Watercolor Artists...Red...Essay

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Watercolor Artists

Approach Red Buildings
Visual Essay

featuring watercolors of
Richard Sargent, Georgina Klitgaard,
Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth,
Thomas Hart Benton, and
William Traylor

1
Red House
Richard Sargent (1911-1978) American
Watercolor on paper, 10" x 14" (w x h)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

Richard Sargent, born in Moline, Illinois in 1911, received his art education at the Corcoran School of Art and the Philips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C. He also worked with Ben Shahn. Sargent painted many cover paintings for The Saturday Evening Post. His illustration works are feature good humor and insight into human frailties. He also illustrated for Fortune, Woman’s Day, American Magazine, Photoplay, and Collier’s magazine. He was a member of the Society of Illustrators in New York, and for many years, lived and painted in Spain.

2
Ice House, Nantucket
Georgina Klitgaard (1889/1893-1977) American
Watercolor, graphite and charcoal on paper, 20" x 14" (w x h), 1930
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Georgina Klitgaard (born Berrian), an American artist, was known for panoramic landscape paintings of scenic New York from a bird's-eye view perspective. Her work was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, on April 14, 1929, and in The Art Digest, on November 1, 1929. She painted three murals in United States Post Offices during the Great Depression. She graduated from Barnard College, and also studied art at the National Academy of Design.

3
Cobb's Barns and Distant Houses
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) American
Watercolor and graphite on paper, 30" x 22" (w x h), 1931
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Edward Hopper was renting Burly Cobb's house when this was painted during the Depression. It's in South Truro, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Hopper sold 30 paintings in 1931, including 13 watercolors. The following year he participated in the first Whitney Annual, and he continued to exhibit in every annual at the museum for the rest of his life. In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art gave Hopper his first large-scale retrospective.

4
Houses with Red
Charles Demuth (1883-1935) American
Watercolor and graphite on paper, 14" x 10" (w x h), 1917
The MET Art Museum, New York, New York

Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was one of the leading artists during the American Modernism era. He was distinguished for intimate watercolors and cubic architectural paintings. Demuth studied art at Académie Julian in Paris, where he was welcomed into the avant-garde art scene and met other American Cubism artists like Marsden Hartley. He illustrated plays and novels such as Émile Zola's Nana. Demuth later employed a cubist technique by painting industrial factories with complex structural planes, leading him to becoming a pioneer for the Precisionist movement.

5
House in Cubist Landscape
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) American
Watercolor and charcoal on paper, mounted on board,
8" x 12" (w x h), circa 1915-1920
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

Thomas Hart Benton was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His work is strongly associated with the Midwestern United States, the region in which he was born and which he called home for most of his life. He also studied in Paris, lived in New York City for more than 20 years and painted scores of works there. He summered for 50 years on Martha's Vineyard.

6
Man in Blue House with Rooster
Bill Traylor (1853-1949) American
Opaque watercolor and graphite pencil on board,
12" x 16" (w x h), circa 1939-42
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

William Traylor was an African-American self-taught artist from Lowndes County, Alabama. Born into slavery in 1853, Traylor spent the majority of his life after emancipation as a sharecropper. It was only after 1939, following his move to Montgomery, Alabama, that Traylor began to draw. At the age of 85, he took up a pencil and a scrap of cardboard to document his recollections and observations. From 1939 to 1942, while working on the sidewalks of Montgomery, he produced nearly 1,500 pieces of art.  Traylor now holds a central position in the fields of self-taught-artists and modern art.