In the Beginning: Howard Terpning

People have differing opinions regarding when New York City went to hell (I say it was around 1965) and the same goes for what span of years represented the Golden Age of American illustration art. However, most observers seem to agree that the illustration party was pretty much over by 1970.

So what was a (previously) successful illustrator to do when the market for his work was in a state of collapse? Some migrated to doing cover art for books. Others went into portrait painting. And a few, including James Bama and Howard Terpning (born 1927), the subject of this post, left the New York area to do Western fine art painting.

Biographical information on Terpning can be linked here and here. He was part of the last generation of traditional illustrators, those just old enough to have establish themselves by the early 1960s when the market for their work started to crumble. For instance, he was born the same year as Bob Peak; both Peak and Terpning (for a while) taking up the slack by doing movie poster art (See Leif Peng's post on Terpning's posters here.)

Peak died comparatively young, but Bama and Terpning were still alive when this post was written. From what I've read, Bama is no longer active, but Terpning continues to paint and his works have been well received by buyers favoring Western art.

Terpning focuses on American Indians as subject matter as the images below suggest.

Signals in the Wind

War Stories

Status Symbols

Now for examples of Terpning's illustration work.

Gallery

Beer advertisement

Poster for "Cromwell" - 1970

Poster illustration for "The Sand Pebbles" - 1966

"The Wild Bunch" - 1969

Bar scene

The first illustration is a pretty conventional 1960-vintage work that might have been done by other good illustrators. The movie poster art make use of compositional clichés of the time, and Terpning used a smoother, less painterly style that probably was in line with his clients' expectations.  The two lower illustrations use a sketchy style popularized in the 1960s by the great Bernie Fuchs.  So Terpning was both skilled and versatile, but never quite attained a distinctive style.

Arthur Mathews' Tranquil Painted World

Gertrude Stein famously said regarding Oakland, California that "there is no there there." If you consider Oakland's context in the Bay Area setting and when she last lived there (1903), she might have had a point. (These days, I think the East Bay towns of San Leandro, San Lorenzo and a few others along the flats could be more aptly described thus.) But even today, if you exclude the part of Oakland in the hills and perhaps the part around Lake Merritt and bits of downtown, her point still holds.

One positive Oakland item is the fact that its Oakland Museum of California has a good collection of works by Arthur Frank Mathews (1860-1945) and his wife Lucia Kleinhans Mathews (1870-1955). Their paintings, picture frames and other objects might be pigeonholed as Art Nouveau or Tonalist and clearly seemed old-fashioned during the 1950s when the classical phase of Modernism reached its peak of influence. Now that we are a century away from Arthur Mathews' heyday, his art is oddly compelling, perhaps because it is utterly lacking in irony, transgressive statements, snide cultural references and whatever other characteristics are honored these days by the Art Establishment.

A brief Wikipedia entry on Mathews is here and another short biographical piece is here. A checklist of his mural work can be found here. There's even something I wrote regarding Mathews several years ago here.

Let's take a look at some of his paintings (click to enlarge).

Gallery

Youth - c.1917
Although he painted a variety of subjects, Mathews might be best known for his images of dancers.

Centaur and Mermaid on a Beach at Sunset
He did on occasion draw on mythology, as seen here. He also did historical paintings, the most important being murals for the state capitol building in Sacramento.

Afternoon Among the Cypress - 1905
Then there were landscapes, many of which featured cypress trees.

Scene with orange poppies
Mathews studied at Paris' Académie Julian 1885-89, so might have been aware of paintings of poppy fields done by Claude Monet in the late 1870s.

Girls dancing

Spring Dance

The Dancers
Young women donning flowing robes and dancing as ancient Greeks supposedly did was a fad on American college campuses in the early twentieth century; plenty of old college yearbooks have photos that attest to this. Mathews was surely aware because the University of California (in the years before other campuses were added) was at nearby Berkeley.

Three women walking - c.1917

Three women gazing
Not the same women, and none are dancing, either.

Apparently unfinished painting
I don't know if this was a mural or an easel painting. Some of the background figures are unfinished. Mathews at this time (1915-20?) seems to have blocked in the main elements -- clothing, faces, etc. -- and then worked in shading and details.

Isaak Levitan: Russian Landscape Master

Readers of this blog who plan to visit Russia are most likely to do so via a cruise ship, which means that St. Petersburg and vicinity is what will be seen. And as for art, the place most likely to be visited will be the Hermitage. But there is more good art to be seen in St. Petersburg besides the Hermitage's collection, so I urge you to try to find time to tour The Russian Museum. It's not far -- about one kilometer east -- as the double-headed Imperial eagle flies.

There you will find examples of paintings by Russia's best late 19th century and early 20th century artists including the great Isaak Levitan (1860-1900) who died before reaching his 40th birthday. His Wikipedia entry is here and more biographical information is here.

By their nature, landscape paintings require less commentary that those dealing with people, so I'll simply let you examine some examples of Levitan's work below. However, let me note that he seems to have included water in his images where possible.  Perhaps selecting scenes with water was one of his strategies to add viasual interest in the part of Russia where he lived and worked -- a land with no mountains.

Gallery

Lake

Evening on the Volga - 1888

Landscape

Silent Monastary - 1890

After the Rain, Pylos - 1889

River Istra at Twilight - 1885

The Evening Bells - 1892

Harold Speed: Painter, Teacher, Writer

There's the old saw that goes something like "Them's that cain't do, teach." A grain of truth there for certain fields, but by no means generally so. When it comes to art instruction books, as best I can tell, the authors actually seem to be artists.

