Douglas John Connah

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Douglas John Connah (born April 20, 1871 in New York City , † August 23, 1941 ibid) was an American landscape and portrait painter and illustrator . He taught at various art and summer schools in the United States . From 1897 to 1909 he succeeded William Merritt Chase as director and teacher of the New York School of Art .

Life

Connah was the son of John Connah and his wife Anna Maria, nee Dalhousie Duff. To study art, Connah left his hometown New York and attended the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar . In 1887, at the age of 18, he enrolled at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . There he attended Heinrich Lauenstein's elementary class until 1888 . In addition, Wilhelm's son was his teacher in Düsseldorf . Another station of his artistic training was the Académie Julian in Paris , where he studied under Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens and exhibited regularly in the salon .

Illustration from Two Girls of Old New Jersey , 1912

In October 1893 he married Nora Leslie in London . She gave birth to John Ferris "Jack" Connah (1896–1979), who later also became a portrait painter. In 1893 Connah was represented at the World's Columbian Exposition . In 1894 he appeared in the Royal Academy of Arts through the portrait Lost in Reverie (Lost in Reverie) . This portrait of the 4-year-old Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, who later became one of the most successful authors in literary history as Agatha Christie , is considered to be his most famous work. Since about this time he has provided illustrations for magazines, for example for the London magazines The Illustrated London News and The Sketch , and later also for books, for example for the story Two Girls of Old New Jersey by Agnes Carr Sage (* 1854) published in 1912 .

In New York City, where Connah returned in the mid-1890s and where he exhibited at the National Academy of Design , he was sponsored by the portrait and landscape painter William Merritt Chase . From 1897 to 1900 Connah taught at the Shinnecock Summer School of Art , the first open-air art school in the United States to train male and female art students near the town of Southampton on Long Island . He also worked at his New York art school, which taught male and female students in drawing, painting, composition, illustration, architecture and design. This school was founded by Chase in 1896. Connah ran the school, which was named New York School of Art in 1898 , from 1897 to 1909. It still exists today under the name Parsons The New School for Design . The students who studied there under his aegis include George Wesley Bellows , Patrick Henry Bruce , Edward Hopper , Rockwell Kent and Walter Pach . In addition to Chase, the teachers who worked under Connah's directorship included Alice Beckington (1868–1942), Grace Cornelia Canedy (1869–1965), Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951), Kenneth Hayes Miller (1876–1952), Francis Luis Mora (1874–1940), Theodora W. Thayer (1868–1905), Eugene Paul Ullman (1877–1953), from 1909 for a short time also Robert Henri .

In 1911 Connah founded the New England School of Design (also New School and New School of Design ) in Boston , which he headed until 1924. Arshile Gorky was one of the better-known students at this art school, where Vesper Lincoln George (1865-1934) taught alongside Connah and other teachers .

In 1925 Connah returned to New York and became co-director of the New York School of Design , also known as the American School of Design . On October 6, 1926, he married Dorothy "Kay" Hardy, his second wife, after his first wife got divorced because of Connah's "philandering" in the early 1920s. In 1929, the couple acquired the historic Buckingham House in Deep River, Connecticut, where it hosted summer courses in the 1930s.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. No. 132 in the finding aid 212.01.04 Student lists of the Düsseldorf Art Academy , website in the archive.nrw.de portal ( North Rhine-Westphalia State Archive )
  2. ↑ Bettina Baumgärtel , Sabine Schroyen, Lydia Immerheiser, Sabine Teichgröb: Directory of foreign artists. Nationality, residence and studies in Düsseldorf . In: Bettina Bamgärtel (Ed.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michel Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 428
  3. ↑ Lost in Reverie , website in the portal artuk.org
  4. ^ Douglas John Connah: The New School . Brochure, Boston 1917 ( digitized )
  5. ↑ Gail Levin: Edward Hopper. An Intimate Biography . University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles 1995, ISBN 0-520-21475-7 , p. 34 ( Google Books )
  6. ^ The New York School of Art, 1896–1902 , New York 1902, brochure (title page)
  7. ↑ Nouritza Marossian: Black Angel. The Life of Arshile Gorky . The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers Inc., New York / New York 2000, ISBN 978-1-46830-517-3 ( Google Books )
  8. ^ The Hosmer Buckingham House , webpage on thenauticalartsworkshop.com , accessed on March 4, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Connah, Douglas John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American landscape painter, portrait painter, and illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH August 23, 1941
Place of death New York City