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coloring, the pictures themselves when completed were unsatisfactory. Be- ing very industrious and patient however, Mr. Beckett manages to throw off quite a large number of paintings which found favor among his not particular friends." Charles Codman came here as a young man from Mas- sachusetts where he had painted clock faces for Willard, the famous clock maker. He opened a sign painting shop on Middle Street and became Port- land's first painter of consequence, noted for his local island scenes, moun- tain scenery, and summer landscapes.
Charles O. Cole (1817-58), a native of Portland, achieved considerable local fame with his portraits of prominent citizens, quite a number of which are owned by older families of the city. His epitaph in the Western Ceme- tery reads: "His name is engraved on the tablets of our hearts and we give him the laurels of genius and the immortelles of affection." Several origi- nal Cole portraits hang in the library of the Maine Historical Society.
Of a later period was Charles Frederick Kimball (1832-1903), a local artist who in his day was ranked high as a landscape painter. John Calvin Stevens, in 'An Appreciation of Maine's Greatest Landscape Painter' which appeared in the Pine Tree Magazine, April, 1906, wrote of Kimball's work: "The rugged strength of northern New England scenery when it is flooded with the splendor of the summer sunshine and glowing with the rich colors characteristic of these latitudes, has rarely found so true an in- terpreter as was Charles Frederick Kimball, Maine's greatest landscape painter ... . His pictures were almost entirely of the summertime and he dearly loved the full, rich greens of June. Occasionally a spring landscape made a subject for his brushes; and whatever he did received the most in- telligent and painstaking treatment he was capable of. He aimed to 'paint the weather' and to reproduce the very atmosphere and all the effects of light and shade which seemed to him so beautiful." Kimball's most noted pictures are: 'The Goslings,' a large canvas; 'Presumpscot Falls'; 'Stroud- water'; 'Midsummer Day at Diamond Island,' owned by Bowdoin College; and 'The Pines.'
Kimball, affectionately termed 'The Master' by his fellow painters, was one of the original members of The Brush'uns, an enthusiastic group of Portland artists of the late 1800's. Founded by George T. Morse in 1860, this organization included in its membership many well -- known professional and amateur artists. Some of the members, together with the nickname by which they were known in the club, were: John Calvin Stevens, the Old Man; John T. Wood, the Silent Man; Clifford Crocker, the Kid; F. H.
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Thompson, the Deacon; F. J. Ilsley, the Politician; C. C. McKim, the Water Colorist; Lucius Clark, the Hardware Man; Edward S. Griffin, the Woodcarver; Tom F. O'Neil, the Policeman; Walter Bailey, the Paper- hanger; Millard Baldwin, the Trust Magnate; and Charles Fuller, the Professor.
The artist Harrison B. Brown (1831-1915) may well be regarded as dis- tinctly a Portland product. In Portland And Vicinity, Edward H. Elwell writes: "Out of all of our native artists Harry B. Brown has shown the truest eye for color and achieved the greatest success as a landscape and marine painter. Commencing as a sign and banner painter his natural genius soon worked its way into its own field and he has attained a recognized posi- tion .... His sea and shore scenes are distinctive in their character, remark- able for the free dash of the waves and solidity of the cliffs, while in at- mospheric effects he excels." Brown was actively interested in the growth of art in the city, and he is largely responsible for the founding of the Port- land Society of Art, of which he was one of the first presidents.
Prominently identified with the growth and appreciation of art in Port- land for many years was Charles Lewis Fox (1854-1927), known for his three great allegorical murals: 'The Working God and the Sower,' 'Adam and Eve,' and 'Lady Godiva'; one of these murals is now hung in the L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum. Fox is famous for his meticulously and exquisitely painted mushroom studies; numbering over two hundred, these studies are now owned by the Columbia University School of Biology.
