George H. Clements (artist)
George Henry Clements was an American artist who was best known for the watercolor paintings he made in an impressionist style. Critics said his work was characterized by "exact observation" and "vivid, brief, suggestive" treatment of his subjects. Working outdoors, often while cruising on a custom-made sailboat, he chose sea and coastal scenes as his most frequent subjects. He had a folklorist's appreciation of Louisiana's Creole culture and was a supporter of civil rights for the Black communities that were oppressed by Jim Crow laws in that state.
His father having died in the year of his birth, Clements was raised by his mother in New Orleans. He began his art career by making portraits and genre paintings in that city and at a family-owned plantation nearby. To advance his training, he traveled first to Boston and then New York, where he took classes for a year at the Art Students League. He next traveled to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi. He recognized the portability and rapidity of watercolor painting while on a walking tour to Florence and thereafter used that medium for most of his work.
Throughout most of his career he showed mostly in group exhibitions held by nonprofit organizations and during the last decade of it he received solo exhibitions from commercial galleries in New York and Boston.
Although known best for his paintings, Clements was also an illustrator and on occasion an art instructor.
Early life and training
Clements was born on February 12, 1854, in San Luis Obispo, California. Later that year, after his father was killed by a bear while hunting on his ranch, Clements's mother took him and his three older brothers back to her family home in New Orleans. He grew up in that city and on reaching adulthood began work as a clerk in a New Orleans cotton factor's office. Having found in himself both talent and interest in making art, he then began a career as a portraitist and genre painter. At age 26 in 1880, he left Louisiana for a brief stay in Texas and then New York City, where he studied at the Art Students League. A year later he travelled to Paris to study first at the Académie Julian in Paris and later at the Académie Colarossi. In 1886 Clements travelled in Florence and Rome and the following year returned to the US.Career in art
While living in New Orleans, Clements became friends with the novelist George W. Cable. The two men celebrated Louisiana's creole culture and shared a fervent opposition to the state's oppressive Jim Crow laws. In 1884, the New York Times reported that Cable had covered the walls of his workroom with Clements's paintings. In an article called "Creole Cable's Workshop", a reporter said the Clements paintings had "much force of expression".In 1886, while Clements was studying at Académie Colarossi, the art gallery of the Southern Exposition of Art, Industry, and Agriculture in Louisville, Kentucky, put two of Clements's paintings on display; one, a portrait, and the other a view of Venice. That year, he also began a career as an illustrator when a popular author, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, asked her publisher to hire him and another artist to illustrate one of her best-known stories, "The Madonna of the Tubs".
On returning to the US the following year, he rented a studio in Boston and is thought to have begun teaching at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School. At this time he also began making illustrations for New York-based magazine publishers. In 1887 he showed plantation scenes in a group exhibition at the Boston Paint and Clay Club. At this time Clements wrote an article in Arts and Letters magazine in which he criticized American artists and collectors for seeking art excellence in Europe rather than America. Clements wrote that having returned from France he felt "impelled to cry aloud to my fellow countrymen exhorting them to feel more confidence in the aesthetic possibilities and accomplishments of our great republic." The following year he showed oils and watercolors in a solo exhibition at a club in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the year after that contributed illustrations for an article on moose hunting in Outing magazine.
In 1890 Clements participated for the first of many occasions in an exhibition held by the New York Watercolor Club. When he showed at the club again two years later, his work received an extensive review in The Critic. Describing Clements's paintings as "well written", the author praised his use of form and color to make "a distinct mental, as well as a visual, impression." This reviewer said Clements had achieved "one of the most purely artistic performances that we have seen this season."
