Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Benson was a descendant of a family that had settled in Salem during the Revolutionary era and had prospered in the maritime trade. He grew up in privileged circumstances, engaging in sporting activities of tennis, fishing, and hunting, which he enjoyed for the rest of his life. From 1880-1883, he received his first art training at the newly founded School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he met fellow artists and life-long friends, Edmund Tarbell and Robert Reid. In 1883, Benson traveled to Paris and continued his studies at the Académie Julian under the instruction of Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. During his French years, he copied Old Master paintings at the Louvre and spent summers in the country. During the summer of 1884, he visited Concarneau, Brittany, where he met American painters, Alexander Harrison, Arthur Hoeber, and Edward Simmons, and was influenced by their somber palettes and genre subject matter.

On his return home in 1885, Benson rented a studio in Salem and began to exhibit at the Boston Art Club and the National Academy of Design in New York. In spring or fall of 1887, he taught at the Portland School of Art in Maine. In the next year, he moved his studio to Boston and was married to Ellen Peirson, a childhood friend. Although the couple settled in Salem, much of Benson’s life revolved around the Boston art world after he became an instructor at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston in 1889. Along with Tarbell, who began to teach there at the same time, Benson helped to establish the school as one of the outstanding art instruction facilities in the United States

Benson spent the summer of 1890 in Dublin, New Hampshire, where he came to know other artists who summered in the area, including Abbott Thayer, George de Forest Brush, and Rockwell Kent. In Dublin, Benson created a number of landscapes, but he returned to his emphasis on the figure in the early 1890s, when he created a number of interiors, which feature elegant women in darkened rooms lit only by firelight and oil lamps.Benson had achieved a position of renown in the Boston art scene by the early 1890s. In 1891, he had his first important show, a joint exhibition with Tarbell at J. Eastman Chase’s Gallery in Boston. Around the same time, he became a member of the Tavern Club, where he made the acquaintance of many well-to-do Bostonians who purchased his works. Through the Tavern Club Benson met the prominent expatriate painter, John Singer Sargent, whose art had an influence on his. In the early 1890s, Benson participated in the interest in decorative art that accompanied the American Renaissance era. In 1893, he created murals for the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, and a few years later he took part in the decoration of Boston Public Library, creating murals for the vault of the library’s south corridor.

In 1898, Benson joined a number of painters from New York and Boston, including Tarbell, Reid, Simmons, Thomas Dewing, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, and John H. Twachtman, to form the Ten American Painters. This group, which broke from away from the Society of American Artists (the principal artist organization of the time), consisted of several of the most advanced and talented artists of the era, many of whom were working in the French Impressionist style. Benson exhibited in all of the Ten’s annual exhibitions, which were held for twenty years.

Two sources influenced the Impressionist style Benson formulated around the turn of the century. He was inspired to explore the modern French approach by both his friends in the Ten and by the sunlit countryside of North Haven Island, Maine, located in Penobscot Bay, where he summered beginning in 1901. Benson first saw North Haven during the summer of 1900, while staying with friends in Ogunquit, Maine. From Ogunquit, Benson traveled to North Haven, where he visited the farm of Levi Wooster, which stood on Crabtree Point. The artist was immediately enamored of the locale with its open sunlit hills that offered views out to sea, and the next summer, he returned to the island and rented Wooster Farm. He would make annual visits to North Haven with his family for the rest of his life. On North Haven, Benson posed his wife, Ellen, and his children, Eleanor, Elisabeth, George, and Sylvia, on hillsides and at the water’s edge, and created vibrant painterly images that seem filled with light and air. Showing his daughters usually clad in white, their dresses and hair blown by the ocean breeze, Benson’s North Haven paintings express the essence of refined summer pleasures. As William Howe Downes remarked in 1911: “He sets before us visions of the free life of the open air, with figures of gracious women and children in a landscape drenched in sweet sunlight, and cooled by refreshing sea breezes.” (1)

By contrast, in his studio during the winter, Benson maintained a more traditional approach, depicting quiet interiors inhabited by carefully wrought figures. These works were influenced by the Dutch Little Masters, Vermeer in particular, and by Benson’s academic training. Benson’s interiors resembled those of Tarbell, who had initiated the Vermeer revival in America, and it was for these works that Benson has come to be known as a leading figure in the Boston School.

In the 1920s, Benson focused on another sort of imagery. Always a passionate naturalist and outdoorsman, he gave his attention to portraying wildlife, sporting, and hunting scenes. His depictions of these subjects in oil, watercolor, pen and ink, and etching were extremely popular.

Benson’s works may be found in many important private and public collections including the Albright-Knox-Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, Ohio; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; the Huntington Library, Pasadena, California; the Indianapolis Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Academy of Design, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.

(1) William H. Downes, “The Spontaneous Gaiety of Frank W. Benson’s Work,” Arts and Decoration 1 (March 1911), p. 195.

The above biography is copyright of Spanierman Gallery LLC, 45 East 58th Street, New York.

Frank Weston Benson's masterpiece paintings of American society at try are some of America's most popular works of art. 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 where his painting, After the Storm hung at the Royal Academy.

Upon returning to America, Benson opened a studio on Salem's Chestnut Street and began painting portraits of family and friends...

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