Henry Golden Dearth
Encyclopedia
Henry Golden Dearth was a distinguished American painter who studied in Paris and continued to spend his summers in France painting in the Normandy
region. He would return to New York in winter, and became known for his moody paintings of the Long Island
area. Around 1912, Dearth changed his artistic style, and began to include portrait and still life pieces as well as his paintings of rock pools created mainly in Brittany
. A winner of several career medals and the Webb prize in 1893, Dearth died suddenly in 1918 aged 53 and was survived by a wife and daughter.
, Rhode Island, Henry Golden Dearth was the youngest of five children of John Willis and Ruth Marshall Dearth. His father was connected with the whaling business and was an artillery officer during the civil war. He was also a talented musician and provided favorable influences to the development of Henry's talent. His grandfather was a commander in the United States Navy during the war of 1812. At the age of 15, his family moved to Waterbury, Connecticut
, where he entered the employ of Brown & Brothers, and was afterward for a time connected with the Waterbury Clock company. Dearth's passionate love for art led him to eventually devote himself solely to the study of painting. He entered the studio of portrait painter Horace Johnson for three months before he went to Paris and studied in the atelier of Herbert and Aime Morot
at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts
.
Returning to the United States in 1888, Dearth established himself with a debut exhibition of landscape at the National Academy of Design. In 1889 he exhibited for the first time with the more progressive Society of American Artists. In 1893 he was awarded the Webb prize for works by an artist under the age of 40. In 1902 he opened his studio at 18 E. 40th Street in New York and started to return to spend his summers in Normandy
, the region that first attracted him to landscape painting. He had a house and studio at Montreuil-sur-Mer
, in the Pas-de-Calais, on the English Channel
coast, where he worked several months each season. He married Cornelia Van Rensselaer on 26 February 1896 and they had one daughter Nina Van Rensselaer Dearth.
painter and is considered part of the American Barbizon school
. Spending most of his time in France, he was naturally fond of the picturesque country, and many of his subjects were found near Boulogne and Montreuil-sur-Mer. These early works show a marked indifference to detail, a somewhat limited palette and a preference for a low key. In art critic Charles Buchanan's words, Dearth was more or less repainting Barbizon, but was "inexpressively exquisite" and "a supreme gentleman of aethetics".
After 1912, he altered his technique and painted with broken colors, changing his subjects from the moody landscapes of Long Island and Montreuil to still life
and figurative
subjects in a style reminiscent of Adolphe Monticelli. Such a style change was marked by his request to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1915 to replace his earlier work with his recent figure painting. Although his late works include portraits and genre subject, his most numerous works of this period were paintings of rock pools in Brittany
. The canvases were highly colored; the pigment thickly applied with impressive decorative effect of the compositions. In his final days, Dearth frequently used objects from his substantial collection of Gothic
, Renaissance
, and Eastern
artifacts as his subjects or as backgrounds. His final pictures incorporated important Japanese screens, early Chinese paintings, and stone carvings of the Wei period in still life arrangements or as backgrounds for some finely modeled figures.
Dearth's works from the 1890s to the early 1900s show him to be the landscape painter of considerable delicacy, refinement, and imaginative feeling. Paintings such as Springtme Montigny (1899) and Montigny (1898) exemplify his conscientious regard for the facts of nature, combined with a notable faculty for their poetic interpretation in artistic terms. His pictures are full of light and atmosphere, and no matter how brilliant his color schemes, the result is a subtle depth of tone instead of hardness. When Boulogne Harbor was exchanged for Cornelia in Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Times critic commented the two pictures seen together would have formed an extraordinary commentary on the completeness and rapidity of a style change possible to an impressionable painter. In the works dating from 1912 and beyond, he freely used pure color spots and splashes in order to render what he saw so that the paintings display great harmony and are pervaded with a rich, unctuous feeling.
After his death, a memorial exhibition was organized by Mrs. Henry Golden Dearth and Cornelia B. Sage-Quninton, Director of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and Albright Art Gallery in the principal museums or art galleries in the cities of Buffalo, New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Muskegon, Youngstown, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Worcester, Providence and Boston in 1919.
in 1888 and was elected to full Academician in 1906 when the National Academy
and the Society merged. He was also a member of the Fencers Club
, Lotos Club
, and the Century Association
. He won the Society of American Artists' Webb prize in 1893. He also won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universal in Paris (1900) and silver medals at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (1901) and at an exhibition in Buenos Aires (1907).
