From Impressionism to Yankee Modernism
In conjunction with the Portsmouth Athenaeum, this exhibition explores the art of Russell Cheney (1881–1945) through his views of northern New England --landscapes, portraits, and still life studies – including many newly discovered works.
The youngest of eleven children in a family of well-to-do silk manufacturers, Russell Cheney graduated from Yale in 1904. Over the next decade he studied at the Art Students League in New York and at the Academie Julian in Paris. Returning home, he created an elaborate painting studio in the former stable of his family home in South Manchester, Connecticut and began to exhibit his work.
From 1910 to 1915 Cheney summered at York Harbor, “painting out of doors at York and Ogunquit, Maine” and studying with Charles Woodbury. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1916, Cheney spent much of World War I in Colorado’s Cragmor Sanatorium for his health. Between 1916 and 1921 he visited his friends Charles and Evelyn Macdonald and painted at Red Echo Farm in Topsham, Vermont.
He first summered in Kittery in 1927 and by 1930 made his permanent home beside the Piscataqua. His style had already evolved into a Yankee modernism that captured his native New England in more emotive ways. While “Cheney’s art presumably grew out of his response to Cézanne and the Impressionists,” Art Digest noted in 1947, but “there is little trace left in his simplified realism.“
T. H. Parker described the artist’s new work, “in which Fords, houses, lunch-wagons and lampposts have no value pictorially, but resolve themselves into … line, mass, plane and rhythm, which combines into compact, unified and emphatic design.” Cheney’s regional landscapes “extract the essence of the scene by contrasting the typical cubes of New England buildings with the rolling land.”
Dorothy Adlow, art critic for the Christian Science Monitor, later called him “a New England artist who enjoyed the exhilarating influence of modern French painting a modern American romantic. The imagery that captured his interest was imbued with a zestful vivacity.” Small-town New Castle, Portsmouth’s landmarks and waterfront, and coastal Maine during the inter-war decades were part of what made Cheney a “New England and American master.”
For more information about Russell Cheney see: www.russellcheney.com
Download Antiques & Fine Art article (summer 2008 issue)
