Seeing Big in Perkins Cove

Charles H. Woodbury used to tell the students in his Ogunquit, Maine Art of Seeing class to "paint big and fast outside" not because drawing doesn't matter (it does) but to help them capture their initial felt impressions of nature first. 

I love the runaway red in this painting, one of Woodbury's more Modernist-influenced works.

At 17, while an engineering undergrad at MIT, Woodbury became the youngest artist ever elected to the prestigious Boston Art Club. Critics recognized in his first solo show (which sold out - he was 18) the hallmarks of his life's work: a sensuous love of paint, a sharp observational eye, a sense of air and light, and, above all, a feeling for the world of "things" as the interaction of forces and resistance in motion. 

Cliffs at Ogunquit

Even though he'd decided he wasn't going to become an engineer (he was already supporting himself by teaching and selling his art), Woodbury was determined to finish MIT for the sheer challenge of doing so. He fell in love with one of his art students, a southern Mainer by the name of Susan (Marcia) Oakes. He stumbled on Ogunquit while visiting "Miss Oakes," and after they married he built a studio and a house for them and set up shop. In 1898 he established his summer art school, which he operated for the next 40 years under the banner of "The Art of Seeing." 

He was one of the earliest painters to teach what has become a core tenet of contemporary plain-air painting: active seeing, or "seeing like an artist," as it's often phrased.

Woodbury's view from his studio, a painting he titled "Phlox." Though thoroughly Impressionistic in influence, it illustrates Woodbury's sense of things as forces in motion. "Paint in verbs not in nouns," he told students.

Woodbury constructed a painting very quickly out of four or five flatly painted "color values" that corresponded to his spontaneous reaction to nature. "Be deliberate," he advised. "Size up the whole day and conditions.... Then paint as though you had been sent for. You cannot afford to lose a second anywhere – not a second." After that, his procedure was to take the painting to completion with only as much detail as he felt he could add before it began to take away from the "great things" that were there at the start.

Woodbury was more practical than visionary; he chose traditional representation at a time when abstract art was breaking the new ground. He didn't ignore Modernism completely, he just took bits and pieces of it here and there as it suited his purpose. 

There's a good bit of Modernist abstraction in the muscular contortions of these Ogunquit cliffs.

Much of his work combines "Impressionism, oriental compositional motifs, and the sensuous lines and jewel-like colors of the Art Nouveau," as art historian Erica E. Hirschler correctly nailed it.

But his greatest influence came through his teaching. Before Woodbury's death in 1940, some 4,000 painters passed through his "Art of Seeing" summer program. The "colony"that sprang up around the school also drew important artists, including Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, Hamilton Easter Field, Robert Laurent, Marsden Hartley, George Bellows, and Walt Kuhn.

The "sensuous lines and jewel-like colors of the Art Nouveau."

“A picture is a thought or feeling expressed in terms of Nature," he wrote. "The method is a matter of the moment….Clear sight, clear thought, clear expression; the thought should depend on the sight, and the expression on the thought....Realism is not based on the way things are, but upon things as you see and feel them. Realism is after all only what you think the thing may be.”

What I like about Woodbury is his rejection of painting as simple imitation in favor of an expressive perceptual approach. He's rooted as much in love for the medium as in the desire to see clearly with the heightened perception of the fully present eye and mind. 

Often eliminating foreground cues, Woodbury originated a convention in marine painting in which the viewer is suspended in mid air above the waves.

Woodbury's "Thunderstorm." Before 1940, landscape painting didn't get much more direct and gestural than this.

For my students and other folks nearby: Through a series of presentations and painting workshops, I hope to help share Woodbury's work and his approach to getting "the big things" in nature with a new audience. I want to see if, by "seeing big," we can capture spontaneity and originality in paintings that work. 