In writing to a friend Fox once said: "To me the mission of Art is too world wide to confine itself to beauty alone, for character and harmony each claim the divine right to its own utterance, and how much broader and deeper and richer the world of art when they also speak." He spent six years in France working under Bonnat and Cabanel and for a while in the Gobelin Ateliers to study the method, design, and color of the masters of tapestry making. Alexander Bower, director of the L. D. M. Sweat Mem- orial Art Museum, writes understandingly of Fox in the Foreword to The Work of Charles Lewis Fox (1854-1927) : "This same spirit, this sense of wanting all to share with him, what to him was his greatest joy, led him on his return to Portland to establish a school, with day and night classes, that found in him always a devoted teacher and a loyal friend that served with- out thought of self. The school was conducted on a purely co-operative basis-the nominal costs of its maintenance being shared by its students. ... After fifteen years apart from his easel in the stress of militant social-
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ism, he returned to his art, and there found peace in an earnest effort to save for posterity something of the life of a primitive people-the Indians of our Maine Woods .... Long before there was a Taos school, and men like Ufer, Blumenschein, Higgins and Sloan, and the other men of the New Mexico group had discovered the American Indian, did Charles Lewis Fox feel the urge and the need to make some record from the artist's un- derstanding of the passing of a fast vanishing race . ... So we have from his heart and his hand these expressive character studies of the Indian ... . Something of his delight and understanding of the design in the Indian arts of basketry, weaving and pottery he gives us in his own art. Pattern and design were never far from his mind for he did not forget the lesser factors in his thought for the spirit of his message. With a prevision that is most significant in his second period, there is an almost prophetic expres- sion of what has become the trend of the Art of our day, and this though he lived during this time in a hermit-like retreat from the world of his fellow artists and workers .... A live imagination, the soul of a crusader, always the seeker for the greater truth in life and art, his work will live as the ex- pression of the spiritual yearning of a sensitive artist and a gallant gentle- man."
Walter Griffin (1861-1935) is regarded as the most outstanding of na- tive-born Portland artists. Son of a family of wood carvers, Griffin grew up amid ship figureheads in all stages of production. As a boy he drew por- traits of old seamen and dabbled in wood carving. Later he studied in Bos- ton, New York, and Paris where he was a pupil of Jean Paul Laurens. The particular quality for which his work is noted was acquired while in Venice, and he himself explained it as "the technique which best expressed my feel- ings .... To get effects on canvas I resort to the palette knife or fingers aside from the brush . ... Sunshine is the most important factor." Griffin was invited in 1919 to give an exhibition of his work at the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris; later he was a prize winner at the Panama Exposition, and in 1922 was elected to the National Academy. In 1924 he was awarded the Jennie Sesnan Medal for the best landscape in an exhibit at the Pennsyl- vania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. A French art critic, in a re- view of Griffin's work, declared: "It is the manly quality that the artist shows in his painting that entitles him to the high place he has achieved in modern art. His work has a mild quality that has attracted attention every- where, while the term 'Griffin Trees' has become well known." The in- spiration for many of Griffin's famous canvases was derived from the rustic
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surroundings of his studio in Stroudwater. An excellent example of his brilliant technique is 'The Old Apple Orchard,' which hangs in the L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum.
Royal Cortissoz, the American art critic, wrote 'An Appreciation' in the biography Walter Griffin: "The salient members of the American school of landscape painting are those who define the principles of the school in terms of their own .... Walter Griffin was such a figure. He painted with a personal accent. The fundamental virtues of the school belonged to him, its fidelity to nature, its solicitude for atmospheric quality and for what, lack- ing a better phrase, one is driven to call "landscape sentiment." But he had a way of dealing with these things that gave him an individualized place. Was there a trace of romanticism in that way of his? Not in the sense of any factitious heightening of the note discovered in any given subject. He did not, I think, deliberately poetize a scene. But somehow he painted it in a tender and even lyrical mood, so that he lifted a gnarled tree or a mass of laurel onto something like a poetic plane. I don't suppose that in all his life he ever emulated the mode of Diaz but as I look back over the mass of his work I am conscious of a faint kinship between him and the Frenchman, the kinship of artists unable to face nature without feeling the magic of her light and color. The difference between them is a difference of key. Diaz was jewelled and gleaming. Griffin muted his colors and his harmonies are not so much brilliant as tender. He practised a careful naturalism but saturated it in the delicate, restrained quality of his temperament. His landscapes are beautiful things."
