1929 Eliot Clark Winter in Tuscany Painting

Description

Winter in Tuscany or Near Florence, Italy, 1929
Oil on board, 12 x 18 board, 19 x 25 framed
Signed … more Winter in Tuscany or Near Florence, Italy, 1929
Oil on board, 12 x 18 board, 19 x 25 framed
Signed lower left, titled verso

Eliot Candee Clark( born New York 1883, died Charlottesville, VA 1980)
Son of landscape painter Walter Clark and Jennifer Woodruff Clark, a student of psychic phenomena, Eliot Clark was a precocious artist who became a landscape painter in the late American Impressionist style. Moving to Albemarle, Virginia in 1932, he was one of the few Impressionist* artists of the Southern states. Likely this was a result of his association with James Whistler and his painting in 1900 at Gloucester, Massachusetts with John Twachtman, a family friend. Showing his obvious interest in Impressionism, he wrote a book about its exponents including Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, Julian Weir, and Robert Vonnoh.

Clark was a teacher including at the National Arts Club* from 1943, the Art Students League*, and New York City College.

Early in his youth, Clark traveled with his father and other prominent artists to paint in the summer art colonies at Annisquam, Gloucester, Chadd's Ford and Ogunquit where he met artists of stature such as Edward Potthast and John Henry Twachtman. Clark's only formal instruction was a short two months at the Art Students League in New York.

His landscapes evoked a "spiritualized rendition of nature" that was to stay with him for the rest of his life. Clark (perhaps related to his mother's interest in physic phenomena) developed an early interest in oriental philosophy that ended up having a major effect on his artistic development, the sense of spirituality in his landscape paintings slowly grew in importance.

Between 1904 and 1906, Clark studied in France in Paris and Giverny, and in London he saw the impressionist work of James Whistler. He wrote to his father about the Whistler Exhibit stating that some of Whistler's work impressed him, "not so much in the handling, but in the use of color, and subtle arrangement of line and balance of masses." He engaged in a "walking tour" of Europe with a fellow artist whom he met in earlier in Paris. They visited many of the major galleries in Holland and then traveled through the Alps, finally reaching Venice on August 10, 1906. In Venice, he produced some Whistlerian style pastels similar to the ones he had seen in the Whistler Exhibition.

In the 1920s and 1930s, he again painted landscapes in the Southwest including the Arizona Painted Desert in 1926 and 1935. From 1922 to 1932, he lived primarily in Kent, Connecticut along the Housatonic river with such notable impressionist painters as Robert Nesbet and G. Glenn Newell. In 1932, he moved to Albemarle County Virginia to escape from a bitter divorce with his first wife.

Because of his interest in eastern philosophy he traveled in the late 1930s to India for two years where he painted the Himalayas and also to Tibet. He also painted in the Deep South in Charleston and Savannah where he set up his easel on the waterfronts and among oak groves. In 1944 rejuvenated by a second marriage and election to the National Academy of Design, Clark returned to the Connecticut countryside to paint landscapes. In the late 1940s Clark began to summer in Virginia where he ultimately returned for good in 1959, settling with his new wife in the "lovely hills" near Albemarle, Virginia.

He continued to paint almost to the end of his life, enjoying the solitude and peace of the surrounding environment where he could relate to canvas the subtleties of nature as only he could. He was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1917 and full academician in 1944. Clark was also president of the National Academy from 1956-1959. He was a member/president of the American Watercolor Society*; president/member of Allied Artists of America*, 1948-52; ex officio trustee, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1956; National Academy of Design Awards Jury; Society of Painters of New York; Connecticut Association of Fine Art; Salmagundi Club*; International Society of Arts and Letters; Macdonald Club; Art Fund Society; New York Watercolor Club and others.

Clark exhibited at the New York Watercolor Club; National Academy of Design; American Art Association of Paris Annual Exhibition; Doll & Richards, Boston; Louis Katz Gallery, NY; Guild of Allied Artists, NY; Milwaukee Art Institute; Henry Reinhardt & Son, NY; Mohr Art Galleries; Butler Art Institute; Telfair Academy, Georgia; Rochester Art Association, Rochester, MN; J.W. Young Galleries; Atlanta Woman's Club; Fort Worth Museum of Art, Texas; Carnegie Public Library; Providence Art Club; Witt Memorial Museum, Texas; Nan Sheets Gallery, Oklahoma; Iran Institute and others.He taught at the Art Students'League; Savannah Art club; University of Virginia; Grand Central Art Gallery School and others. less