Robert Vonnoh

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Robert Vonnoh: Poppies , 1888

Robert William Vonnoh (born September 17, 1858 in Hartford (Connecticut) , † December 28, 1933 in Nice ) was an American painter and art teacher. He received his education in the United States and France, and traveled frequently between the two countries throughout his career. As a sought-after portrait painter, he created an extensive work in the style of academic realism . The influence of French Impressionism can be clearly seen in his landscape paintings from the mid-1880s . As a recognized art teacher, he taught at art schools in Boston and Philadelphia and was one of the first painters to bring the artistic innovations of his time emerging in Europe to his home country. He belonged to both the artist colony in Grez-sur-Loing , France , and Old Lyme, America , and was in lively exchange with numerous other artists. His second wife was the sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh .

Life

Robert Vonnoh: Companion of the Studio , 1888

Youth, training and first professional activity

Robert Vonnoh was born in Hartford in 1858 to Frederika and William Vonnoh, both of German descent. After the family moved to Boston, he attended public schools there. As a child, he initially showed no particular artistic talent. At the age of fourteen he took up a job in a lithography shop and began drawing privately. At the age of 17 he began his artistic training at the Massachusetts Normal Art School , where he studied with George H. Bartlett and two years later met the painter Edmund C. Tarbell . After completing his training at the art school, he taught drawing and painting as an art teacher in this institution from 1879. A little later, further teaching activities followed at the Roxbury Evening Drawing School and the Thayer Academy in South Braintree .

First stay in France

Robert Vonnoh: November , 1888

Vonnoh was looking for new artistic ideas around 1880 and traveled to France for the first time in 1881. In Paris he took lessons at the Académie Julian where he took courses with Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre until 1883 . There he worked in front of the living model and made charcoal drawings. He also visited the Louvre regularly to study the works of art there. In the Salon de Paris of 1883 he exhibited the portrait of John Severinus Conway , a portrait of the painter John Severinus Conway, who was a friend of Vonnoh, painted according to academic rules . The portrait received positive reviews when it was presented in Boston a year later. Subsequently, around 500 portraits were created by the end of his life, in which he largely adhered to the traditional forms of painting. In addition, he worked on landscapes during this first stay in France. It is not known whether Vonnoh saw the group exhibitions of the Impressionists held during his stay , or whether he attended solo exhibitions by these artists in the galleries of Georges Petit and Paul Durand-Ruel , which were to influence his later work .

Return to the United States

Robert Vonnoh: Winter Sun and Shadow , 1890

Vonnoh returned to the United States in 1883 and taught at the Cowles Art School in Boston from 1884–85 . He took over the direction of the East Boston Evening Drawing School and in 1885, succeeding Frederic Crowninshield, led the portrait painting classes at the Art School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Vonnoh saw the Foreign Exhibition in the Mechanics Building in Boston in 1883 , an exhibition in which the American public could see works of art by the French Impressionists on a large scale for the first time. He also visited the exhibition French Impressionism in New York in 1886 , which also showed works of this art movement from the holdings of the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. In the same year he married Grace D. Farrell and spent their honeymoon in France with her. The couple chose Grez-sur-Loing near the Fontainebleau forest , a place where Vonnoh later settled permanently.

Second stay in France

Robert Vonnoh: Coquelicots , 1890

From 1887 to 1891 Vonnoh went to France again with his wife. He took lessons at the Académie Julian again until 1887 and continued to work on portraits, such as Companion of the Studio , a portrait of his classmate John C. Pinhey . For this work, which was painted in dark colors in the style of his teachers in 1888, Vonnoh received a bronze medal at the Paris World Exhibition of 1889 . Around 1888 he began to turn to a more colorful palette and the painting style of Impressionism in his landscape paintings. Vonnoh and his wife had settled permanently in Grez-sur-Loing at that time, where he met the Irish painter Roderic O'Conor . Vonnoh's turn to impressionism and open-air painting is attributed to his influence , but contact with Alfred Sisley , who lived in nearby Moret-sur-Loing , is also possible. During this time Vonnoh painted motifs such as haystacks and poppy fields, as they are known from the paintings of Claude Monet , although Vonnoh is not known to have visited Monet in Giverny. Vonnoh saw two paintings by Monet with poppy meadow motifs from 1885 at the exhibition of Impressionist works in New York in 1886. The Swedish painter Karl Nordström , who also lived in Grez-sur-Loing, also painted poppy flower motifs in the 1880s . Like Monet, Vonnoh experimented with the different lighting conditions at different times of the day and year. In paintings like Poppies from 1888 Vonnoh took a step in the direction of Fauvism in choosing the unmixed bright colors and the coarse, broad brushstrokes and the paint applied with the palette knife . This impasto application of paint can also be found at this time with Vincent van Gogh , with whom O'Conor was connected. O'Conor left Grez-sur-Loing in 1890 to paint with the group around Paul Gauguin in the artists' colony of Pont-Aven . Vonnoh's contribution to the Salon de Paris of 1889, in which he shows a woman bent over a letter, showed how he worked in different painting styles at the same time. This work, entitled Bad News , corresponds more to a conventional genre picture.

