Edwin Dickinson
Edwin Walter Dickinson was an American painter and draftsman best known for psychologically charged self-portraits, quickly painted landscapes, which he called premier coups, and large, hauntingly enigmatic paintings involving figures and objects painted from observation, in which he invested his greatest time and concern. His drawings are also widely admired and were the subject of the first book published on his work. Less well known are his premier coup portraits and nudes, his medium-sized paintings done entirely from imagination or incorporating elements from one of his drawings or done from observation over several days or weeks, including still lifes, portraits of others, both commissioned and not, and nudes.
His style of painting, which eschewed details in favor of close attention to the relationships between masses of color, was strongly influenced by the example of his teacher Charles W. Hawthorne. The strange juxtapositions and perplexing hints of narrative in his large compositions have been compared to Surrealism, and his premier coups often approach abstraction, but Dickinson resisted being identified with any art movement.
History
Early life and art training
Dickinson was born and raised in Seneca Falls, New York, in the Finger Lakes area; his family moved to Buffalo in 1897. The death of his mother from tuberculosis in 1903, the suicide in 1913 of his older brother, Burgess, his father's remarriage in 1914 to a much younger woman, and the death of a close friend in combat have all been cited as influences on the themes of his later work. As a boy Dickinson had assumed he would become a minister, like his father, but his brother's suggestion of a career in the navy proved more to his liking. After failing the entrance exam of the U.S. Naval Academy twice, in 1911 he enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied under William Merritt Chase. In the summers of 1912 and 1913 he stayed in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he studied with Charles W. Hawthorne, and continued there year-round from 1913 to the summer of 1916, working as Hawthorne's assistant in 1914. From late summer 1916 through year's end Dickinson investigated the possibilities of printmaking in Provincetown with fellow painter Ross Moffett, and made further attempts in the 1920s and '30s, but felt his time was better spent painting.Hawthorne, who had himself been a student of Chase and perpetuated some of his ideas, had a strong influence on Dickinson's painting methods and ideas, many of which he retained in his later teaching. Dickinson's Self-Portrait of 1914 is what Hawthorne's students called a "mudhead", a back-lit figure built up in color patches, working outward from the center, rather than filling in contours. Hawthorne had his students use palette knives and even fingers, "as if painting had been just invented" and preventing them from trying to paint details instead establishing relationships between "spots" of color. From Hawthorne, Dickinson learned to look for the unexpected and to paint without formulas, to squint to determine value relationships, and to believe that a painting will be better if one leaves off when inspiration wanes, no matter how much is done. Dickinson's use of Hawthorne's ideas in his teaching has been described by one of his former students, Francis Cunningham.
World War I and European trip
Dickinson spent time teaching painting in Buffalo and working as a telegrapher in New York City until his naval service from late 1917 to 1919. World War I had interrupted Dickinson's plans to visit Europe with his close friend and fellow painter, Herbert Groesbeck, and while Dickinson served in the navy off the coast of New England, Groesback traveled to Europe as a soldier and died in the Argonne Forest in one of the last battles of the war. His death seemed to reawaken Dickinson's pain over earlier losses of his mother and brother and to affect subsequent paintings. A trip to Paris to study art followed between December 1919 and July 1920, financed by a gift from Groesbeck's widow and parents of the insurance money paid on his death. Dickinson made a side trip to visit in northern France and then to Spain; two paintings by El Greco in Toledo he declared the best he had ever seen, an admiration that persisted throughout his life. The subject of one was especially meaningful to Dickinson, having visited Groesbeck's grave so recently, The Burial of Count Orgaz.Financial instability
