1862-1951

A member of the Ten American Painters and an important figure in the Boston School in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Frank W. Benson was one of the first American artists to combine the figure with the Impressionist landscape. His images of women and children in sunlit meadows and hillsides established Impressionism as a major style of painting in America. Benson is also known for his indoor figural depictions, which convey the quiet contemplative spirit of the genteel age and for paintings, etchings, and watercolors of sporting subjects, especially of fishing and hunting, which he rendered in the later portion of his career. Benson’s fame and financial success lasted throughout his professional life.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Benson was a descendant of a family that had settled there during the Revolutionary era and had prospered in the maritime trade. He grew up in privileged circumstances, engaging in sporting activities, including tennis, fishing, and hunting, which he enjoyed for the rest of his life. From 1880 to 1883, he received his first art training at the newly founded School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he met fellow artists and life-long friends, Edmund Tarbell and Robert Reid. In 1883, he traveled to Paris and continued his studies at the Académie Julian under the instruction of Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. During his time in France, he copied Old Master paintings at the Louvre and spent summers in the countryside. During the summer of 1884, he visited Concarneau, Brittany, where he met fellow American painters Alexander Harrison, Arthur Hoeber, and Edward Simmons.

On his return home in 1885, Benson rented a studio in Salem and began to show at the Boston Art Club and the National Academy of Design in New York. In the Spring or Fall of 1887, he taught at the Portland School of Art in Maine. The next year, he moved his studio to Boston and married Ellen Peirson, a childhood friend. Although the couple settled in Salem, much of Benson’s life revolved around the Boston art world after he became an instructor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1889. Along with Tarbell, who began to teach there at the same time, Benson helped to establish the school as one of the outstanding art instruction facilities in the United States.

Benson spent the summer of 1890 in Dublin, New Hampshire, where he came to know other artists who summered in the area, including Abbott Thayer, George de Forest Brush, and Rockwell Kent. In Dublin, he created a number of landscapes, but he returned to his emphasis on the figure in the early 1890s, when he rendered a number of interiors, featuring elegant women in darkened rooms lit only by firelight and oil lamps.

Benson had achieved a position of renown in the Boston art scene by the early 1890s. In 1891, he had his first important show, a joint exhibition with Tarbell at J. Eastman Chase’s Gallery in Boston. Around the same time, he became a member of the Tavern Club, where he made the acquaintance of many well-to-do Bostonians who purchased his works. Through the Tavern Club, he met the prominent expatriate painter, John Singer Sargent, whose art influenced his. In the early 1890s, he became interested in decorative art of the American Renaissance era, creating murals for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. A few years later, he took part in the decoration of Boston Public Library, creating murals for the vault of the library’s south corridor.

In 1898, Benson joined several painters from New York and Boston, including Tarbell, Reid, Simmons, Joseph DeCamp, Thomas Dewing, Frederick Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, John H. Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir, to form the Ten American Painters. This group, which broke from away from the Society of American Artists (the principal artist organization of the time), consisted of several of the most advanced and talented artists of the era, many of whom were working in the French Impressionist style. Benson exhibited in all of the Ten’s Annual Exhibitions, which were held in New York and Boston for twenty years.

Two sources influenced the Impressionist style Benson formulated around the turn of the century. He was inspired to explore the modern French approach by both his friends in the Ten and by the sunlit countryside of North Haven Island, Maine, located in Penobscot Bay, where he summered beginning in 1901. Benson first saw North Haven during the summer of 1900, while staying with friends in Ogunquit, Maine. From there, he traveled to North Haven, where he visited the farm of Levi Wooster, which stood on Crabtree Point. The artist was immediately enamored with the open sunlit hills that offered views out to sea, and the next summer, he returned to the island and rented Wooster Farm.

He made annual visits to North Haven with his family for the rest of his life. When there, Benson posed his wife Ellen and his children, Eleanor, Elisabeth, George, and Sylvia, on hillsides and at the water’s edge, and created vibrant painterly images filled with light and air. Showing his daughters usually clad in white, their dresses and hair blown by the ocean breeze, Benson’s North Haven paintings express the essence of refined summer pleasures. As William Howe Downes remarked in 1911: “He sets before us visions of the free life of the open air, with figures of gracious women and children in a landscape drenched in sweet sunlight, and cooled by refreshing sea breezes.”

By contrast, in his studio during the winter, Benson maintained a more traditional approach, depicting quiet interiors inhabited by carefully wrought figures. These works were influenced by the Dutch Masters, Johannes Vermeer, in particular, and by Benson’s academic training. Benson’s interiors resembled those of Tarbell, who had initiated the Vermeer revival in America.

In the 1920s, Benson focused his attention on wildlife, sporting, and hunting scenes. Always a passionate naturalist and outdoorsman, he merged his art with his passion for the outdoor life in these works, which he rendered in oil, watercolor, pen and ink, and etching. The current example belongs to this group of works and captures the intensity of the moment when the fish is struggling against the taught line and has broken the surface of the water, while the fishermen is poised knee-deep at the river’s edge holding a gaffing hook. Fishing subjects and waterfowl, especially in flight, were the artist’s most prolific subjects within this genre.