Clements's paintings were again singled out for comment during Water Color Club exhibitions of 1893, 1894, and 1895. Writing in the London-based Magazine of Art, a critic praised his French landscapes and a critic for Art Amateur said he handled "watercolors as though he had dabbled in them from infancy", adding that he was "marvelously happy in seizing the exact moment when nature had placed a nearly perfect picture before him, and not less so in stopping his brush before she had included too much." Writing in the New York Times and The Critic, reviewers praised a painting called "A Tangerine Wedding Procession" in 1894, the one calling it, "a glorious round dance of color" and the other noting the "fury of action" it showed. The latter added, "Mr. Clements’s great talent is in his thorough comprehension of the matter in hand. Every line, every touch of color is expressive, and the picture is the crushed-out essence of the subject." The following year, Art Interchange, a general-audience magazine, noted the "power and authority" in Clements's painting and placed him in the front rank among artists of his day.
Clements showed at the National Academy of Design while the 1895 Watercolor Society exhibition was still on view. In reviewing the show, Art Amateur's critic described at some length his "extraordinary merits". By this time, Clements and his family were living in a house in Flushing, Queens, that had been designed by his wife. A local newspaper called it "a perfect reproduction of the New England colonial architecture". In 1896, he showed in both the Boston Arts Club and the Society of American Artists in New York.
In 1900 he bought a sailboat. Built to his specifications, it had ample room to accommodate his family and friends in comfort. A news report said it was "staunch and seaworthy" and could be 'stocked for an extended cruise." Soon after taking possession, he departed on a summer-long expedition.
In 1901 a German art annual reported that he had been spending most of the year sailing along the coasts of New England, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi. Its reporter said he spent his time painting, "drawing his subjects now from groups of lounging Mexicans, now from sober Gloucester fishermen, or from New Orleans Italian dock workers." When Clements traveled to New Orleans, he often painted genre and landscape watercolors at a plantation near Opelousas, Louisiana, that was owned by members of his mother's family, the Toledanos.
When a Water Color Club show that opened in November 1900 devoted a whole gallery to a display of 78 Clements paintings, the German art annual's reviewer described them as showing great skill. Other critics found the show highly entertaining and "decidedly refreshing", but one felt the works displayed were repetitive and monotonous and, while praising the paintings' vivid color and keen sunlight, a critic for the New York Times wondered "why Mr. Clements should have been given an entire gallery and an opportunity to hang 78 pictures in so comparatively small an exhibition."
During the rest of the first decade of the twentieth century, Clements continued to participate in group exhibitions and in 1913 illustrated a collection of short lyrics, each having a refrain that pointed to a moral lesson. Called Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles, the book was well received when it first appeared in 1913 and received renewed attention in recent years after its author—popular story-teller Ruth McEnery Stuart—was rediscovered feminist and social literary critics.
In 1914 Clements was given a solo exhibition in Detroit. This was followed in the early 1920s by a succession of solos in, respectively, New York Buffalo, Boston, and New York again.
After his wife died in 1931, Clements stopped exhibiting and moved back to Louisiana where he lived with his brother Edward. He was 81 years old when he died at his brother's home on December 17, 1935.
Artistic style and critical reception
Clements made both oil and watercolor paintings. Critics noted his skillful handling of color in both mediums but generally considered the subdued tones of his oils to be outmatched by the bright hues of the watercolors. Although he made some early portraits, outdoor scenes dominate his work. These were seascapes, often showing sailboats; genre scenes, often showing manual laborers; and landscapes, often of coastal subjects.He was known as a watercolorist. In the early 1880s, while on a walking trip from Paris to Florence, he came to recognize the portability and immediacy of watercolor for artists who were traveling light and thereafter, during his frequent travels, made a great number of watercolor paintings.
Early in his career, he was noted for the "exact observation", "thorough comprehension of the matter in hand", and force and expression in his paintings.
His technique was impressionistic and often atmospheric. In 1895 a critic was impressed by Clements's "knowledge of color values brought to a masterly perfection" and a few years later another noted his "great skill in the treatment of light watercolors and interest in the study of light and atmospheric mood". Calling attention to the sense of immediacy he was able to convey in his watercolors, a critic noted a talent for making a "vivid, brief, suggestive record". Another said he was "technically as fluent and as firm as he is in sentiment pleasing and exhilarating."
In 1901, a critic said his watercolors were "washed in freshly, and with an enthusiastic delight in the operation."