: Spanierman Gallery, LLC is hosting "Charles Warren Eaton
(1857-1937): An American Tonalist Rediscovered" through December
31.
Comprising 70 works, the exhibition is the largest and most
comprehensive show of Eaton's art to date. Most of the works are
Eaton's oils in a tonalist vein of tranquil landscapes in the
half light of dawn or dusk. The show also offers Eaton's works in
other media, including pastels, watercolors and monotypes.
Providing a full monographic treatment of the artist's career and
work, the catalog for the show includes more than 60 color plates
and an essay by Charles Teaze Clark, who has studied Eaton's art
for almost three decades.
Due to an unwitting comment by the dealer William Macbeth in
1938, Eaton had a reputation as a recluse. However, as Clark's
scholarship reveals, Eaton was hardly a solitary eccentric. While
never a central figure in the rapidly changing New York art world
of his time, he had a secure place in American art and especially
in the American Tonalist movement at the beginning of the
Twentieth Century, creating works that reflect many of the
currents of influence and aesthetic awareness that governed his
age.
Born into modest circumstances in 1857 in Albany, N.Y., Eaton
moved in 1879 to New York City, where he supported himself as a
dry goods clerk and studied at the Art Students League and the
National Academy of Design. He began exhibiting at the academy in
1882 and that year scored an enviable success when no less an
arbiter of taste than Oscar Wilde bought one of his works.
In 1886 Eaton visited France, Belgium, Holland and London,
spending time in Brolles, near Barbizon, where he made a
pilgrimage to the home of Jean Francois Millet, and visited the
nearby town of Grez-sur-Loing, where an informal artists' colony
had been established.
In 1888 Eaton moved to Bloomfield, N.J., where he joined a robust
and growing art community that had surfaced under the shadow of
George Inness. Eaton became closely allied with Inness in the
years that followed. In 1889 Eaton established a studio that was
adjacent to Inness's in New York City. After a chance visit to
Eaton's studio one day, Inness bought one of the youngest
artist's works; later the two shared Inness's studio in
Montclair.
Although primarily a painter in oils, Eaton enthusiastically
investigated several other media during the first two decades of
his career. He was an avid watercolorist, created monotypes and
experimented with pastels. In 1890 he participated in the fourth
and final exhibition of the Society of Painters in Pastel.
About 1900 Eaton discovered the white pine forests of
Connecticut, near his summer haunt of Thompson. For the ten years
that followed, he made the white pine tree motif his primary
subject, becoming so famous for it that he was often called "The
Pine Tree Painter." Today the abstract and simplified aspects of
Eaton's pine tree works have been seen as close in spirit to the
decorative concerns of Art and Crafts interiors, and they have
been avidly collected for inclusion in such harmoniously
conceived spaces.
In the early Twentieth Century, Eaton began to spend more of his
annual trips abroad in Belgium and Holland, painting the
picturesque region of Bruges, Belgium, and its nearby
countryside, and neighboring villages Sluis in Holland, and
Knokke in Belgium. After 1910 he began extended stays in Italy,
returning to Venice and staying for the first time in Lake Como.
In his Italian works, Eaton adopted a modified Impressionist
palette, capturing the intense blues of the lake, the reds and
corals of the tile roofs, and the greens of the olive and cypress
trees under the bright summer sun.
Eventually Eaton moved his summer retreat from Thompson to
Colebrook, at the opposite end of Connecticut, where he continued
to paint the pine tree theme, but often worked in a higher key
and created images that were more topographically specific. In
1921 Eaton created approximately 21 images of Glacier National
Park in Montana, on assignment by the Great Northern Railroad
Company as part of their "See America First" campaign.
The gallery is at 45 East 58th Street. For information,
212-832-0208.
