school Benson once said, “I may have taught many students, but it was I who learned the most.” In 1890, Benson won the Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy in New York. It was the first of a long series of awards, that earning for him the sobriquet “America’s Most Medalled Painter.” In the early years of his career, Benson’s studio works were mostly portraits or paintings of figures set in richly appointed interiors. Young women in white stretch their hands out towards the glow of an unseen fire; girls converse on an antique settee in a room full of objets d’arts; his first daughter, Eleanor, poses with her cat. Works of this sort, together with a steady influx of portrait commissions, earned Benson both renown and financial rewards, yet it was in his outdoor works that gave Benson his greatest pleasure. In the latter half of the 1890s, Benson summered in Newcastle, on New Hampshire’s short stretch of seacoast. It was here, in 1899, that Benson made his first foray into impressionism with Children in the Woods and The Sisters, the latter a sun-dappled study of his two youngest daughters, Sylvia and Elisabeth. This painting was one of the first works that Benson hung at an exhibition with nine friends. The resignation of these ten illustrious artists rocked the American art establishment but, the catalogue for their first exhibition was titled, simply, “Ten American Painters.” When, in 1898, the three Bostonians and seven New Yorkers began to exhibit their best work in exquisitely arranged small shows, the group (dubbed by newspapers, “The Ten” ) quickly became known as the American Impressionists, a bow to the style of their French predecessors. The Ten’s annual shows soon became an eagerly awaited part of the annual exhibition calendar and were always well reviewed. Held annually in New York City, the group’s yearly exhibitions usually traveled to Boston and were occasionally seen in other cities. Benson’s association with other members of the group such as Childe Hassam, Thomas Dewing, William Merrit Chase and J. Alden Weir, only reinforced his growing emphasis on the tenets of Impressionism. As he later said to his daughter Eleanor, “I follow the light, where it comes from, where it goes.” The principles of Impressionism began to dominate Benson’s work by 1901, the year that the Bensons first summered on the island of North Haven in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. His summer home “Wooster Farm,” which they rented and finally bought in 1906, became the setting for some of Benson’s best known work and there, it seemed, he found endless inspiration. Benson’s sparkling plein-air paintings of his children–Eleanor, George, Elisabeth and Sylvia–capture the very essence of summer and have been widely reproduced: In The Hilltop, George and Eleanor watch the sailboat races from the headland near their house. As a boy, Benson dreamed of being an ornithological illustrator. In mid-life, he returned to the wildfowl and sporting subjects that had remained his lifelong passion. Using etching and lithography, watercolor, oil and wash, Benson portrayed the birds observed since childhood and captured scenes of his hunting and fishing expeditions. Together with his two brothers-in-law, Benson bought a small hunting retreat on a hill overlooking Cape Cod’s Nauset Marsh. Here, in the late 1890s, he began experimenting with black and white wash drawings. These paintings became so popular that Benson was not able to keep up with the demand. He turned to an art publishing company to have several made into it intaglio prints; twelve wash drawings are known to have been reproduced in this manner. At least two of them were given as gifts to associate members of the Boston Guild of artists, of which Benson was a founding member. Benson was also an avid fisherman and his salmon fishing expeditions to Canada’s Gaspé Peninsula where one of the high points of his summer. There, in 1921, he began the first in a series of watercolors that would eventually over 500 works. Benson’s watercolors conveyed the joy and beauty of a sportsman’s life whether in a painting of a hunter setting out decoys, a flock of ducks coming in for a landing or a grouse flushed from cover. The critics favorably compared Benson’s watercolors to those of Homer. “The love of the almost primitive wilderness which appears in many of Homer’s landscapes and the swift, sure touch with which he suggests rather than describes–these also characterize Benson’s work,” one critic wrote. “The solitude of the northern woods is very much like Homer’s.” Like the wash drawings before them, Benson’s watercolors proved...

John Terelak Biography American, b. 1942 John Charles Terelak is recognized as one of America's finest living impressionists. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, he received formal art i...

This drypoint from 1930 was printed in an edition of 150. It is signed in pencil just under the image in the lower left. Listed in the catalogue raisonne on Frank W. Benson by Adam Paff #303. Frank Weston Benson (1862-1951), well known for his American impressionist paintings, produced an incredible body of prints - etchings, drypoints, and a few lithographs. Born and raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts, Benson, a natural outdoorsman, grew up sailing, fishing, and hunting. While a teenager his fascination with drawing and birding developed simultaneously and continued throughout his life. His first art instruction was with Otto Grundman at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and then in 1883 in Paris at the Academie Julian where he studied the rigorous ‘ecole des beaux arts’ approach to drawing and painting for two years. During the early 1880’s Seymour Haden visited Boston giving a series of lectures on etching. This introduction to the European etching...

Mallard Drakes (Louisiana Honkers) Drypoint, c. 1940 Signed in pencil lower right (see photo) Titled in pencil lower left (see photo) Note: A famous image by Kleiber. It is was made in a hand colored version which commands a large premium. Condition: Excellent Image/Plate size: 9 7/8 x 7 7/8 inches Hans Kleiber (1887-1967) Hans Norbert Kleiber, painter, etcher, illustrator, and naturalist, was born in Cologne, Germany on August 24, 1887. He emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1900, settling in Massachusetts before moving to Wyoming. Kleiber first worked in lumber camps before working for the United States Forest Service from 1906 until 1924. One of his duties as a ranger was to monitor the logging camps in the Bighorn Mountains. Kleiber was primarily self-taught as an artist and it was in the 1920s that he began devoting himself to art. It appears that he first began to work in watercolor and oil but was producing etchings and drypoints as early as 1924. He traversed the mountains of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, and his subjects are drawn from the pristine landscapes and wildlife. Kleiber's first exhibition of his etchings was mounted in 1928 at Goodspeed's Book Shop in Boston. His etching, Crossing the Platte, was included in the 1939 New York World's Fair exhibition, American Art Today. There was an exhibition of fifty of his etchings at the National Museum in 1944, and an exhibition of his watercolors was mounted at the Grand Central Galleries in New York in 1950. Kleiber was a member of the Society of American Etchers and the California Society of Printmakers. He received a silver medal in 1931 from the Printmakers Society of California for his print, Leaving the High Country...