I'll be giving a free presentation on Woodbury and his teaching philosophy at the Beth Ellis Cove Gallery in Perkins Cove (within sight of Woodbury's original 1898 studio) this Sunday, April 14, at 2 p.m. You can download a preview of the presentation from my website: http://christophervolpe.com/exhibitions-galleries/

The presentation came about because of a one-day workshop I'm conducting in Ogunquit on the 19th in which we'll take inspiration from Woodbury's approach to seeing and painting. There's still space for a few more - let me know if you're interested in joining us.

In the planning is a week-long course in Woodury's "Art of Seeing" that I'll offer jointly with painter Todd Bonita through the Beth Ellis Cove gallery in September.

Ogunquit headlands.

Maria J.C. a'Becket - Rediscovering an American Original

A wild, expressionistic seascape by 19th century Maine landscapist Maria a'Becket. In the 1890s, very few American artists (and even fewer "women painters") dared to wield such thick, gestural chunks of paint. 

On a breezy spring day in 2006, I was poking around among contemporary and 19th century landscape paintings at the Banks Gallery in Portsmouth, NH, when the above painting slapped me to attention.

Had to be contemporary, at least mid 20th century, with abstract-expressionist paint-handling like that, right? Stunned, I learned that not only was the painting created by a forgotten 19th century artist, but that the artist was a woman, someone born in Maine who called herself Maria J. C. a'Becket, a nom de plume absent from the recent scholarship on the history of women in the arts, and of course missing from standard art history textbooks, even those mentioning female contemporaries like Gertrude Fiske, Cecilia Beaux, or Maria Cassatt.

It turns out that, despite an apparently prolific output, a bit more than two dozen of a'Becket's paintings are accounted for. One is in the possession of the Portland Museum of Art, and two are held by the Maine Historical Society. Other than a few more in storage at a number of small museums, the rest reside in private collections, periodically popping up to change hands at auction. How could this be?

A river landscape with overhanging trees by Maria J. C. a'Becket, c. 1890

My encounter with the mystery of Maria a'Becket began a semi-obsessed four-year investigation to recover the life and work of an unjustly forgotten 19th century painter. The trail led from Portland and Bar Harbor, Maine to Boston, New York, and St. Augustine, Florida, where I dug through yellowed newspaper articles and exhibition catalogues, microfilmed letters, diaries, and periodicals, searched the correspondence of millionaire art collectors, and combed out-of-print memoirs, histories, and long-defunct art magazines. The existence, as I learned more, of a celebrated and spirited, female avant-garde artist contradicted a lot of what I'd been taught about the official "story" of American art history!

Every few months I'd uncover another long-buried reference to “Maria J.C. a’ Becket,” and it was often something larger than life: wild flights at the easel with a visionary’s fervor outside during a thunderstorm, shooting off hunting rifles or starting an artist's colony in the Wild West, sketching among moonlit pines in Florida or in fishing villages in Normandy and meeting millionaires in mountain crags in North Carolina, obtaining a private audience with the Pope in Rome, having solo shows in Boston and on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, holding forth with Vanderbilt and other financial barons, navigating rapids in a birchbark canoe. How could such an interesting, successful artist have completely vanished from history? I put together what pieces of the puzzle I could find in an article published in the current issue of the scholarly journal Maine History. At least a semblance of her remarkable life and work are back on record!

C. 1879, signed "M. Becket"

So who was Maria a'Becket?
A'Becket was the daughter of a Portland drug store owner and amateur landscapist Charles E. Beckett who died as a result of a fire that devastated the city in 1866. She was born Maria Graves Beckett in Portland, Maine, on July 7, 1839. A'Becket established a highly successful professional career painting landscapes in a Barbizon-Impressionist variant all her own. She died of heart disease in New York on September 7, 1904. Lacking any heirs or living relatives to champion her memory, her name dropped out of currency (but she was once so well-known that the New York Times included her in a special New Year’s Day feature on “Famous Women Whose Careers Ended in 1904”).

