Bessie Potter Vonnoh

Girls Dancing

Oil on board Provenance Estate of Marjorie MacMonnies Wysong (the artist's granddaughter); Hap Moore Auctions; Martin Ferrick Antiques Exhibitions Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, American Women Artists: 1860–1960, October 13–November 10, 2017. Description During her expatriate career, between the mid-1880s and return to the United States in 1920, painter and muralist Mary Fairchild MacMonnies (later Low) was one of the most successful American women artists of her generation. Mary Fairchild was born in Connecticut, but was raised largely in St. Louis, Missouri. Inspired by her mother's work as a painter of miniatures and dissatisfied as a school teacher, she enrolled in the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, where she led a movement for women to be permitted to draw model posed in the nude, an important component of artistic training then considered improper for well-bred young women. Impressed by her talent and drive, the school's director, Halsey Ives...

Like his mentor the great American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, Charles Webster Hawthorne was equally admired in his own day as both a talented painter and a highly influential instructor. Hawthorne first studied with Chase at his Shinnecock Summer School of Art, which was specifically dedicated to open-air landscape painting. Not only did Hawthorne quickly absorb all the principles of Chase’s instruction, but he also became determined to found his own school based on the same model. In 1899 Hawthorne discovered the small fishing village of Provincetown on the furthermost tip of Cape Cod, and after purchasing a large house on Miller Hill, he opened the Cape Cod School of Art, which proved to be an immediate success. While Hawthorne’s own approach as a teacher owed much to Chase, he developed a distinctly unique painting style and teaching method that defies easy categorization. He was greatly impressed with the work of Franz Hals, which he was exposed to during his trip to Holland in the summer of 1898. Hawthorne was particularly struck by Hals’ Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almhouse, and from this work he absorbed a deep appreciation for the power of human expression and an economy of technique. Hawthorne applied these lessons to his own realistic portraits of Provincetown fishermen and their families; these works have a somber, almost melancholy quality to them, and they reveal a sense of the vulnerability of the human condition. Stylistically, Hawthorne maintained a life-long commitment to the importance of color. “Beauty in art,” he said, “is the delicious notes of color one against the other.” Of equal importance to him was capturing the effects of light. He told his students: “Everything in painting is a matter of silhouettes. Hold light against shadow, not light against light.” He developed a particular technique of layering glazes and texturing the surface of his paintings, which heightens the relationship between the colors and creates a light effect that seems to emanate from within the painting. These stylistic techniques in combination with his straightforward compositions of one or more figures shown at close range create the hallmarks of Hawthorne’s best paintings. Hawthorne and his wife Ethel’s 1905-1907 trip to Italy did not result in a drastic impact on his artistic style. Nonetheless, it proved to be a transformative and enlightening voyage. The extensive trip was financed by collectors who paid in advance for a painting to be produced abroad. On the trip, Hawthorne explored the work of old masters and was struck particularly by the paintings of Titian, which to Hawthorne, demonstrated the master’s true adoration for the act of painting itself through his handling of paint and color. Where Titian’s paintings...

This bronze sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh, from 1911, is a charming rendering of a young woman dressing. Vonnoh became one of the so-called "White Rabbits", women artists who a...

Ben Benn American, 1884-1983 Dancing Girls Oil on board 14 ½ by 21 in, w/ frame 21 ½ by 28 in Studied: The Art Student League in NYC; National Academy of Design, 1904-1908. Membe...