The 1938-39 edition of Who's Who In American Art includes 13 Port- landers in its listing of prominent American painters and artists. Alexan- der Bower, A.N.A., Director of the local L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum, has done much to foster art and its appreciation in Portland. He received his training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under Thomas Anshutz, at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, and in special study abroad. He was director of Fine Arts at the Sesqui- centennial International Exposition at Philadelphia in 1926, was made a member of the National Academy in 1931, and in 1933 was appointed chair- man of the first State Art Commission in Maine. In 1938 Bower received an honorary Master of Arts degree from Bowdoin College. From 1900 un- til 1910 he was engaged in industrial design, mural painting, and work in leaded and stained glass. In later years he has confined his work to land- scape and marine painting; self-styled a realist, his work hangs in many
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public and private collections. Bower has exhibited at many of America's leading galleries, including Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg, Corcoran Gal- lery in Washington, Chicago Art Institute, National Academy in New York, and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He has been Director of the local art museum since 1931.
Claude Montgomery, a graduate of the Portland School of Fine and Ap- plied Art, has exhibited at the National Academy, the American Society of Etchers, and was awarded the Suydam Prize by the National Academy. In 1939 he was awarded the annual silver medal of the International Exposi- tion, American Section, in Paris. Montgomery is becoming well known for his portraits, one of which is owned by Colgate University, and another by the local L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum.
Dorothy Hay Jensen majored in art at Smith College and studied at the Portland School of Fine and Applied Art, specializing in block prints; in 1932 she was awarded first prize in the National Junior League Art Ex- hibition in the print class for 'Shipyard,' and the same award in 1929 with 'After Skiing.' Mrs. Jensen has exhibited at the Woodcut Society, Hayloft, Denver Art Museum, World's Fair Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, and Portland Society of Art. She illustrated Mollie Irwin Booth's Dozy Hour Tales (1937), a juvenile book published by the local Falmouth Book House, and did the mural in the Children's Chapel of the Williston Church in Portland.
Norman Thomas, a recent graduate of the Portland School of Fine and Applied Art, won the 1938 Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship in Art; that same year he was commissioned by Herman Hagedorn, Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial in New York, to paint three panels illus- trating the 'Bill of Rights,' which will eventually be reproduced for dis- tribution to the public schools of America. Thomas assisted Arthur Covey in decorating the Contemporary Art Building at the New York World's Fair. His portrait of Chief Justice Charles Dunn, Jr., is included in the permanent collection in the State Capitol at Augusta.
Joseph B. Kahill has become one of the State's leading portrait painters. He studied under Richard Miller, Portland's Charles L. Fox, and Collin Prinet of Paris. Kahill's work is represented in the collections of the Wal- ker Art Gallery at Bowdoin College, University of Maine, Colby College, Bates College, L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum of Portland, and in the State's Capitol at Augusta. His oil painting, 'The First Step,' has many times been reproduced in magazines and periodicals. Among his well-
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known works are: 'Face to Face,' a temperance lecture on canvas; and the 'Fate of the Christians,' portraying an attack by the Turks on an Armenian village.
John Howard Allen has exhibited his oil paintings at local and other Maine showings, as well as at the Memorial Gallery in Oberlin, Ohio, Cur- rier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and New Haven Paint and Clay Club in Connecticut. In 1938 Allen received a bronze medal from the San Francisco Museum of Art for a still life he exhibited.
Francis Orville Libby has exhibited water colors at the Salamagundi Club in New York, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Interna- tional Water Color Show in the Chicago Art Institute. His miniatures have been shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Fine Arts. Libby also specializes in photography, having shown photographs at the London Salon of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, of which he is a member.
Ralph Frizzell, trained at the Portland School of Fine and Applied Art, has done noteworthy work. He illustrated Erskine Caldwell's The Sacrilege of Alan Kent, published by the local Falmouth Book House. Well known for his prints from wood and linoleum, Frizzell also has done local murals, among which is the 'Greek Athlete' frieze in Deering High School.
Josiah Thomas Tubby works in several mediums-oil, water color, pen- cil, pen, and etchings. His work has been included in many local showings, and has hung at exhibitions in other New England cities and in New York.
