In pursuit of a higher truth: the landscape paintings of Charles Morris Young

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2005 by Charles Teaze Clark

While in Paris Young met the American painter Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939), who became a close friend. In 1898 the two of them--with Frieseke serving as interpreter--visited Katwijk in the Netherlands, where Young found ready-made subjects in the picturesque village situated along a canal, and coached Frieseke in the techniques of watercolor. (14) The paintings Young completed during the trip to Katwijk represent his first sustained effort at recording related themes using varying approaches under differing atmospheric conditions. Canal in Winter (Pl. VIII), which was exhibited widely in 1901 and 1902, (15) repeats the seasonal theme established in L'Hiver a Moret but with a richer palette and a greater emphasis on traditional perspective. The somber subject and luminous twilit sky betray Young's admiration of tonalist painters, including Birge Harrison (1854-1929), a frequent contributor to annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy. (16)

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A related painting, Winter Morning After Snow, was bought for the academy's permanent collection in 1901, and another; The Frozen Mill Race (whereabouts unknown), won a silver medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904. Young received a series of awards at this time, including an honorable mention at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, and a silver medal at the InterState and West Indian Exposition in Charleston, South Carolina, the following year.

In the early 1900s Young met Eliza Middleton Coxe (1875-1950), a fellow student at the Pennsylvania Academy and a member of one of Pennsylvania's most influential families. (17) They married in 1903 and left Philadelphia for Europe. Arriving in Paris, they rented Cazin's apartment at 56 rue Notre Dame des Champs (Cazin had died in 1901), and Eliza enrolled at the Academie Colarossi while Young prepared entries for the 1904 exposition in Saint Louis. Fellow Philadelphian Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) suggested they visit Giverny, where an artists' colony had formed around Claude Monet (1840-1926) and where they spent the summer of 1905. Giverny (Pl. II) is one of only two known paintings from this period--a small-scale but richly varied landscape within the context of its wintry tonality.

The Youngs returned to Giverny in 1906 after a winter stay in Paris, lodging first at the Hotel Baudy, and then at a private house. Young renewed his friendship with Frieseke, who had settled in France and spent summers in Giverny, and it was no doubt the influence of such a large contingent of Americans painting in an impressionist vein that encouraged him to adopt the impressionist stylistic traits that would receive their greatest expression in his work of a decade later. Within a year of the birth of their first child, Arthur, in 1905, the Youngs returned to Philadelphia and soon after settled at Meadowbank, an old stone house on Eliza's grandparents' estate in Jenkintown. (18)

Young had a one-man show at Philadelphia's McClees Gallery in 1906, displaying paintings of Giverny and the first of the landscapes of the rural counties near Philadelphia that secured his reputation. (19) Only one of Young's works is known to have been painted near New Hope, where Redfield and his followers settled. (20) In Farmhouse in Winter of 1909 (private collection), which won an honorable mention at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1910, Young adopted a sun-drenched impressionist palette and light, quick brushwork to capture an old stone farmhouse surrounded by an array of barnyard implements. The influential critic Leila Mechlin (1874-1949) had recognized Young's skill with such themes in 1909, stating that, along with Redfield, "Mr. [Walter] Schofield and Mr. Young are preeminently painters of winter scenes, of snow, and sunshine and frosty crystalline air." (21)