Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:
| ELIOT CANDEE CLARK (1883-1989)
Eliot Clark was the son of painter Walter Clark (1848-1917). "As a child," he later wrote, "I grew unconsciously in the association of artists, of studio talk and the smell of paint and turpentine."(1) His earliest memories of his father's studio were when it was in the Holbein building in New York City -- above a stable and right next door to the studio of George Inness. No doubt he was instructed at his father's easel from the youngest age (he exhibited two pieces at the New York Water Color Club when he was only nine years old).(2)
His first classroom instruction began when he was seventeen. "While still going to school," Clark continued, "I studied in the afternoon for a term at the Art Students League under John Twachtman in the antique class."(3)
The two months with Twachtman was about the extent of Clark's academic training. His father believed that nature herself was the painter's best teacher and took Eliot with him on his own painting excursions. Father and son spent the summer of 1900 together in East Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Twachtman, Frank Duveneck, and Edward Potthast also turned up.(4)
Clark painted landscapes in a realist style, which employed broad areas of saturated color while keeping detail to a minimum. He was very planar in his approach to the canvas, dividing it into obvious foreground, middle and background areas. Often he used hills and banks of foliage to accomplish this division. His painting "Under the Trees", which employs trees to isolate groups of figures from one another, won for the young artist the Third Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design in 1912.(5) This work falls into Clark's Tonalist phase, but over the years he painted more and more as an Impressionist, letting more light onto his canvas and increasing the intensity and vibrancy of his colors.
For most of his professional life, Clark divided his time between New York City and Kent, Connecticut, until 1932 when he bought a summer home amidst the rolling hills of Albermarle County, Virginia. (6) In New York he taught, he wrote, and he was active in artists' clubs. He was elected president of the National Academy of Design in 1956. (7) But in The Old Dominion -- with the exception of two summers during the Depression when he taught at the University of Virginia -- he spent time traveling throughout the Tidewater, the Delmarva peninsula, and the mountains of western Virginia as well as neighboring West Virginia. He retired to his Albermarle County home in 1959. (8)
(1) Eliot Clark, "Notes from Memory," American Artist, vol. 21, no. 6, June, July, August 1957, p. 72.
(2) "Eliot Clark, N.A., Retrospective Exhibition," with introduction by David Lawall. Typescript to accompany an exhibition at The University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, March 2 - April 6, 1975, p. 24.
(3) Clark, p. 88.
(4) Lawall, p. 2.
(5) Florence N. Levy, editor. American Art Annual, vol. X, New York: American Federation of Arts, 1913, illus. opp. p. 103.
(6) Lawall, pp. 27-28.
(7) "People in the Arts," Arts, vol. 30, no. 7, April 1956, p. 8.
(8)Lawall, p. 28.
The Charleston Renaissance Gallery
Cynthia Seibels; Copyright 1990 Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc.
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Biography from AskART:
| 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 Art 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.
Clark was
educated in the New York public schools, and at age 13 exhibited with
the National Academy and the New York Water Color Club. By 1912,
he had won national painting awards, and by 1916 was writing books on
American artists as well as the history of the National Academy.
In his early years Clark was privately tutored, and then later
graduated from Washington Irving High School at the early age of
fifteen. Although he later was quoted as saying "he had no formal
training from his father", his early work was notable influenced
by Walter Clark's tonalist style.
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. I n Venice, he produced some Whistlerian style pastels
similar to the ones he had seen in the Whistler Exhibition.
He
returned to New York in 1906, and a year later took a studio in the Van
Dyke Studio Building on Eighth Avenue. There working in the
building were a diversified group of painters such as the tonalist
artists Bruce Crane and Cullan Yates; the impressionists were
represented by Edward Dufner and Karl Anderson.
In 1912, he painted
at the Grand Canyon, in New Mexico, the Painted Desert and northern
Arizona, and in 1913, he was in California, painting in Yosemite.
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. This led to a
dark time for Clark who opted to travel abroad to find himself again
rather than take the security of a teaching position, which was offered
to him by the University of Georgia.
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.
Eliot Candee Clark passed away in 1980.
Sources:
Peggy and Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West
Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc., The Charleston Renaissance Gallery
Peter Hastings Falk, Editor, Who Was Who in American Art
William Gerdts, American Impressionism
Blake Benton Fine Art
.
Source:
Blake Benton Fine Art |
Biography from AskART:
| | Born in NYC on March 27, 1883. Eliot was the son of artist Walter Clark. After studying briefly at the ASL under Potthast and Twachtman, he taught there during 1912-22. While based in NYC, he made painting trips to the West during the 1920s and 1930s. Small oils of Yosemite are extant. Member: Salmagundi Club; NA; NAC. Exh: NAD, 1912, 1922 (prizes); Biltmore Hotel (LA), 1928. In: NAD; Fort Worth Art Center; Maryland Inst. (Baltimore); MM; Woodrow Wilson House (Washington, DC); Baltimore Museum; San Antonio Museum; Dayton Art Inst. | Source:
Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"
American Art Annual 1905-33; Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs, et Graveurs (Bénézit, E); Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers (Fielding, Mantle); Artists of the American West (Samuels); Artists of the American West (Doris Dawdy); Who's Who in American Art 1936-78. | | Nearly 20,000 biographies can be found in Artists in California 1786-1940 by Edan Hughes and is available for sale ($150). For a full book description and order information please click here. |
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