Linwood Easton (1892-1939), who studied under Albert E. Moore and Alexander Bower, distinguished himself in the field of etching. He ex- hibited in many print shows throughout the country, and in 1938 was awarded a prize at a showing of the California Print Society. Easton was a member of the Society of American Etchers.
Thomas Elston Thorne, who studied at the Portland School of Fine and Applied Art and the Yale School of Fine Arts, has done much local mural work. Best known of his works are 'Crucifixion' and 'Last Supper' in the St. Lawrence Church, the 'Circus' in the children's ward of the Maine Gen- eral Hospital, and the historical murals of Portland High School.
John Calvin Stevens (1855-1940), late senior member of one of the lead- ing architectural firms, made painting his avocation. One of his landscapes is owned by the Portland Public Library.
The city has an active group of contemporary artists who have achieved more than local recognition. Alice Harmon Shaw, a graduate of the Port- land School of Fine and Applied Art and a member of the National Society
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for Women Painters and sculptors, has exhibited her water colors at the New York Water Color Club, the American Water Color Society, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The works of Rosamond Gray and Bernice Breck were shown in the National Exhibition of American Art at Rockefeller Center in New York; Miss Breck has exhibited water colors at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Walter H. Rich, author of Feathered Game of the Northeast, is noted for his aquatic and bird life studies in water color, and his work has been exhibited in New York gal- leries. Ethel M. Dana, landscapist in oils, has exhibited at the local L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum and at the Altrusa Convention in Chicago. Rupert Scott Lovejoy, who paints in the style of his master Wal- ter Griffin, has had exhibits in this country; Lovejoy is also well known for his photographic work. Stephen E. Mathews, another adopted son of Port- land, has been called the dean of Maine artists. At the age of 82 he is still active with the brush and a tireless worker for the city's various art organi- zations. Roger L. Deering, who studied under Anson Cross of Boston and Penrhyn Stanlaws of New York, is best known for his mural work. Anton Skillin, although a resident of South Portland, has done many local murals, among which are those in the Children's Hospital, Monument Street School, and Sea Scout Room in the State Street Congregational Church; Skillin is the author of Ships of All Times.
The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Adminstration of Maine was inaugurated in December, 1935, and has employed an average of 13 artists under the supervision of State Director Dorothy Hay Jensen. In the fall of 1939 this division of the Work Projects Administration became the Maine Art Project under the sponsorship of the Maine Development Commission. Its most intensive work has been on the index of American Design, a nation-wide compilation of portfolios of drawings illustrating early native arts and crafts of the country. In Maine the study has been devoted principally to early wood sculpture, including ship figureheads, and weather vanes of artistic and historical interest. Also recorded in paint are wall stencils that were used in colonial homes when wallpaper was too ex- pensive, and drawings of early crewel embroideries and japanned tinware. Murals and canvases have been done by the project for schools and hos- pitals, also a Mother Goose mural in the Children's Hospital, and favorite children's stories at the Monument Street School. Work is in progress on farmer and fishermen murals for the Nathan Clifford School, and in sports decorations for the Cape Elizabeth High School. Members have served
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public groups at various times as teachers of drawing, painting, and crafts. Exhibitions have been held in the local L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum, the Penobscot Marine Museum at Searsport, the Knox House at Thomaston, and the Bangor Public Library.
The development and practice of sculpturing locally begins with Ben- jamin Paul Akers (1825-61) who was born in Westbrook. His father had no settled occupation and roamed for a time from place to place with his large family. When Benjamin was 18 they finally settled in Salmon Falls, but he was too old to attend the district school and his father needed his help. They built a small wood-turning mill on the Hollis side of the Saco River, but Ben, as he was then called, worked only when he felt like it or when his father insisted. The boy made his own patterns and the carvings and designs showed his early artistic ability. An avid reader, he went through Plato, Aristotle, Dante, and any books of German and French literature loaned to him by the village doctor. It is said that "when he had studied Goethe his horizon was widened and he saw beyond the confines of his rural surroundings." Coming to Portland, he set type in a printing shop on Exchange Street. In the winter of 1849 he went to Boston and took lessons in plaster casting from Carew.