Then there's the case of sports, where it is said that the best coaches and instructors are usually not the best athletes. The reason offered is that really gifted athletes practice their techniques intuitively, and aren't really aware of the details less gifted people need to learn in order to improve their skills. A lesser athlete has to pay close attention to such details and therefore is better equipped to impart them to others.

So does this apply to art instruction in studios or via books? Maybe, but I'm not sure, never having seriously analyzed the situation. The reason why I haven't is that when I buy an art instruction book (something I seldom do anymore), I gravitate to books where the author's drawings or paintings influence my decision to purchase. That is, if I don't care for the author's artistic style and degree of expertise, I won't buy the book.

Do other aspiring artists do what I do? I have no idea. But let's consider the case of an artist whose books have been in print for the better part of a century, clearly implying broad acceptance.

That would be Harold Speed (1872-1957). A short Wikipedia entry on Speed is here. Matthew Innis has a long post dealing with Speed here.  Besides many examples of Speed's paintings, Innis includes step-by-step images from a portrait tutorial.

Speed wrote two books about doing art. They are "The Practice and Science of Drawing" and "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials," respective Amazon links here and here. Innis mentions that the latter book is in the public domain and can be found online.

So how good was Harold Speed? Let's look at a few of the portraits he painted.

Gallery

Frank Pomeroy - 1898

Lady Diana Bridgeman

Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman - 1907

Lady in Green

Lillah McCarthy as Jocasta - c.1907

My reaction is that Speed did good, competent work, capturing his subjects with solid skill. Lacking is the flash, dash and artistic personality that more famous portrait painters such as John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, Joaquin Sorolla, Giovanni Boldini, Philip de Laszlo and a few other contemporaries and near-contemporaries. I suppose this comes close to the case of sports mentioned above. Whereas the painters just listed might have some students or might have passed along tips regarding painting, so far as I know they never wrote books on the subject. Speed wasn't quite an absolute top-level painter if fame is the criterion, but he was highly competent and able to convey what students of drawing and painting needed (and still need) to know.

Albert Edelfelt: Classic Peripheral

Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905) was one of the artists who served as inspiration for my "Peripheral Artists" series of posts during my time Second or Third Banana at the old Two Blowhards blog.

The phrase Peripheral Artists is actually a kind of pun, because it means artists who were (and to some extent still are) peripheral to the Art Establishment version of art history while also being from lands peripheral to the major art centers of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This dawned on me while touring Helsinki, Finland and visiting its prime art museum, the Ateneum. There were a number of fine paintings by this Edelfelt, a fellow I had never heard of, not to mention other good paintings by other artists flying below the Art Establishment radar.

As for background on Edelfelt, there's his Wikipedia entry here, but it is skimpy indeed. A much more detailed source is here. Edelfelt, after studying in his native Finland (then a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire), went to Amsterdam for a while, but moved on to Paris, as many Peripheral Artists did. There he studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme and became friends with Jules Bastien-Lepage, two of the most important non-Impressionists of the day.

Edelfelt's portrait of Louis Pasteur proved to be a prize-winner that launched his career in that genre, later sitters included the Czar. And he painted other subjects as well, as shown below.

Gallery

Kuningater Blanka (White Queen) - 1877

Louis Pasteur - 1885

Nicholas II - 1896

A Child's Funeral - 1879

Kaukola Ridge at Sunset - 1890

The Gossips - 1887

Portrait of a Young Lady - 1889

Emilie von Etter, Cannes - 1891

Brunette - 1885

Walter Ernest Webster: Artist Without a Biography

Walter Ernest Webster (1878-1959), British.

That's it. That is about all I could find about the man on the Internet aside from a good many of his paintings. Something about him will surely turn up, but for now all I can do is display some of his works.

Gallery

After the Performance - watercolor

Coquette

Lady Diana
I'm not sure about the title, but that's what one Web site called it.

Rhapsody

Sweet Lavender

The Japanese Fan - 1909

The Lute Player

Clearly, he liked to depict young women, and did that well. He also painted a number of nudes that might be a little stark for viewing at the office.

Prendergast Actually Painted Some Portraits

Alas, I've never been a fan of the art of Maurice Prendergast (1859-1924). That's because I've never liked broken-color Impressionist style paintings. I probably never will like that style. And I can't easily explain why I don't like it; something visceral, I suppose. Try not to hold it against me.

As for Prendergast, some biographical information can be found here and here.

Being a committed broken-color guy, he usually painted outdoor scenes, though not many still lifes. Interestingly, he often included small, full-length human figures in his landscape works, usually with many such figures in a single painting.

Another genre he tended to avoid was portraiture. That's not surprising because painters using broken-color or small-areas-of-flat-color styles as Prendergast did, probably found that such styles weren't compatible with portraiture. Nevertheless, he did paint a few portraits in the years immediately after he moved to New York City. I located three such images on the internet, and here they are:

Gallery

Portrait of a Young Girl - c.1913

Portrait of a Young Girl with Flowers - c.1910-13

Miss Edith King - c.1913

Like many American Impressionists, Prendergast retained a certain amount of delineation and structure in his paintings. This is particularly noticeable in the portraits shown above, because if an artist's intent when making a portrait is to actually portray, then the Impressionistic approach has to be dialed back, as they say.

The images above strike me as being satisfactory Impressionist style portraits, but not very satisfactory from the standpoint of pure portraiture.