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Milne Ramsay (1846-1915), Peaches and Wine, Oil on Canvas, 27 ¼ by 48
in., Gold Medal, 1907, American Art Society, Private Collection
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| Milne Ramsay, Still Life with Lobster, 1898, Oil on Canvas, 26 by 39 in., Detroit Institute of the Arts |
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| Milne Ramsay, Apples and Cider, Oil on Canvas, 19 by 31 1/4 in., Private Collection |
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| Ella G. Wise, Milne Ramsay in his Studio, circa 1888, Oil on Canvas, 27 by 36 in. There is a similar photograph of Ramsay in his studio that might have provided the impetus for this painting. Little is known of Ms Wise, but she was probably one of his students. |
I blame Milne Ramsay for all the troubles I’ve had as a painter over the years. I’m joking, of course. I wish it were that simple.
Milne’s certainly not responsible for all my many
art-related problems, no indeed. Some
are caused by the lousy west/northwest daylight I’m forced to paint under in my
substandard apartment studio in dreary Manhattan
to preserve my legendary reputation as a stickler for painting under natural
light exclusively. Well, almost
exclusively. But Milne did entice me to
take the wrong fork in the road in my formative years as a painter.
After two years of great fun painting models in art school
eons ago, the money ran out and I was compelled to figure out how and what to
paint for myself. I took to painting portraits of fruits and vegetables, carefully selected from the
fancy grocery store across the street. I thought this practice would be the easiest and most-sensible course
to follow to become a certifiable (1st and 2nd definitions) professional artist. I would throw in some pots and pans and
fabrics to accompany the produce, because everybody else had done the same
thing in the past. So that’s what I did,
and do, mostly, to this day.
When I first learned, with far more difficulty than I had
anticipated, how to paint an apple or a peach to the point where someone other
than myself could say, “It looks like a photograph,” or, “It looks so real you want
to eat it,” I was quite pleased and greatly relieved.
Not long after that epiphany, I picked up a little catalog
at the Strand Bookstore for an exhibition of the work of Milne Ramsay (1846-1915),
an American painter of still lifes and landscapes. It was easy to see that he could paint his apples,
peaches, brass pots, porcelains, lace tablecloths, wine bottles, and everything
else for that matter, far better than I could, with excellent drawing and
textural distinctions, along with lots of atmosphere. I’ve seen a few of his paintings in the
galleries and they are wonderful.
But that wasn’t the enduring problem he created for me. The problem was the way he composed his still
life paintings. Heck, all he ever did
was distribute his apples and peaches and decorative brass and copper pots on a
cloth-covered tabletop in a low-relief zig-zag pattern right across the picture
plane from one edge of the canvas to the other.
What could be simpler? Following
his attractive example, that’s about all I’ve ever done myself. How boring is that? He turned me into a boring still life painter
without my having ever attained the same level of skill at rendering that he
had attained or having ever acquired the same de rigueur 19th Century artist trappings
that graced his impressive studio.
Just look at Milne above, relaxing in a swell armchair,
taking his ease, and contemplating his latest landscape masterpiece in that
grand studio of his. I wanted a studio
like that. I wanted all the requisite
trappings – rich oriental rugs, big brass and copper pots, Asian porcelains. This studio in Philadelphia,
one of the many studios Ramsay occupied over the years, was compared favorably
with the well-documented, elaborately appointed studio in New York City of
William Merritt Chase. I wanted the
painter’s life that Milne Ramsey had then.
After seeing his beautiful paintings, I couldn’t be bothered
with all the talk of the Golden Mean and all those complicated, segmented
diagrams showing how the Old Masters achieved their masterful
compositions. I’m not painting
decorations for the Sistine Chapel for God’s sake. I’m painting pretty little pictures of apples
and peaches for modest parlor walls.
Besides, we’re inundated with movies, television, animated
films, computer games, videos and still photographs – most of them artfully
composed. Everybody in the world today knows what
makes a pretty decent composition. All we
have to do is look through the LCD screens of our digital cameras, move the
camera around a little bit until the scene before us looks real nice, and shoot. The next thing you know, we are winning
awards for our amateur snapshots. That’s
the story of composition for most of us today. As a still life painter, I simply move things
around until the setup looks good. Of
course, it doesn’t hurt if you position an apple or a peach, preferably cut in
half, or, better still, an orange slice, in the Golden Mean now and then, just
to be safe
Milne Ramsey was born in Philadelphia
on Sept. 16, 1846, one of
six sons and two daughters of Alexander Ramsey and his wife, Anna Eliza Milne,
whose surname became his first name, as you can plainly see. Not easy to name eight kids, I suppose. His
father was a prosperous cotton merchant before the Civil War, during which he
lost his prosperity and after which he set up a family-run notary public and
collections business in Philadelphia.
