Charlotte in New York (9 page)

Authors: Joan MacPhail Knight

M
ARY
C
ASSATT
(1844â1926) Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to wealthy parents, Mary Cassatt studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before traveling to Paris to continue her studies when she was twenty-two. She became a close friend of Degas and was a great help to the Impressionists by promoting their work in the United States and convincing rich American friends like the Havemeyers to buy their paintings.

W
ILLIAM
M
ERRITT
C
HASE
(1849â1916) The son of a shopkeeper, Chase was born and raised in Indiana. He left when he was twenty years old to study at the National Academy of Design in New York. After further study in Europe, he returned to Manhattan, where he transformed a vast space in the old Tenth Street Studios into an exotic showplace that attracted many pupils and lucrative portrait commissions. Quickly, Chase became recognized as a brilliant art teacher and one of the most successful artists of his day. In 1886, he married Alice Gerson, a family friend, and their beautiful children became favorite models for his paintings.

P
AUL
G
AUGUIN
(1848â1903) Born in Paris to a French journalist father and a Peruvian mother, Gauguin had a successful career as a stockbroker when he met Camille Pissarro and the other Impressionists and attended their first exhibition. Overwhelmed at what he saw, he retired from business to become a painter, moving out of Paris to Rouen, then Denmark, Martinique and Panama, before settling for several years in the Brittany towns of Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. In 1895, he moved permanently to the South Sea islands.

(F
REDERICK
) C
HILDE
H
ASSAM
(1859â1935) Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Hassam traveled to Europe when he was twenty-two to visit museums and spend three years at the AcadÃ©mie Julian in Paris. On his return, he settled in New York, the city he considered to be the most beautiful in the world, and took his subjects from Manhattan's avenues, parks, bridges and squares, often capturing effects of snow or rain. Summers he worked on Appledore Island in the Isles of Shoals, the home of his friend the poet Celia Thaxter. It was she who suggested he drop the name “Frederick” in favor of the more glamorous-sounding “Childe Hassam.”

C
LAUDE
M
ONET
(1840â1926) Oscar Claude Monet was born in Paris but moved to Le Havre with his family when he was five. Even as a boy, he was gifted and encouraged by his parents and teachers to study art. In 1859, he returned to Paris to attend AcadÃ©mie Suisse. In 1862, he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, and together they founded an independent group of artists. They organized their first group exhibition in 1874. Monet's painting
Impression: Sunrise
gave rise to the name “Impressionism” and defined the group's style. In 1883, after his first wife, Camille, died, Monet moved with Alice HoschedÃ© and her six children to Giverny. They settled into the Maison du Pressoir, or “Cider-Press House,” where he livedâpainting, gardening and landscapingâfor the next forty-three years.

B
ERTHE
M
ORISOT
(1841â1895) The daughter of a government official who was an amateur painter and supporter of the arts, and the granddaughter of Fragonard, Berthe Morisot was born in Bourges, France. She studied with Camille Corot and Edouard Manet, with whom she had a lifelong friendship. In 1874, Morisot married EugÃ¨ne Manet, Edouard's younger brother, and had a daughter, Julie, who was often a subject of her paintings. Morisot was the first woman to join the circle of French Impressionist painters and exhibited in all but one of their shows.

M
AURICE
B
RAZIL
P
RENDERGAST
(1858â1924) Maurice Prendergast was born in St. John's, Newfoundland, where his father had a trading post. At the age of ten, he moved with his family to Boston, Massachusetts. In 1891, he and his brother Charles, a frame maker, had saved enough money to travel to Paris, where he enrolled at the AcadÃ©mies Julian and Colarossi. Upon his return to Boston, he visited Manhattan often, where he was inspired to paint many scenes of New Yorkers enjoying themselves in Central Park.

J
OHN
S
INGER
S
ARGENT
(1856â1925) Sargent was a brilliant and successful portrait painter. Born in Florence to American parents, he grew up abroad and learned to draw and paint at an early age. Recognizing his son's talent, his father arranged for him to study portraiture under Carolus-Duran in Paris. Sargent became friends with Monet, and the two artists exhibited together and collected each other's work. Sargent traveled extensively throughout his life, capturing in oil and watercolors the scenic places he visited and the friends and family who traveled with him.

P
AUL
S
ÃRUSIER
(1863â1927) Born in Paris, SÃ©rusier was the son of a wealthy businessman who hoped he would follow him into the perfume business. SÃ©rusier resisted and attended the AcadÃ©mie Julian instead. In Brittany in 1888, Gauguin urged him to paint freely from his imagination, using pure colors. He painted a small wood panel,
The Talisman
, and took it back with him to the AcadÃ©mie Julian where it sparked a controversy. Together with other young painters who admired Gauguin, such as Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, SÃ©rusier formed the group called the Nabis.

W. L
OUIS
S
ONNTAG
J
R
. (1869â1898) The son of a successful landscape painter, W. Louis Sonntag Jr. was raised in New York City and painted scenes of New York urban life. A child prodigy with no formal artistic training, he was only thirteen years old when his watercolor of the Brooklyn Bridge was exhibited at the National Academy of Design.

C
ELIA
L
AIGHTON
T
HAXTER
(1835â1894) Poet and painter Celia Thaxter was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. When she was four, she moved with her family ten miles out to sea, to tiny White Island, where her father would be the lighthouse keeper. Eventually he built a popular resort hotel on nearby Appledore Island, where painters such as Hassam and Brown were regular guests. On summer evenings, they, along with other artists, writers and musicians, would gather at Thaxter's cottage where she, in a beautiful white dress, presided over a salon.

J
AMES
A
BBOTT
M
C
N
EILL
W
HISTLER
(1834â1903) Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler moved with his family when he was nine to St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father was a civil engineer for the construction of a railroad line to Moscow. He studied drawing at the Imperial Academy of Science. After several years at West Point Military Academy where he excelled only in drawing, Whistler decided to become an artist and moved to Europe permanently when he was twenty-one. A friend of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, he soon made a name for himself as a talented painter, witty art critic and flamboyant dandy in the style of another friend, Oscar Wilde.

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

Charlotte Glidden is not a real girl, although a girl just like Charlotte could very well have traveled with her mother and artist father to France in the 1890s, when American painters flocked there to learn about the new French way of painting called Impressionism. Her journal is based on historical fact. Artists like Mary Cassatt, Theodore Butler and John Singer Sargent traveled to Paris and the beautiful French countryside to paint where French masters paintedâin Monet's village of Giverny in Normandy, for instance, and Gauguin's hamlets of Le Pouldu and Pont-Aven on the rocky coast of Brittany. Then, with what they had learned in France, many returned to America in the late 1890s to paint in New York, a great bustling city with more than a million people, soaring skyscrapers and the longest bridges and busiest harbor in the world. American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase and Maurice Prendergast rented apartments and painting studios, often near Washington Square, painted
en plein air
in Central Park, attended exhibitions at the New York gallery of Monsieur Durand-Ruel and were invited to costume balls in grand mansions owned by art patrons such as the Havemeyers. When summer came, they, like the fictitious Glidden family of this book, escaped the city's heat by traveling to picturesque artists' colonies along the seacoast, such as Easthampton, Long Island and Appledore Island, off the coast of New Hampshire.

The author wishes to thank the Pont-Aven Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Museum and the Museum of the City of New York for their assistance and access to their research libraries, as well as to acknowledge Celia Thaxter's book,
An Island Garden
, as a source of inspiration for this book.