oil on canvas
24 by 30 in.
Executed circa 1889-92.
Christies will auction this piece on January 23, 2025
In 1889 Frank W. Benson’s close friend Joseph Lindon-Smith invited Frank and his new wife Ellen to visit him in Dublin, New Hampshire, a small summer colony that was growing around the shores of the lake at the foot of Mt. Monadnock. The mountain was a magnet not only for hikers but had also been an inspiration for the writers and philosophers of New England since the l830s. The student artists had been roommates on the Left Bank during their two years at the Academie Julian in Paris. On the shores of the lake, Joe and his parents were in the process of building a cabin at Loon Point. It had quickly become a focal point for the social life of Joe and his many artist friends.
At the other end of the small lake, Mrs. John Singleton Copley Greene, a doyen of the Boston social set, had built several rustic cottages that she lent to various musicians, artists, professors, and other “Persons of Arts and Letters.” Benson, like Lindon-Smith, had just been named to a position at their alma mater, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts School. Mrs. Greene was delighted to include him and his young family in her “Salon.” The heady, creative, and slightly bohemian flavor of this group earned for the little colony of cottages the sobriquet “The Latin Quarter.”
But it was probably more than Joe’s friendship or the lure of a cool, mountain lake that brought Benson to Dublin. Abbot Handerson Thayer had been invited there by Miss Mary Greene (a cousin of Benson’s benefactress) who promised to build him a house and studio if he would start an art school in Dublin. Thayer had established a reputation for himself in New York after studying in Paris and Benson was undoubtedly eager to learn the art of teaching from such a recognized artist.
Benson and Thayer hit it off immediately. Benson’s early views of Mount Monadnock are so like Thayer’s that it is easy to visualize these two painters seated on their campstools not far from each other, painting the same scene, each in his own way. Their mutual interest in sport also drew the two together. In fact, the first mention Benson made of Thayer is in his fishing journal. “I got [fish] more or less every day…over 100 in all,” Benson wrote at the end of his second summer in Dublin. “Thayer caught one of just one pound…”
Despite their twelve-year age difference, the two had trod remarkably similar paths. Thayer’s first painting had been of a fish he had caught and arranged in a still life on the grass. Frank’s first painting had been of birds he had shot and painted as they hung from a nail on the barn door. Both had studied in Paris and both were happiest out-of-doors. Both artists took their work very seriously. But there the similarities ended. Where Thayer had two major patrons to whom he often turned when his funds were low, Benson’s work was collected by a wide and varied group of connoisseurs, but he had no actual patrons.
Yet the two artists were close. At first the friendship of these two very different men was based on mutual admiration for each other’s art. Thayer obviously became a mentor for Benson, and for the next seven or eight years subtle bows to Thayer’s influence can be seen in Benson’s studies of women.
However critics noted more differences than similarities in the two men’s styles. They observed that Benson’s young women were fresh, real American girls, while Thayer’s women were romantic visions of other-worldly goddesses. Writing of Summer, an allegorical figure which Benson painted in Dublin during his second summer there, a critic noted, “Mr. Benson is deliberately decorative…[his] figure is not a goddess; she is simply a charming woman. And there is no glamour of romance flung about her…the very design…is graceful, original, and picturesque…a picture alive with unaffected motion, with fragrant but quite earthy airs.”
Frank W. Benson, 1890. Oil on canvas.
This painting, long thought to have been modeled for by Benson’s wife Ellen, is a lyrical study of a young woman representing the most brilliant season of the year. August-blue skies echo the blue of her gown. Her swirling scarves mingle with the billowing clouds. Two trees frame her figure like columns in a Greek temple. It is the work that most closely resembles the sort of paintings that Thayer continued to do until the end of his life. But in Benson’s paintings of women, there are no wings or halos. It is interesting that Benson essentially discontinued using motifs of such allegorical nature during his last year in Dublin.
by Abbot Handerson Thayer
The Benson family spent at least a portion of each summer in Dublin for the next five years during which Benson painted mostly landscapes and portraits. In 1892, Edmund Tarbell (who had attended the Museum School with Benson and Lindon-Smith and with whom Benson would later direct the Museum School for 25 years) also spent the summer with his family at a cottage on Dublin Lake
Just why the young family changed summer places is not known, although the worlds of Joe and Frank were becoming very different. Joe was a bachelor and a world traveler, while Frank was the father of three. Perhaps during the winter of 1893 Tarbell and Benson talked of their previous summer’s brief visit to Newcastle, New Hampshire, and the opportunities for painting there. Maybe Benson, born in the seafaring town of Salem, Massachusetts, missed the ocean. Whatever the reasons for the Bensons’ change of summer homes, they spent only the early part of the summer of 1893 in Dublin. After Benson completed a landscape and his portrait of Thomas Wentworth Higginson the young family stayed for the remainder of the summer in Newcastle at the Tarbell’s new home. The following year Benson and Tarbell began a summer art school on the Newcastle town dock. Their school remained active until about 1899.
Benson painted many views of Mount Monadnock and the surrounding countryside. This mountain and the nearby woods, which he had hiked as a boy, appear frequently in his paintings and those of Thayer. Indeed, their respective studies of the Dublin landscape look so similar that it is easy to imagine these two painters seated on their campstools not far from each other, painting the same view. In what may have been Benson’s first painting of Mt Monadnock, his oil and Thayer’s are, at least in the upper portion of the canvas, almost identical. As if to highlight this both men named their 1889 paintings Spring Hillside.
Frank W. Benson, 1989. Private collection.
Just as the paintings of the French Impressionists reveal them to have had “sketching parties” at particularly picturesque sites, so too the artists of Dublin–Thayer, Benson, and Lindon Smith–often packed their traps upon their backs and hiked together to a favorite spot where each painted the scene in his own particular style.
In works from Benson’s early years in Dublin his palette is restrained, and his paintings closely resemble Thayer’s use of darker pigments and somber compositions. As Benson progressed in developing a landscape style of his own, his treatment of natural elements grew more spontaneous and his palette brighter.
This small oil, although titled Monadnock, is not strictly a painting of the famous mountain but a dramatic treatment of shadow and sun falling on the loosely handled natural elements of a forest glade. As if unable to create a Dublin landscape without at least a brief mention of the mountain that dominated the town, Benson inserts a small portion of a flank of Mt. Monadnock thus adding a sloping horizontal component to the design. With the most prominent tree, perhaps the one that casts the majority of the dark shadows, Benson establishes a strong vertical element that seems to frame an opening in the forest through which we see the mountain. Using the slope as a background, Benson sets against it the curving branches of a smaller tree and the angled trunk of another. The contrast of the nearly black evergreens with the sunlight grasses and the cloud strewn sky is striking and sets the stage for Benson’s later Dublin works–paintings that are colorful and exuberant.
This painting of Mt. Monadnock was given by Benson to his niece Marjorie as a wedding gift. Marjorie was the daughter of the artist’s brother John, who–with the encouragement of his older brother–also became a successful painter at the age of 57.
© Copyright, 2024, Faith Andrews Bedford.
1 Fishing Diary, 15 September l890.
2 Harper’s Weekly, 40 (18 April 1896): 392-94.
3 It was here that Tarbell painted his famous Mother and Child in a Boat, an early Impressionist oil of his wife Emmaline and his daughter Josephine who was Benson’s god daughter. It is now at the Boston Museum of Fine Art