It seems she blazed her own trail at a time when women who wanted to be artists faced a major uphill climb. From Who Was Who in American Art, I learned early on that A'Becket had studied with heavyweights Homer Dodge Martin, William Morris Hunt, and in France with pre-Impressionist innovator Charles Daubigny. From biographical clips in a Florida newspaper, I learned that during the 1880s she shared a small cabin in rural Virginia with a younger female athlete-turned-artist named Bertha Von Hillern, whom she'd met in Hunt's classes in Boston. The two lived and painted in this rural "American Barbizon" setting for nearly a decade, until a'Becket took a studio in the famous Tenth Street studio building in New York.

Landscape by Maria a'Becket in the collection of Maine's Portland Museum of Art.

The caliber of her growing exhibition opportunities and the positive news articles I was finding argued that by then she'd established herself as a successful landscape artist with a popular, distinctive style. Society writers noted her brilliant conversation, unusual independence, and quirky and original painting style. A new digitization that appeared on Google Books revealed that the avant-garde American art critic Sadikichi Hartmann had recognized A'Becket as “a peculiar phenomenon in our art” with a “frail build” and “the vigorous touch of a man." Hartmann wrote that she had “rendered some of the wildest and grandest scenes of the ocean," and described her thus:

"in moods of religious ecstasy, with so intense an energy as to raise blisters at her finger‑tips, [she] paints impressionistic sketches which would have gained her a reputation in Europe long ago.  After having associated with men like Homer Martin, W.M. Hunt, and Daubigny, she invented a pallet‑knife style of her own, in which she slaps on pure colours in a wild improvisatore fashion....She seldom exhibits, but various art lovers and critics have been attracted by her work." (A History of American Art, vol. 1, Boston, L.C. Page & Co., 1909, p. 105). 

A call to the Flagler Art Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, which holds one of her paintings in its collection, revealed that during the 1890s, A'Becket became a sought-after artist-in-residence at St. Augustine's Flagler Hotel (alongside Martin Johnson Heade) and summered in high-society resort spots in Bar Harbor and Newport, RI. Ship manifests prove that she revisited Europe. Her work is listed in exhibit catalogs for most of the major venues for professional American painters of the time, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the American Art Union, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the National Academy of Design. New York Times articles tracked her appearances in exhibitions that also included George Inness, Ralph Albert Blakelock, Homer Dodge Martin, Frederick William, Dwight Tryon, Alexander Wyant, Francis W. Kost, Abbot Thayer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and John Francis Murphy at venues like the woman‑ and Tonalist‑friendly Lotos Club of New York.
 
It took me a while to pin down, but I think her mature work absorbs and personalizes the Barbizon style, infusing it with a rapid, sketch-like line, an exuberant individual sense of color, and vigorous paint-handling inspired by French Impressionism.  

A colorful marsh sunset by Maria a'Becket

A'Becket’s “shimmery” semi‑abstract marine works in particular prefigure abstract expressionism in their decentralized “all‑over” broken‑color composition, their engagement with the active gesture, and their foregrounding of the medium itself through unblended color and surface impasto.

A seascape by a'Becket employing impasto and broken color to achieve a scintillating, jewel-like surface. Few painters of the time so successfully set the surface of their works in motion.

But what now seems most “peculiar” in considering Beckett’s achievement is not so much her work but how early she created it, how successful she became, and against what odds. During the 1860s, '70s and '80s, few women ventured outside of the accepted genres and mainstream styles of the day. 

Gloucester marine by a'Becket

She was an original. Seeking out the most radical masters, living three‑quarters of the year for nearly a decade in nature, she rejected her peers’ prevalent aesthetic theories and artistic trends, and became one of the first American painters to wholeheartedly adopt the entire raft of what were then quite radical techniques associated with the European avant‑garde And for all this she was rewarded with fame during her lifetime and, unfortunately, obscurity after her death.  


Two great books that have done much to reconstruct the lives and careers of other nineteenth-century women who were artists are Kirstin Swinth's Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Erica Hirschler's A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940 (MFA Publications, August 15, 2001).