The young Milne served nine months in the Pennsylvania
militia during the Civil War. After his
release, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and had a studio
in Philadelphia for a short time
before shipping off to Paris in
1868, where he studied for five years in the atelier of Leon Bonnat (1833-1922),
a very successful academic painter of portraits and historical religious themes.
Milne was active in the American expatriate art community in
Paris and frequently exhibited
academic figure paintings, still lifes and landscapes during the 10 years he
lived in The City of Light. He was one
of the founders of the Society of American Artists in Paris,
which at one point had 40 members. Milne
won considerable success in Paris with
his academic work, but most of those paintings haven’t been located. He also painted and dated small plein air
landscape studies to record his travels in and around the Normandy
and Brittany countryside. Back in America,
he continued to produce small plein air sketches of American scenes, many of them
thickly painted with slashing brush strokes on cigar box tops. Ramsay’s paintings often show up at auction. On its website, The Smithsonian American Art
Museum lists 163 titles of works by Ramsey obtained from galleries or auction
houses.
The Milne Ramsay exhibition catalog I picked up was
published in conjunction with a major exhibit of 81 of his works at The
Chapellier Galleries in New York City
in 1974. The stated purpose of the
exhibit was to revive interest in this prolific artist, who was much-celebrated
during his lifetime. I suppose the
gallery also hoped to sell a few of the works it had corralled. The catalog includes an interesting essay on the
artist’s life and work written by William H. Gerdts, an American art historian
and the author of more than 25 books on American art.
Near the end of the essay, Gerdts notes that Ramsay “seems
to have gradually withdrawn from art activity in Philadelphia
as time began to pass him by and new artistic trends developed.” Ramsay didn’t exhibit his work as much,
although he continued to paint still lifes and spent more time working on his
landscapes.
During his peripatetic painting career, Ramsay had many
addresses, both in Europe and America. On one of his return visits to Philadelphia
from Europe, around 1870, he got married and had two
kids before the heartbreak of divorce.
One of the kids, Charles Frederic Ramsay, also became a painter and was one
of the first artists of the famous art colony in New Hope,
Pennsylvania.
Milne married again, at the age of 46, to a woman lawyer and
painting student of his who was 17 years younger. They had five kids.
At various times, Ramsay had studios
in Philadelphia, New York
City, Atlantic City and Bronxville,
New York, where he built a house and
studio. The family moved back to Philadelphia
in 1900. His last studio was in the Baker
Building, a center of artistic
activities in that city. One of his
neighbors on the 4th floor was his friend Prosper Senat (1852 - 1925), who was known
for his watercolor landscapes. Senat's widow remembers Ramsay asking her husband for "a tube of daylight." Gerdts
believes this friendship was one reason why Ramsay turned increasingly to watercolors
in his later years.
The Chapellier catalog illustrates a number of Ramsay’s
small, impressionistic, plein air landscapes, painted in oil on panels measuring
approximately 5 by 7 inches, which were usually painted on the New Jersey coast
or in the marshlands. The paintings seem
to be filled with the brilliant light of high noon. The staging area for these paintings must have
been the Shelburne Hotel in Atlantic City,
an opulent seaside resort that his wife had inherited.
Gerdts writes, “Ramsay’s late landscapes are poetic
evocations of a little explored region, while his late still lifes continued a
19th century tradition of which he was one of the most proficient
practitioners, but by his death in 1915, he was virtually forgotten.” That gallery exhibit 40 years ago doesn’t
seem to have done much to revive Ramsay’s reputation among the general public.
A lot of painters I’ve read about who achieve great
commercial success and win a lot of awards for painting traditional figurative
work, still lifes or landscapes early on become disillusioned when the trendy
art market passes them by. Some just get
worn out or bored from creating the same paintings over and over and switch to a
completely different art form – even go abstract. Quelle horreur! Some give up painting altogether
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Most of us traditional realists needn’t worry about getting bored
or worn out, at least for those reasons.
We don’t get much notice for our work, except from our friends and
relatives. As for me, I’m still greatly
surprised, excited and relieved every time I paint a decent-looking apple or
peach. I can’t blame Milne Ramsay for
that!
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| Milne Ramsay, Still Life with Roses, Bowl, and Oriental Urn, 1887, Oil on Canvas, 23 by 36 in., Private Collection |
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Milne Ramsay, Flowers on a Table, 1873, Oil on canvas laid
down on masonite, 36 by 29 in., Private Collection
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Milne Ramsay, Apples, Ming Plate and Earthenware Pitcher,
Oil on Canvas, 18 by 24 in., Private Collection
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Milne Ramsay, Brandy and Peaches, Oil on Canvas, 32 by 25 ½
in., Sheldon Museum of Art,
Lincoln, Nebraska
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