A few of Dickinson's early works garnered recognitions, most notably Interior, which was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1916 and three other major venues, and Old Ben and Mrs. Marks, 1916, which was shown in New York in 1917 and in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris in 1919, where Dickinson saw it. However, this recognition did not continue after his return from Europe. Despite the financial support of a patron, Esther Hoyt Sawyer, Dickinson struggled financially. In 1924, Dickinson reached a low point after an inheritance from his mother and some money from his father ran out. He was unable to sell An Anniversary, a major painting on which he had worked steadily for thirteen months, and two commissioned portraits, one of his uncle Charles Evans Hughes, and one of Charles D. Walcott, painted during an eight-week stay in Washington the previous year, were rejected. The sale of another major painting to a friend, for $500 in installments, was not enough to enable him to continue as an artist. However, in July 1924, Sawyer's husband arranged to pay Dickinson a monthly salary in exchange for the right to choose paintings of his equivalent in value. This arrangement continued for twenty-one years, ending only when Dickinson secured steady teaching jobs at the Art Students League and Cooper Union in 1945.In 1928 Dickinson married Frances "Pat" Foley, shortly after the completion of The Fossil Hunters, an painting on which he spent 192 sittings and that achieved considerable notoriety when exhibited at the Carnegie International of 1928, because it was hung sideways, a mistake perpetuated by subsequent exhibitions in 1929 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Esther Sawyer arranged for the sale of Dickinson's works, especially drawings, portraits, and landscapes to her wealthy friends, and in 1927 she and her husband purchased Dickinson's painting An Anniversary, 1920–21, and donated it to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Dickinson devoted more time to his landscapes in the 1930s because they were easier to make and sell than his larger works, which he was having greater difficulty exhibiting in major exhibitions.
In a letter to Sawyer in 1933 he wrote that he hoped to live by the landscapes he was painting. In February 1934, he was invited to participate in the first Depression-era program for artists, the half-year Public Works of Art Project, which offered him weekly pay and an exhibition of the painting in Washington in May. He finished the work on time by reworking an abandoned painting, one of a small group done from imagination on a favorite subject, polar exploration, and changing its title to Stranded Brig. The major paintings of this period were Woodland Scene, 1929–1935, which Esther purchased and gave to Cornell University, and Composition with Still Life, 1933–1937, which the Sawyers gave to the Museum of Modern Art in 1952.
A second trip to Europe with his family followed in 1937–38, where he painted landscapes in southern and northern France and visited Rome, Florence, and Venice until concerns about Nazi Germany cut short his stay. While still abroad Dickinson had his first one-person show in New York City at the Passedoit Gallery. It included The Cello Player, The Fossil Hunters, Woodland Scene, Stranded Brig, the recently completed Composition with Still Life, fifteen landscapes sent from France, and fifteen other paintings. It was well covered by art critics, with a generally favorable response. A year after the family's return Dickinson bought a house on Cape Cod in Wellfleet, where they stayed when not teaching in New York.
1943 to 1958
Between 1936 and 1942 Dickinson exhibited annually in the Passedoit Gallery in New York City. This was made possible because he painted no large, time-consuming works between the time he left off work on Composition with Still Life in 1937 and began work on Ruin at Daphne January 1, 1943. The relationship ceased because Dickinson, still struggling to support his family, did not generate enough income from sales and needed to find "earning work". In 1944 he moved the family to New York, believing that it would help him secure a teaching job. During the first year he received some commercial work, including drawings for a French magazine that were rejected and a copy of a photograph of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-Shek. His wife, Pat Foley, found employment at the Hewitt School that lasted until her retirement in 1966, and in 1945 Dickinson was hired to teach at three schools, beginning a period of teaching that lasted until his retirement, also in 1966.The other reason for discontinuing the connection with Passedoit was that he wanted time to work on a new painting, Ruin at Daphne, on which he continued to paint, with periodic interludes and lapses in enthusiasm, until 1953, for a total of 447 sittings. A donor purchased Ruin at Daphne and gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1955. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased The Fossil Hunters in 1958, and in 1988 the M. H. de Young Museum purchased The Cello Player, the last major painting of Dickinson's to enter a museum. In 1948 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1950.