David Gilmour Blythe

David Gilmour Blythe (born May 5 or 9, 1815 in East Liverpool , Ohio , † May 15, 1865 in Pittsburgh ) was an American self-taught artist.

Life

David Gilmour Blythe had Scottish ancestors on his father's side and Irish ancestors on his mother's side. He was the fourth of six sons to John and Susan Blythe, who immigrated in the summer of 1811. He grew up little sheltered. His relatives first discovered that he had artistic skills when they saw a portrait of a neighbor that Blythe had drawn on a door.

At the age of 16, Blythe left home and moved to Pittsburgh, where he lived for a few years and made a living as a craftsman. During this time he became acquainted with the woodcarver Joseph Woodwell. In 1834 he teamed up with his brother John. They traveled to New Orleans on the Mississippi . Three years later, in July 1837, Blythe went to New York and signed up for the Navy. On August 2 of the same year, he set sail on the USS Ontario . In the following months he reached Cuba , Jamaica , Puerto Rico , Mexico , the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands with this ship ; In 1838 he witnessed the French bombing of Veracruz . Returning to East Liverpool, he began working as a portrait painter in 1840. In the winter of 1846 he moved to Uniontown , Pennsylvania, and on September 30, 1848, he married his fiancée Julia Keffer in St. Paul's Cathedral in Pittsburgh, with whom he had exchanged numerous letters and poems. Like Blythe, Julia Keffer was born in East Liverpool, but moved to Uniontown with her family as a child. There she died of consumption less than two years after the marriage . Blythe would never recover from this loss.

Around 1850 he began his major project, a panorama of the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia . Around the middle of the 19th century, such panoramas were shown in traveling exhibitions, where they, mounted on rollable frames, were pulled past in front of the eyes of the seated audience. These presentations were accompanied by the recitation of suitable texts and sometimes with music.

He also created a larger than life sculpture depicting General Lafayette and, on his travels through the country to collect picturesque scenes for his panorama, numerous portraits of regionally or nationally known or at least wealthy people.

After drawing sketches for the panorama for two summers, he began to transfer the motifs onto canvas in his studio in Uniontown. The pieces were seven by fifteen feet long; the assembled panorama was about 200 feet long. The work was finished in September 1851. After the panorama was shown in Uniontown, a tour was to begin, which was to begin on October 3, 1851 in Cumberland , Maryland . Blythe traveled with friends and supporters James T. Gorley and PU Hook; great financial success was expected from the presentation of the panorama. But these hopes were false. After Blythe and his company had stopped in a few cities, the company in Cincinnati had to be closed. Parts of the panorama were then sold, and some were still used as backdrops at Trimble's Variety Theater in Pittsburgh. Nothing of the panorama has survived.

Blythe, who had begun poetry after this failure, only returned to Uniontown for a short time and then began a wandering life. A manuscript from this period, which he entered on an old album of his wife, has been preserved on microfilm in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art . Where Blythe stayed in the years up to 1854 can no longer be traced, but during this time he probably also visited Boston and New York and got to know the works of Dutch and Flemish painters as well as artists from the Hudson River School, including Asher B. Durand . His biographer Bruce W. Chambers noted a change in his painting from this period "from stiffness to fluency, from simplicity to complexity".

Art Versus Law

In 1855 Blythe returned to East Liverpool, where he again earned his living as a portrait painter, but also began painting genre pictures . Soon after, at age 41, he moved back to Pittsburgh. Rebuilt after a major fire in 1845, this city had turned into an industrial city. Blythe now painted the victims of this development: drinkers, beggars, homeless, anti-social youth, dirty street children. The painting Art Versus Law dates from the Pittsburgh period and , according to Chambers, contains a public admission of Blythe's guilt: The seedy painter who has to leave his studio is obviously a drinker. The art collector CH Wolff bought the picture for 35 dollars. It is now in the Brooklyn Museum . In addition to Art Versus Law , according to some biographers, Blythe also contains other pictures of his self-portrait: Bruce W. Chambers assumed that he could have depicted himself on Prospecting , Dorothy Miller suspected that the bearded man at the window in Libby Prison was a self-portrait of Blythe.

Blythe became a part of the Pittsburgh art scene that gathered around JJ Gillespie's gallery on Wood Street. He was friends with the sculptor Isaac Broome as well as with Gillespie. George Hetzel , Russell Smith, and Alfred Wall were also members of the circle . Gillespie often showed works by Blythe in his shop window, especially when he had turned to political realism and caricatures .

With the beginning of the Civil War , Blythe joined the Thirtheenth Pennsylvania Regiment and went from war theater to war theater for four months. At least ten works of art that had the war as their theme later developed from his sketches. After his return to Pittsburgh, Blythe planned another large panorama, this time for the Civil War, but did not implement this idea. In the spring of 1865, the heavy drinker was found unconscious in his bed. He was taken to St. Passavant Hospital, where his life came to an end; the doctors named mania potu as the cause of death.

Aftermath

G. David Thompson, who belonged to the Pittsburgh steel industry, started a collection of works by Blythe in the 1940s and made the painter popular among art collectors in Manhattan . His works came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art , the Smithsonian Art Museum , the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. One of his paintings can also be seen in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown , General Doubleday Crossing the Potomac . The Lafayette statue is still in Uniontown.

One of his paintings was auctioned for $ 100,000 in 2013. But until the 1930s, David Gilmour Blythe remained a relatively unknown artist. In addition to Thompson, William H. Vodrey Jr. was one of the early collectors involved in Blythe's work.

A curiosity is the theft of some of Blythe's works of art from the library in East Liverpool. Numerous works of Blythe's had been there for decades and unsecured. The thief selected only the best works from these holdings. The Gouty Fisherman has not reappeared since then. The remaining pictures, now in the hands of the East Liverpool Historical Society, were subsequently saved.

Web links

Commons : David Gilmour Blythe  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Aaron Skirboll, The Gritty Realism of Genre Artist David Gilmour Blythe , January 13, 2015 on beltmag.com
2. ↑ James Thomas Flexner, The Dark World of David Gilmour Blythe , in: American Heritage 13, Issue 6, October 1962 ( online )
3. ↑ Art Versus Law on www.brooklynmuseum.org
4. ↑ Erika Schneider: The Representation of the Struggling Artist in America, 1800-1865. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, ISBN 978-1-611-49413-6 , p. 158 ( limited preview in Google Book Search)