Worcester's pioneering paintings shows - Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by David R. Brigham

The inaugural exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1898 included prints, casts of antique sculpture, oil paintings, watercolors, and illustrations. The 165 oil paintings constituted the largest component of the display, and by 1900 the museum began to hold an annual exhibition exclusively of oil paintings. From these early shows the museum purchased paintings by American impressionists and Barbizon school artists that today form one of the strengths of an American collection that extends from the seventeenth century to the present.

The annual paintings exhibitions generated local, regional, and national publicity for the museum in recognition of its leading role in supporting an increasingly accomplished community of American artists. Worcester's success established a model for other museums founded early in this century and ironically created competition that eventually resulted in the demise of Worcester's annual paintings shows.

Among the contributors to the Worcester Art Museum's eclectic annuals were such Hudson River school painters as Albert Bierstadt, William Trost Richards, and Thomas Worthington Whitwedge. American painters of the Barbizon school included William Morris Hunt, George Inness, Henry Ward Ranger, and Dwight William Tryon. Realism was represented by Thomas Pollock Anshutz, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer, and later by Robert Henri and John Sloan. However, American impressionism was a special strength of these exhibitions, and regular submissions were made by Cecilia Beaux, Frank Weston Benson, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Edmund Tarbell, and Julian Alden Weir. Some of the artists lived in the vicinity or had ties to the new museum, among them Philip Leslie Hale, the first director of the School of the Worcester Art Museum, and Hermann Dudley Murphy, who taught oil painting at the school. Paintings were submitted from the most active art centers in the United States, including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and as far away as California. Expatriate painters such as Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Henry Ossawa Tanner were represented through works loaned by dealers, collectors, and the artists themselves. The wide-ranging exhibitions on occasion even included works by early American artists, nineteenth-century French painters, and the seventeenth-century Dutch school.(1)

The annual paintings exhibitions were created by inviting individual artists to send specific canvases for display. In 1903 the Worcester Daily Telegram explained the selection process:

In all cities where noted art exhibitions occurred, letters were written to reputable artists requesting them to inform the officials of the Worcester art museum relative to the pictures considered of the highest artistic merit or which for some other reason attracted the greatest attention.(2)

Cash prizes were awarded by a jury of artists, and just as the shows spanned the diverse styles of painting practiced at the turn of the century, so did the judges. Among them were Beaux, Benson, Charles Courtney Curran, and Edward Willis Redfield. Barbizon school judges included Ranger and Robert Swain Gifford, while among the realists were Eakins and Frederic Porter Vinton.

With the appointment of Philip G. Gentner as the first professional director of the museum in 1908, the prize money was reallocated for the purchase of works of art. Gentner visited the studios of artists in search of paintings worthy of exhibition and wrote letters inviting artists to participate in which he listed the paintings purchased from the previous years display, implying that a strong submission might result in a sale. This shift in policy had the fortunate consequence of adding to the collection such important paintings as Benson's Girl Playing Solitaire [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED], Metcalf's Prelude [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED], Sargent's Venetian Water Carriers [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IX OMITTED], and Hassam's Breakfast Room, Winter Morning, New York [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XI OMITTED].

In 1904 the museum bought The Venetian Blind by Tarbell [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE V OMITTED], which had been exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris and at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis, Missouri. Critics were divided as to whether the painting was a virtuoso demonstration of the high level American painting had attained or merely a technical exercise without a larger message. Hale, however, felt it was "the best picture that has been done in America,"(3) and in 1905 the museum gave Tarbell a one-man show.

In 1907 Tarbell's peer in Boston Frank Benson was also the subject of a one-man show at the museum. Benson was clearly held in high regard by the museum. In 1908 it acquired his Portrait of My Daughters [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VI OMITTED], set at the artist's summer retreat in North Haven, on Penobscot Bay in Maine, and early in 1909 Gentner visited his studio in Boston, where he saw Girl Playing Solitaire [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED] in the process of being painted. Shortly thereafter Gentner wrote Benson: