Benson in bloom: a new look at Summer

Magazine Antiques, April, 2006 by Trevor Fairbrother

(4) Bates was the president of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and an active member of the Providence Art Club. In 1894 he donated a significant painting (Portrait of a Lady in Pink, c. 1889) by William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) to the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and in 1906 he was one of the five men who purchased Benson's Lady Trying on a Hat of 1904 for the same museum.

(5) Catalogue of the Pictures: The First Exhibition, Ten American Painters, New York, Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York, March 31-April 16, 1898. Admission to the Ten's exhibition was fifty cents.

(6) From a review in the New York Sun (January 1908), as quoted in Pamela J. Belanger, Maine in America: American Art at the Farnsworth Art Museum (Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, 2000), p. 94.

(7) See Deborah Chotner's entry on the painting in Franklin Kelly et al., American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I: The Collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., and Oxford University Press, New York, 1996), pp. 28-31.

(8) Sheila Dugan, "Frank Benson: Outdoors," in Dugan et al., Frank W. Benson, the Impressionist Years (Spanierman Gallery, New York, 1988); and Faith Andrews Bedford, Susan C. Faxon, and Bruce W. Chambers, Frank W. Benson: A Retrospective (Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, 1989), p. 66.

(9) For an overview see Faith Andrews Bedford, "Frank W. Benson: The Divided Paintings," American Art Review, vol. 7, no. 4 (August-September 1995), pp. 106-113.

(10) Twenty-third Annual Exhibition of American Oil Paintings and Sculpture, Art Institute of Chicago, October 18-November 27, 1910, No. 22.

(11) Seventeenth Annual Exhibition of American Art, Cincinnati Museum, May 21-July 20, 1910, No. 2, p. 21; and Annual Exhibition of American Painting, John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis, December 1910. After the latter exhibition the host institution (now the Indianapolis Museum of Art) purchased the painting (now known as Sunlight) directly from Benson.

(12) Paintings by Frank Benson, St. Botolph Club, Boston, January 10-29, 1910, No. 2, Bela Pratt lent Sunlight Study to this exhibition (No. 16). The Rhode Island School of Design lent The Black Hat (No. 21), which is the painting now known as Lady Trying on a Hat; see n. 4.

(13) St. Nicholas, vol. 36, no. 10, frontispiece, p. 866.

(14) Frank Hoeber, "The Ten Americans," International Studio, vol. 35, no. 137 (July 1908), pp. 25-26.

(15) Caffin, "The Art of Frank W. Benson," pp. 105-106.

(16) Eleanor's remark as remembered by "granddaughter JA" in a 1982 interview with Faith Andrews Bedford. Quoted in Faith Andrews Bedford, Frank W. Benson: American Impressionist (Rizzoli, New York, 1994), p. 233, n. 12.

(17) Ibid., p. 43.

(18) Benson's passport is dated March 29, 1883 (Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts). The Boston painter R. H. Ives Gammell (1893-1981), who studied with Benson in 1913, recalled that he "cut a very imposing figure indeed [and] he was always impeccably clad." According to Gammell, the head of the Boston branch of F. L. Dunne ("the finest, and certainly the most expensive men's tailor in New England") clothed Benson for the remainder of his life in return for one his paintings (R. H. Ives Gammell, The Boston Painters, 1900-1930, ed. Elizabeth Ives Hunter [Parnassus Imprints, Orleans, Massachusetts, 1986], pp. 87-88).