Normandy
Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...
region. He would return to New York in winter, and became known for his moody paintings of the Long Island
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...
area. Around 1912, Dearth changed his artistic style, and began to include portrait and still life pieces as well as his paintings of rock pools created mainly in Brittany
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...
. A winner of several career medals and the Webb prize in 1893, Dearth died suddenly in 1918 aged 53 and was survived by a wife and daughter.
Early life
Born on April 22, 1864 in BristolBristol, Rhode Island
Bristol is a town in and the historic county seat of Bristol County, Rhode Island, United States. The population was 22,954 at the 2010 census. Bristol, a deepwater seaport, is named after Bristol, England....
, Rhode Island, Henry Golden Dearth was the youngest of five children of John Willis and Ruth Marshall Dearth. His father was connected with the whaling business and was an artillery officer during the civil war. He was also a talented musician and provided favorable influences to the development of Henry's talent. His grandfather was a commander in the United States Navy during the war of 1812. At the age of 15, his family moved to Waterbury, Connecticut
Connecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...
, where he entered the employ of Brown & Brothers, and was afterward for a time connected with the Waterbury Clock company. Dearth's passionate love for art led him to eventually devote himself solely to the study of painting. He entered the studio of portrait painter Horace Johnson for three months before he went to Paris and studied in the atelier of Herbert and Aime Morot
Aimé Morot
Aimé Morot was a French painter.Morot was born in Nancy, where he studied under a drawing master named Thierry. He later attended the atelier of Alexandre Cabanel in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but left after only two weeks to continue his studies independently...
at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
.
Returning to the United States in 1888, Dearth established himself with a debut exhibition of landscape at the National Academy of Design. In 1889 he exhibited for the first time with the more progressive Society of American Artists. In 1893 he was awarded the Webb prize for works by an artist under the age of 40. In 1902 he opened his studio at 18 E. 40th Street in New York and started to return to spend his summers in Normandy
Normandy
Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...
, the region that first attracted him to landscape painting. He had a house and studio at Montreuil-sur-Mer
Montreuil-sur-Mer
Montreuil or Montreuil-sur-Mer is a sub-prefecture in the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France. It is located on the Canche river, not far from Étaples...
, in the Pas-de-Calais, on the English Channel
English Channel
The English Channel , often referred to simply as the Channel, is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates southern England from northern France, and joins the North Sea to the Atlantic. It is about long and varies in width from at its widest to in the Strait of Dover...
coast, where he worked several months each season. He married Cornelia Van Rensselaer on 26 February 1896 and they had one daughter Nina Van Rensselaer Dearth.
Careers
Dearth's career can be divided into two periods. Before 1912, he was a tonalismTonalism
Tonalism was an artistic style that emerged in the 1880s when American artists began to paint landscape forms with an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist. Between 1880 and 1915, dark, neutral hues such as gray, brown or blue, often dominated compositions by artists associated with the style...
painter and is considered part of the American Barbizon school
American Barbizon school
The American Barbizon School was a group of painters and style partly influenced by the French Barbizon school. American Barbizon artists concentrated on painting rural landscapes often including peasants or farm animals....
. Spending most of his time in France, he was naturally fond of the picturesque country, and many of his subjects were found near Boulogne and Montreuil-sur-Mer. These early works show a marked indifference to detail, a somewhat limited palette and a preference for a low key. In art critic Charles Buchanan's words, Dearth was more or less repainting Barbizon, but was "inexpressively exquisite" and "a supreme gentleman of aethetics".
After 1912, he altered his technique and painted with broken colors, changing his subjects from the moody landscapes of Long Island and Montreuil to still life
Still life
A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural or man-made...
and figurative
Figurative art
Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.-Definition:...
subjects in a style reminiscent of Adolphe Monticelli. Such a style change was marked by his request to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1915 to replace his earlier work with his recent figure painting. Although his late works include portraits and genre subject, his most numerous works of this period were paintings of rock pools in Brittany
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...
. The canvases were highly colored; the pigment thickly applied with impressive decorative effect of the compositions. In his final days, Dearth frequently used objects from his substantial collection of Gothic
Gothic art
Gothic art was a Medieval art movement that developed in France out of Romanesque art in the mid-12th century, led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, but took over art more completely north of the Alps, never quite effacing more classical...
, Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, and Eastern
Eastern world
__FORCETOC__The term Eastern world refers very broadly to the various cultures or social structures and philosophical systems of Eastern Asia or geographically the Eastern Culture...
artifacts as his subjects or as backgrounds. His final pictures incorporated important Japanese screens, early Chinese paintings, and stone carvings of the Wei period in still life arrangements or as backgrounds for some finely modeled figures.
Death, reception and posthumous fame
Henry Golden Dearth died of a heart attack on March 27, 1918 at his home at 116 E. 63 Street, New York city.Dearth's works from the 1890s to the early 1900s show him to be the landscape painter of considerable delicacy, refinement, and imaginative feeling. Paintings such as Springtme Montigny (1899) and Montigny (1898) exemplify his conscientious regard for the facts of nature, combined with a notable faculty for their poetic interpretation in artistic terms. His pictures are full of light and atmosphere, and no matter how brilliant his color schemes, the result is a subtle depth of tone instead of hardness. When Boulogne Harbor was exchanged for Cornelia in Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Times critic commented the two pictures seen together would have formed an extraordinary commentary on the completeness and rapidity of a style change possible to an impressionable painter. In the works dating from 1912 and beyond, he freely used pure color spots and splashes in order to render what he saw so that the paintings display great harmony and are pervaded with a rich, unctuous feeling.
After his death, a memorial exhibition was organized by Mrs. Henry Golden Dearth and Cornelia B. Sage-Quninton, Director of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and Albright Art Gallery in the principal museums or art galleries in the cities of Buffalo, New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Muskegon, Youngstown, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Worcester, Providence and Boston in 1919.
Affiliations and awards
Dearth became a member of the Society of American ArtistsSociety of American Artists
The Society of American Artists was an American artists group. It was formed in 1877 by artists who felt the National Academy of Design did not adequately meet their needs, and was too conservative....
in 1888 and was elected to full Academician in 1906 when the National Academy
National Academy of Design
The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design – known simply as the "National Academy" – is an honorary association of American artists founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E...
and the Society merged. He was also a member of the Fencers Club
Fencers Club
The Fencers Club is the oldest continuously existing organization in the Western Hemisphere dedicated exclusively to teaching and promoting the sport of fencing...
, Lotos Club
Lotos Club
The Lotos Club is a gentleman's club in New York City. Founded in 1870 by a young group of writers and critics, Mark Twain, an early member, called it the "Ace of Clubs"...
, and the Century Association
Century Association
__notoc__The Century Association is a private club in New York City. It evolved out of an earlier organization – the Sketch Club, founded in 1829 by editor and poet William Cullen Bryant and his friends – and was established in 1847 by Bryant and others as a club to promote interest in...
. He won the Society of American Artists' Webb prize in 1893. He also won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universal in Paris (1900) and silver medals at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (1901) and at an exhibition in Buenos Aires (1907).
Existing works in museums
- In the Gloaming , 1889, Detroit Institute of Arts
- Flecks of Foam, 1911-1912, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
- The Stubble Field, 1890's, Cleveland Museum of Art
- Landscape with Brook, c 1900, Mattatuck Museum Arts and History Center
- Still Life, not dated, Mattatuck Museum Arts and History Center
- An Old Church at Montreuil, 1906-1907, Smithsonian American Art Museum
- Dreamland, not dated, Brooklyn Museum
- Harvest Time in Norman, Berlin Museum, bought by the German government in 1903 International Exhibition in Berlin
- Boulogne Harbor, Metropolitan Museum of Art, later exchanged by his later portrait work titled Cornelia
Exhibitions in chronological order
- 1888 Exhibition of the American Academy in New York
- 1901 Exhibition of the Fine Arts, Buffalo, NY
- 1902 Union League Club
- 1903 the International Exhibition in Berlin, Germany
- 1904 Lotos Club (with other members), New York
- 1907 Oehme Gallery (Representative American Artists)
- 1907 Lotos Club, New York
- 1909 Yearly Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
- 1910 Detroit Museum of Art (with Paul Dessar)
- 1911 Buffalo Fine Arts Academy
- 1912 Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo
- 1912 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
- 1912 Knoedler Galleries, New York
- 1913 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
- 1913 New York Montross Gallery, New York
- 1916 Milwaukee Art Institute, Milwaukee
- 1916 Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago
- 1918 The Milch Galleries, New York