Five American Watercolorists
Sears Gallagher, Hayley Lever, Dodge Macknight, Annie Gooding Sykes, and John Whorf    Sep 29 - Oct 31, 2009

Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening on September 29, 2009 of Five American Watercolorists: Sears Gallagher, Hayley Lever, Dodge Macknight, Annie Gooding Sykes, and John Whorf. Although many American artists explored watercolor as the medium increasingly gained popularity beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the Impressionist era, few were primarily watercolorists until the second decade of the twentieth century. Among them are the five artists in this exhibition, for whom there was no better way to look at the world around them than through the lens afforded by watercolor, with its verve and spontaneity. The careers of these artists coincided with a period when the quickness, confidence, and certainty that watercolor encouraged made it seem an ideal artistic manifestation of the American spirit. This exhibition captures this optimism and sense of adventure with which these artists approached life.

The earliest-born of the five artists, Annie Gooding Sykes (1855-1931) had an especially long and successful career for a woman painter of her time. A native of Brookline, Massachusetts, she received training in drawing and painting in Boston at the Lowell Institute and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts before settling with her husband in Cincinnati in 1882, where she would be based for the rest of her life. The shift in her energies to watercolor in the early 1890s coincided with her transition from crisply rendered narrative scenes to images of floral landscapes, gardens, countryside, and seashores, for which she found the portability and luminosity of watercolor ideally suited to both her subject matter and her expressive identity. Her adoption of an Impressionist approach concurred with the rapid spread of the French style in America, and her rise to prominence can certainly be connected with this development. However, her distinction was due to her commitment to watercolor, in which she achieved exceptional proficiency, fluency, and vivacity. The medium afforded her the possibility of working continually while traveling and vacationing with her family (she returned often to Gloucester and Nonquitt, Massachusetts; Cape Porpoise, Maine; and Ithaca, New York), so that her images are a chronicle of her joyous responses to new as well as familiar places. Active in many of the organizations that sought to provide a vehicle by which women artists could receive recognition in a male-dominated field, she also received acknowledgment in such well-established venues as the New York Water Color Club (whose founding president was Childe Hassam), the Philadelphia Water Color Club, and the Ohio Water Color Society.

Born five years after Sykes, Dodge Macknight (1860-1950) was among the best-known watercolorists in America during the early twentieth century. His annual exhibitions in Boston sold out, his works fought over by such leading art patrons as Sarah Choate Sears, Desmond Fitzgerald, and Isabella Stewart Gardner, who created a “Macknight Room” at Fenway Court for her acquisitions. A native of Providence, Rhode Island, Macknight began to paint on his own before leaving for Paris, where he studied and exhibited at the Salon, as well as befriending Vincent van Gogh, with whom he spent time in Arles. It was in France that Macknight gravitated to watercolor, which suited his peripatetic existence. Indeed, Macknight could not stay put (his home from 1900 on was in East Sandwich, Massachusetts), traveling back and forth to Europe, North Africa, Jamaica, Mexico, Newfoundland, and throughout the United States, including sojourns in New England and to the Grand Canyon. He was drawn to extremes of heat and cold, studying effects of sunlight with broad, fluid washes and radiant color that evoke his admiration for van Gogh. Often his palette was too extreme for Boston audiences—detractors referred to his art as “chromatic Macknightmares.” Macknight’s stature was affirmed when his watercolors were shown in a three-artist exhibition at the Boston Art Club in 1921 along with those of John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer. At the time of the show, Marsden Hartley attributed Macknight with “visual bravery,” finding in his work “impressionistic veracity” and the same “virility of technique to be found in Homer.” Ceasing to paint in 1930 due to grief over the death of his son, Macknight lost his fervent following. Yet, as noted in a 1998 exhibition catalogue on American Watercolors in the Brooklyn Museum, the bold color and intriguing abstract qualities in his work “mark him as an individual talent” whose “oeuvre deserves reexamination.”

Like Macknight, Sears Gallagher (1869-1955) forged his career trajectory within the artistic community of Boston, his birthplace, where the watercolor tradition of Homer and Sargent was well established. With clear, pure washes and a light, fluent touch, Gallagher found watercolor an ideal forum by which to express his love for the outdoor life in New England. His favorite locale was Monhegan Island, where he spent “50 Summers,” capturing the rugged quietude of the remote rockbound locale, sixteen miles off the coast of Maine, and its hardy, well-ensconced fishing community--the artist himself was an avid fisherman. He also sought his subjects in Europe, where he traveled extensively, and in New Hampshire, spending winters in Jackson, where his brother lived, as well as in the White Mountains. Gallagher is also highly acclaimed for his etchings, but watercolor provided him with a break from the exacting techniques of printmaking, and he is noted for his simple yet refined compositions in which he avoided burdensome detail and recorded local character with thin translucent washes and subtle gradations of color, often capturing a light that is soft and crisp at the same time. Gallagher was lauded during his lifetime as an important figure in the first generation of the Boston School along with such artists as Frank Benson and Edmund Tarbell, but his reputation faded in the years following his death, when much of his work was put into storage. The recent rediscovery of Gallagher has restored an awareness of his role as one of the finest American watercolorists and etchers of his era.

A native of Adelaide, Australia, Hayley Lever (1876-1958) established a notable presence in British art circles before settling in 1912 in New York City, where he quickly won a name for himself in the national art scene. Although much of his oeuvre consists of oils, he also worked extensively in watercolor, exhibiting his images in the medium at annual exhibitions of the American Watercolor Society and elsewhere throughout the United States. He was considered a leading American practitioner of the medium. In 1921 the critic Henry Tyrell linked him with the new generation of American watercolorists of an “ultra-modern bent,” including John Marin and Charles Demuth, noting that Lever was an “eager innovator . . . (whose) aquarelle no less than his oil painting gains in stirring vitality with each successive season.” His skillful juxtaposing of transparent washes with lively staccato brushstrokes and his steadfast command of the medium are apparent in the watercolors he created of locales such as Gloucester and Nantucket, Massachusetts; Woodstock, New York; and many locales in New England. Lever lived by the conviction that “honest work, honestly done, will some time be appreciated and understood,” a belief that has come to pass in the appreciation of the work of an artist who demonstrated, in the words of Lloyd Goodrich, an “invigorating personal point of view.”

Born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, John Whorf (1903-1959) is considered among a second generation of Boston School watercolorists. Sears Gallagher was one of the artists he grew up admiring, while his painterly approach and attraction to dazzling sunlight evoke the art of Sargent and Macknight. By the 1930s in a city that had a long-established watercolor tradition, Whorf had become known as the “watercolor wizard of Boston” and the city’s “favorite watercolorist.” He had first used watercolor while traveling in Europe, finding that it provided him with a greater freedom to translate his immediate surroundings into paint than oil. Becoming devoted to watercolor, he reveled in depicting a wide array of subjects that he encountered both at home and abroad. A primary subject for him was the maritime life of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where his grandfather had worked as a shipbuilder, and where he continued to summer throughout his adult years. Often portraying dramatic phases of natural phenomena, Whorf captured the emotion of his scenes, conveying a palpable sense of ever-changing light and movement with a combination of sparkling transparent washes and deep opaque color. While seemingly effortless, his works, as noted in a 1940 article in the Art Digest are “testaments to a medium under absolute control.”