Frank W. Benson - American painter - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2000 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

The American impressionist Frank W. Benson is probably best known for his paintings of women seated or standing on a windswept promontory overlooking the sea. These are studies of sunlight on the shimmering white summer dresses worn by patrician women and children around the turn of the twentieth century. An exhibition on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, until February 18, 2001, includes seventy-seven works of art illustrating the full range of his varied output: portraits, still lifes, interiors, wildlife paintings, outdoor scenes, brilliant watercolors, and textured etchings and lithographs.

Benson was born in Salem and began his artistic career as he later ended it, painting birds. After training at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston he made the then-obligatory pilgrimage to Paris, where in 1883 he enrolled in the Academic Julian and painted in the summer months at Concarneau with other expatriate Americans. He returned to Salem in 1885. took a studio in Boston in 1888, and the following year began to receive positive reviews. This led him to a teaching position at the Museum of Fine Arts School in 1889, where one of his colleagues was his lifelong friend Edmund Charles Tarbell. Achieving critical notice enabled Benson to abandon portraiture, although throughout his life he painted members of his family, paying his children fifteen cents an hour to model. He was a founding member of a group of artists known as the Ten who exhibited together annually from 1898 to 1918 in both Boston and New York City.

In 1901 Benson and his family began summering on North Haven Island in Penobscot Bay Maine. There he painted pleinair works that if unfinished, were carted back to his Boston studio. He was harshly critical of his own work and when dissatisfied he destroyed works even after they had been framed, abandoned works in progress, or painted over works that he deemed unsuccessful.

He explored still-life painting after about 1919, telling his daughter Eleanor, to arrange a still life "so that the light is beautiful. Don't paint anything but the effect of light. Don't paint things." Benson's compositions, both still lifes and interior scenes, include many artifacts that were popular during the colonial revival period--Oriental porcelains and screens, New England pewter and furniture, and other objects of antiquarian interest.

Before setting out for one of his many fishing expeditions (Benson was also an avid hunter) in 1921, he decided to bring along watercolors and paper. It proved to be a medium in which he was adept and thereafter he always traveled with these supplies. In all, he painted more than six hundred watercolors. Benson was a keen student of the natural world and toward the end of his life he became preoccupied with painting wildlife, particularly birds, which were acclaimed by the great naturalist Roger Tory Peterson. Sporting scenes were the primary subject of his etchings, which sold as quickly as he could produce them. He became a devoted conservationist and contributed much to organizations dedicated to these ends.

The catalogue of the exhibition has been published in the form of the museum's annual, Peabody Essex Museum Collections for 1999, volume 135. It contains essays by Faith Andrews Bedford, Benson's great-granddaughter and the guest curator of the exhibition, as well as by Laurene Buckley, Dean T. Lahikainen, and Jane M. Winchell. It maybe obtained by telephoning the museum at 800-745-4054, ext. 3119.