The following spring Akers returned to Salmon Falls, but stopped long enough in Portland to get clay from Jeremiah Dodge and Son, who had a pottery near Deering Oaks, the very pottery which later became the scene of Longfellow's 'Keramos.' Akers' friend, the village doctor, gave him the use of a room behind his office in which to work, and a model of his friend was his first endeavor. In speaking of this in later years he said, "It was as ugly as Fra Angelico's devil and was remarkably true to life." A crude life-size medallion in clay of his own ideal of Christ was his second attempt. Later he produced busts of Longfellow, John Neal, and other prominent local citizens, the proceeds of which enabled him to study in Italy, where he became intimate with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was gathering material for The Marble Faun. At the time Akers was at work upon a number of statues, among them, the 'Dead Pearl Diver' which Hawthorne later de- scribed in his strange romance. This statue, now in the L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum, is regarded as Akers' masterpiece. His last work, now in the possession of the Maine Historical Society, depicts the head of a sleeping child.
Franklin Simmons (1839-1913), a native of Webster, worked as a youth in a Lewiston mill and spent his spare moments modeling in clay.
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Stephen Cammett describes Simmons' youth in the Pine Tree Magazine, August, 1907: "He delighted to model figures in the coarse clay dug from the banks of the Androscoggin. One of his earliest attempts to express himself in this crude medium is the Bowditch bust, still preserved in the Hill Mill office. His next step was to learn that statues are first modelled in clay; but he had never seen it done. A small Maine city of the decades im- mediately preceding the Civil War did not offer a congenial soil for the development of the artist-soul. Neverthless his fingers tingled to feel the damp clay shaping itself beneath their pressure, and bust followed figure in rapid succession, all in the same course clay, dug from the river's bank by the mill. Then came the great desire to see the work, which had hitherto suffered from the crudeness of the medium, shine in the marble's purity of whiteness. His duties at the mill gave the boy only the hours of evening for the work which was his keenest pleasure. The longing to handle the beautiful white marble grew day by day, until it became the one desire which must one time be fulfilled. He sought a hewer of gravestones; made him a friend; obtained a block of the precious marble, a few discarded chisels, and some helpful instructions. Evening after evening he wrought to shape the copy of one of his clay-modelled figures. When finished, the bust had defects; but it was a remarkably faithful likeness. Moreover, it received praise. The praises were so satisfactory that the youth, now eigh- teen years of age made a visit to Boston. There for the first time he saw a piece of sculpture, and the seeing was all that was needed to spur him to the great decision of life. . .. It was in the Boston State House that he saw his first marble group, and stood, spellbound, as one upon whom a great light has burst; who beholds his ideal, and is shown the means of realiza- tion."
Simmons studied in Boston with John Adams Jackson who taught him the chief rudiments of the art that was to make him famous throughout the world. Later he moved to Brunswick, where he made busts of many of the Bowdoin College faculty. In 1864 he launched forth upon a successful career in Washington, D. C., where he made figures of such notables as President U. S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Admiral Farragut. One of the most famous of his works, now in Statuary Hall, Washington, is the figure of Roger Williams, of which several reproductions have been made. In 1888 he executed for Portland the familiar seated bronze figure of Long- fellow, and in 1891 the heroic Civil War memorial in Monument Square. This great figure, emblematic of the Union, which he delighted to call
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'Our Lady of Victories,' is one of the largest bronze statues in America. His idealized marble figure 'Penelope,' of which four reproductions have been made, is now a part of the Franklin Simmons Memorial Collection in the L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum. The entire collection of his statuary was willed to the Portland Society of Art.
Contemporary sculpture is represented in the work of Victor Kahill, brother of Joseph B. Kahill, the portrait painter. In 1939 Kahill completed a model of a life-size figure representing a Maine lobsterman, which oc- cupied a prominent place in the Maine section of the Hall of States at the World's Fair in New York City. He executed the memorial to Harold T. Andrews, the first Portland soldier to lose his life in the World War. He has recently made a colossal bust of the late William Widgery Thomas, Jr., for the memorial to him in Sweden.
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