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

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2005 by Charles Teaze Clark

(29) Eugen Neuhaus, The Galleries of the Exposition: A Critical Review of the Paintings ... (Paul Elder and Company, San Francisco, 1915), p. 33, available online through the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive (www.gutenberg.org).

(30) Edward Redfield's contributions to the field, which were spurred by the work of Wallace Nutting, are discussed in Constance Kimmerle, Edward W. Redfield: Just Values and Fine Seeing (James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania and University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 43-44.

(31) Robert W. Torchia, Xanthus Smith in Mount Desert Island, Maine (Clark Point Gallery, Southwest Harbor, Maine, 2003).

(32) Quoted in Christopher Young, director, Nature Is My Mistress, script by Hilda Osterhout Young.

(33) Young, "Nature Was My Mistress," p. 213.

(34) Ibid.

(35) Young received commissions to paint country houses, horses, and hounds from prominent members of the hunt including Walter Jeffords, whose collection of hunt paintings by Young appeared at auction in October 28, 2004 (The Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Walter M. Jeffords, Sotheby's, New York). Another patron was the author and hunter J. Stanley Reeve, whose Fox Hunting Recollections: A Journal of the Radnor Hounds and Other Packs (J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, 1928) includes a tribute to Young and illustrations of five of his paintings.

(36) From February 24 to April 2, 1929, Young exhibited watercolors, drypoints, and etchings at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. See www.corcoran.org. Young made prints for many years: An etching entitled Holland '92 (the date is an error in transcription; it was probably created in 1898) was included with four additional etchings in the 1999 catalogue Annual Fine Arts Auction, William H. Bunch Auctioneers, p. 53.

(37) A reproduction of My House in Winter in its original state can be found in Catalogue de luxe of the Department of Fine Arts, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Vol. II, ed. John E. D. Trask and Nilsen Laurvik (Paul Elder and Company, San Francisco, 1915), p. 403.

(38) Young had exhibited frequently at the National Academy of Design in New York City from 1891, and was voted an associate academician in 1914. His self-portrait is in the National Academy Museum's permanent collection.

(39) Newspaper accounts vary between seventy-five and three hundred; the latter number is cited in Young's obituary in the New York Times, November 16, 1964, p. 31.

(40) Quoted in George R. Staab, "Artist, 93, Says He's Crushed--Lost 75 Paintings in Blaze," Philadelphia Evening and Sunday Bulletin, November 25, 1962, section 1, p. 32.

CHARLES TEAZE CLARK is a freelance writer and arts consultant who lives in Connecticut.