Will Foote
View of Arizona Desert near Wickenberg, circa 1927
Signed lower center; titled and dated on the reverse
Oil on artist's board
12 x 16 inches
Foote was born on June 29, 1874 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and died on January 27, 1965, in Sarasota, Florida. He was in Old Lyme, 1901-65; and in Cos Cob, 1903.
Will Howe Foote was one of the earliest artists at Old Lyme and one who adopted the town as home. He first went there the summer of 1901 with his uncle, William H. Howe, a painter of cattle, who had been told about the beauties of the countryside by Henry Ward Ranger. Foote had himself heard of Old Lyme when he had met Clark Voorhees in France. He and his uncle were both from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Foote's father was an executive in the furniture industry that made the city famous. Encouraged to be an artist by his father, he began his professional training at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1894. He became friends there with a fellow Michigan student, Frederick Frieseke, who would study with him again at the Art Students League in New York, where Foote worked in 1895-96 under H. Siddons Mowbray and Kenyon Cox.
In 1897 he and Frieseke went to the Academic Julian in Paris, where Foote studied under Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. He was at Julian's until 1900, except for an Italian trip, summers at Laren, Holland, or Etaples, France, and a short period at Whistler's school in Paris. He exhibited twice at the Old Salon, and when he returned to the United States in 1900, he had a one-man exhibition in his hometown.
Will Howe Foote's paintings were well received on his return from abroad. He exhibited frequently at the National Academy of Design and became an associate member in 1910. His awards included a bronze medal at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904 and a silver medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.
Once he visited Old Lyme, Foote returned every summer. In 1902 he was hired as assistant to Frank DuMond at the Lyme Summer School of Art, which was sponsored by the Art Students League of New York. Sometime in 1903 he also taught a session in Cos Cob. After 1906, when the League moved its Lyme classes to Woodstock, New York, Foote continued in Old Lyme as a private instructor.
In 1907 he was married to Helen Kirtland Freeman, whom he had met a year or two earlier when she had come to the Lyme art colony as a student of Henry Rankin Poore. Fellow artist William Chadwick was best man at the wedding. The Footes began building a house on Sill Lane in Old Lyme and upon its completion in 1909 spent every spring, summer and fall there, where Foote devoted full time to painting. The Gregory Smiths, old friends from Grand Rapids, arrived in Old Lyme in 1910 and became neighbors. Foote's early works in Connecticut, such as A Summer's Night reflect the artist's interest in soft, atmospheric scenes dominated by a single, overriding tone. The arrival of Childe Hassam and Walter Griffin...
Category
1920s American Impressionist Charles Gordon Harris Art