Robert Vonnoh: Late for School
Robert Vonnoh: Bessie Potter Vonnoh at her Dressing Table , 1912
Robert Vonnoh: Early Spring, Pleasant Valley, Connecticut , around 1916

Vonnoh sent some of his works in Europe to the United States in 1889, where they were shown in an exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts the following year . His painting November , a rural motif from Grez-sur-Loing in the style of Camille Pissarro , was acquired by the museum in 1894. Vonnoh created one of his main works in 1890 with Coquelicots . He exhibited this painting in 1891 in the Salon de Paris and then showed it in 1892 at an art exhibition in Munich. The painting is now known as In Flanders Field-Where Soldiers Sleep and Poppies Grow , although the name borrowing from John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields is both temporally and geographically incongruous. The place Grez-sur-Loing is neither in Flanders, nor do the poppies painted by Vonnoh bloom over the battlefields of the First World War described in the poem.

Returned to teaching in the United States

Vonnoh returned to the United States in 1891. The Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston showed many of his works in France in a solo exhibition. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he took over the direction of the portrait and landscape painting classes that same year. While he adhered to the academic style of painting in portraiture, he also brought his students, including Edward Willis Redfield , William Glackens , Robert Henri , John French Sloan and Maxfield Parrish , closer to the aesthetics of French Impressionism.

Vonnoh became a member of the Society of American Artists in 1892 . In addition to his work as an art teacher, which lasted until the mid-1890s, he continued to create numerous portraits and landscape paintings. For the world exhibition in Chicago in 1893 he sent twelve of his works, including the paintings November , Bad News and Companion of the Studio .

International exhibitions

After the death of his first wife in 1896, Vonnoh frequently moved between America and France. In 1899 he married the American sculptor Bessie O. Potter , whom he repeatedly portrayed in later works. Vonnoh exhibited two portraits at the Paris World's Fair in 1900 and again received a bronze medal. He also acted as a member of the jury for the selection of the American paintings shown here. At the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, he showed four portraits and the painting November again and again received a medal. In 1904, he exhibited a portrait of his second wife at the National Academy of Design and sent two portraits and two flower paintings to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis .

The Old Lyme artists' colony and last years of life in France

In 1905 Vonnoh discovered the artists' colony in Old Lyme in Connecticut , where the American Impressionist painters Childe Hassam and Willard Metcalf painted regularly. Vonnoh spent the summers here repeatedly for the next 25 years. Vonnoh offered numerous motifs in the surrounding landscape and he regularly took part in the exhibitions of the local Lyme Art Association . In addition, he sent his work to various exhibitions in France and the United States. In 1906 he became a member of the National Academy of Design .

Vonnoh and his wife stayed in France again from 1907 to 1912. In 1911 he had a solo exhibition in the Georges Petit gallery in Paris, known for exhibitions of the French impressionists . At the time, his work was equally well received by collectors and museums. Together with his wife he put 1,914 works of art in the Carnegie Institute in 1915, he took part with the paintings Portrait Daniel Chester French , Bridge at Grez , Poppies and Fantasy: Blue and Yellow at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco , where he was Recognition received a gold medal.

After 1925 Vonnoh's eyesight deteriorated and he reduced his painting activity until he finally stopped painting. In 1926 Durand-Ruel's New York branch dedicated a solo exhibition to the artist. Vonnoh finally settled in France and spent the last years of his life in Grez-sur-Loing. He died of a heart attack in Nice in the winter of 1933.

Works in public collections

literature

  • Robert Vonnoh . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 34 : Urliens – Vzal . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1940, p. 541 .
  • May Brawley Hill: Grez days: Robert Vonnoh in France . Berry-Hill Galleries, New York 1987.
  • Catherine Fehrer: Three Artists of Pleasant Valley: Robert Vonnoh, Oscar Fehrer, Eugene Higgins . Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme 1991.
  • Kathleen Adler: Americans in Paris, 1860–1900 . National Gallery, London 2006, ISBN 1-85709-301-1 .
  • Wendy Greenhouse: Robert Vonnoh: American impressionist . Madron Gallery, Chicago 2010.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Vonnoh, Robert . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 34 : Urliens – Vzal . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1940, p. 541 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Kathleen Adler: Americans in Paris, 1860–1900. 2006, p. 263.
  3. ^ The review of the portrait of John Severinus Conway appeared on January 19, 1884 in the Boston Evening Transcript newspaper .
  4. ^ Kathleen Adler: Americans in Paris, 1860-1900. 2006, p. 135

Web links

Commons : Robert Vonnoh  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Vonnoh, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vonnoh, Robert William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH September 17, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH Hartford, Connecticut
DATE OF DEATH December 28, 1933
Place of death Nice