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The New York Water Color Club

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2005 by David A. Cleveland

The New York Water Color Club (NYWCC), founded in 1890, has always been something of a phantom on the radar screen. This is primarily due to the club's amalgamation with the American Watercolor Society in 1941.

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The NYWCC was founded by a group of ambitious and skilled artists, among them Childe Hassam (see Pls. VII, VIII), Charles Warren Eaton (see Pls. IV, IX), Rhoda Holmes Nicholls (see Pl. II), and Henry Bayley Snell (1858-1943). They were seeking another outlet and forum for their work, both in watercolor and pastel. The American Watercolor Society, founded in 1866, had, by the end of the 1880s, grown in membership and expanded its annual spring exhibition to nearly eight hundred works, including many by amateurs. The young talents who formed the NYWCC were intent on a more elite and professional, yet democratic, organization to promote their work.

In its first decade and into the early years of the twentieth century, the NYWCC was in the forefront of the tonalist movement, which specialized in intimate landscapes in muted tones, while promoting Whistlerian aestheticism, particularly by including pastels in their annual exhibitions. In addition, the club promoted the interests of women in art by exhibiting many of their works and encouraging their participation in the executive functions of the club.

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The early 1880s witnessed a sea change in American art circles. A new generation of American artists had returned from Paris, Munich, London, and Venice with radical new ideas that challenged the older Hudson River school establishment at the National Academy of Design in New York City. The young artists disdained the grandiose, often bombastic, landscapes of the previous generation with their elaborate details and nationalistic themes. Under the spell of James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), this generation championed the guiding principle of art for art's sake, stressing design and the beautiful application of pigment to achieve a unified and pleasing effect. Tonalist landscapes were favored, often scenes at dawn or dusk, emphasizing a mood rather than a specific place.

From Munich, artists like William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), John Henry Twachtman (see Pls. V, VI), and Frank Duveneck (1848-1919) brought back vigorous brushstrokes and an expressive style that was as much about the application of paint as it was about the subject painted. From Paris and the American art colonies in Brittany and Normandy, painters like Julian Alden Weir and the brothers Alexander and Birge Harrison, under the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage, developed an abiding love for naturalistic atmospheric effects and a high horizon line to dramatize foreground features in their landscapes. (1) From Dutch sources and the Hague school, artists like Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916), Twachtman, and Leonard Ochtman (1854-1934) returned to the United States with a love for domesticated landscapes bathed in silvery light. (2)

From an institutional perspective, these stylistic shifts in American art resulted in the creation of three new professional organizations: the Society of American Artists in 1877; the Society of Painters in Pastel in 1884; and the NYWCC. The Society of American Artists was founded by a group of young artists that formed around John La Farge (see Pl. XI). They split with the National Academy because of the latter's prejudice against the work of the younger European-trained artists. The society's first exhibition in 1878 at the Kurtz Gallery in New York City featured the works of founding members whose names read like a who's who of artists working in Whistler's aesthetic tonal mode. They included La Farge, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, William Sartain, Robert Swain Gifford, William Morris Hunt, Homer Dodge Martin, and others who were pioneering the newest stylistic advances taught in Paris and Munich as well as the tenets of the English aesthetic movement promoted in the writings and lectures of Whistler and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).

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The younger generation led by Chase and his students from the Art Students League soon took a prominent role in the society's exhibitions. They not only favored a progressive approach to art, but also instituted fairer, more exacting, and more scrupulous juries to vet works for the society's annual exhibitions. By contrast, the National Academy allowed members to exhibit without vetting.

The trend toward greater professionalism was reinforced by the founding of the Society of Painters in Pastel, the first group in the United States to promote pastels as a serious medium. It was also the most ephemeral art society of the day, folding in 1890 after only six years and four exhibitions. Members included Robert Blum (1857-1903), Chase, Hugh Bolton Jones (1848-1927), Weir, and Twachtman, all of whom were also influential in the Society of American Artists. The Society of Painters in Pastel was one of the conduits by which Whistler--his style, techniques, and artistic persona--was most ably introduced to the American art world. (3) Blum, Weir, and Twachtman in particular encouraged an entire generation to appreciate Whistler's sketchy, intimate, and idiosyncratic style, which successfully translated the most transitory effects of atmosphere and light onto toned paper. Whistler's less-is-more aesthetic became widely influential throughout the art world into the first decade of the twentieth century.