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July/August 2009: Bristol Savage |
Bristol Savage
Early Adirondack Watercolors by Frederic Stuart Richardson
By David H. S. Richardson
F. S. Richardson painted Lake George and other scenic places in the Adirondacks.
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My father was a country doctor who bought a farm in Devon, England, in 1947, which my mother ran and where I grew up. The walls of every inch of the large Georgian farmhouse were covered with paintings by my grandfather Frederic Stuart Richardson, who was a prolific professional artist. While he sold many works, a large number were stored at my grandmother's house or ours, including a portfolio of watercolor sketches he painted as a young man during a trip to North America and, in particular, the Adirondacks.
My grandfather was born in 1855, the son of an English parson and part of a large extended family. He studied to be a civil engineer but was left an inheritance, at age 22, that gave him a chance to study art in Paris under Carolus-Duran, a well-known portrait painter who also taught the famous American artist John Singer Sargent. Frederic became more interested in landscapes and returned home to set up a studio in the rooms above the stable at his father's rectory at Sandy, in Bedfordshire, north of London. A short while later, Frederic was invited to accompany a young cousin on a journey to the United States. The cousin's father wrote a letter of introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the famous poet, so that the two young men would have the opportunity to meet him on their trip. Frederic took paints and a pad to record their adventures.
For many years the family had no idea of the date of this, Frederic's only visit to the United States, or with whom he went. Then, after my father died, in 2000, I came across an audiotape my mother had made with my grandmother Elsie, Frederic's wife, who died in 1971. She talks about the family, and my mother asks about the trip to America made long before Frederic and Elsie married. My grandmother mentions that it was with a cousin named Nash, but could not recall his first name. This enabled me to contact the Houghton Library, in Boston, the repository of Longfellow's correspondence, to see if it had any letters from persons named Nash. Fortunately there were only a small number and I sent for a copy of the most likely one. The received letter was as follows:
Bristol, 2nd April, 1881
My Dear Sir,
Just two years ago in the company with Mr Carpenter and
Mr Whiteside of this city who were visiting Professor Graham Bell, I had the honour of an introduction to you. I remember on that occasion telling you of one of my sons, who has often tried his hand at poetry, and who would be much interested at hearing of my visit to Cambridge. He is now about to pay a short visit to your great Country, and I am sure from his love of poetry that few things would give him more delight than an interview—however brief with one of whom he often speaks. My excuse for the liberty that I am taking is the recollection of the very kind way in which you received me and my friends in 1879.
I remain, with much respect, yours very faithfully, Charles Nash.
P.S. My son is accompanied by a young artist Mr. F. Richardson
Ausable Chasm
and other scenic places in the Adirondacks.
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I deduced that the visit was made in the summer of 1881, when Frederic would have been 26. I do not know how the cousins traveled, on what ship they arrived, or how they moved from place to place. However, it is clear that Frederic had time to sit and make quite accomplished watercolor sketches and from these I can follow their journey from New York City to Boston (to meet Longfellow). From here it is likely they went by rail to the shores of Lake Champlain, which they crossed on a sailboat. They then traveled through the Adirondack Mountains, with stops at Ausable Chasm, the top of Whiteface Mountain and Lake George. Next they made their way to Niagara Falls, then returned via the Catskills to New York and took the boat home. My grandfather kept the small sketches in a folder that was passed to my father, who eventually gave them to me, as the only member of the family living in North America (I moved to Nova Scotia in 1992). The outside of the folder was splashed by water, probably during the lake-crossing in a small boat.
Frederic returned to England and spent the rest of his life as a professional artist painting in Holland, France and Italy until the outbreak of the First World War, and in Scotland with his artist friends Hamilton MacCallum and Kenneth Mackenzie. He was a member of the Staithes Group that painted in Yorkshire and the Bristol Savages (see facing page), who painted in Somerset. In 1911, at the age of 56, he went to paint in Cornwall, in southwest England. He stayed at a small hotel in Coverack, where he met my grandmother, Elsie, who was 26 at the time. They married in April 1912. They had two children and Frederic continued to paint landscapes and seascapes in both oil and watercolor until a few days before his death, in 1934, at the age of 79. He exhibited widely; 49 of his works were accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.
Frederic Stuart Richardson:
Portrait of a Landscape Artist
Although Frederic Stuart Richardson also used oils, during his North American trip he painted watercolor landscapes, a medium and genre strongly associated with his countrymen. In particular, J. M. W. Turner, who died four years before Richardson's birth, was, and still is, one of the most celebrated British landscape painters. Turner was a Romantic, whose loose brushwork, with close attention to natural color and quality of light, prefigured British Impressionism.
At the time of Richardson's Adirondack visit, British Impressionism had yet to appear, although it is possible his studies with Carolus-Duran in France exposed him to emerging French Impressionism. Like the Impressionists, he preferred to paint en plein air. He was later part of the Staithes Group, sometimes referred to as the Northern Impressionists.
View from the top of Whiteface Mountain.
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Scott Wilcox, chief curator of art collections and senior curator of prints and drawings at the Yale Center for British Art, isn't familiar with Richardson. But based on images of his early watercolor sketches, Wilcox says the artist doesn't appear to have fit into either of the prevailing styles of his contemporaries in the early 1880s. "He's clearly not in the Pre-Raphaelite camp," Wilcox says, "nor does he fall in the more conventional Victorian Picturesque landscape."
Artists painting in the Picturesque style in the 18th and 19th centuries tended to favor sentimental pastoral landscapes, Wilcox explains, often unpopulated but sometimes including buildings, especially ruins. The Pre-Raphaelites, on the other hand, emerged in the mid-19th century in response to what they deemed a formulaic and imprecise tendency in British art. They strove for fidelity to nature, with meticulous details.
It was de rigeur for all kinds of landscape artists to travel in search of beautiful scenery, although it was less common for an English artist to venture to North America than to countries in Europe and the Middle East. However, as Erin Budis Coe, chief curator of the Hyde Collection, in Glens Falls, explains in the catalog for the museum's 2005 exhibition Painting Lake George, the Adirondacks was a popular destination for American artists. "Scenic touring was an integral part of nineteenth-century genteel culture," Coe writes. "Lake George was on the itinerary of the American grand tour.… Beginning with Thomas Cole, every Hudson River School artist painted Lake George."
Richardson never returned to the United States. But he did become a member and one-time president of the Bristol Savages, an artists' club founded in 1903 that uses Native American imagery: its logo is a profile of an Indian man in a feathered headdress, its meeting place is called the Wigwam, and members wear colored feathers to indicate their status as an artist, entertainer or lay member.
Geoff Cutter, honorary secretary of the still-active club, explains the source of the Native American theme: "An early associate member of the group was the American Consul in Bristol.… We had a visit from the Chief of the Sioux in 1928, and the occasion is well documented.
"Following that, we acquired much memorabilia of Native Americans, and now we have memorabilia from all over the world."
Wilcox says one source of a 19th-century European vogue for things Native American was the artist George Catlin, whose portraits of indigenous people toured Europe in 1839. Also, in 1887 Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West show, complete with Indians, to London.
—Lisa Bramen
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