Alas, Poor McEvoy

Ambrose McEvoy (1878-1927), Madame (Mary Spencer Edwards McEvoy, the Artist’s Wife), 1915, Oil on Canvas, approx. 56 by 46 in., Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.

Ambrose McEvoy, Silver and Grey (Mrs. Charles McEvoy, wife of artist's brother), 1915, Oil on Canvas, approx. 34 by 29 in., Manchester City Galleries, England

Ambrose McEvoy, Mrs. S.S. Howland, Oil on Canvas, approx. 40 by 30 in., Bradford Museums and Galleries, England

Ambrose McEvoy, Portrait of an American Lady with Pearls,1924, Oil on Canvas, approx. 40 by 30 in., Bolton Library & Museum Services, England

Ambrose McEvoy, Miss Teddy Gerrard, 1921, approx. 30 by 25 in., Manchester City Galleries, England

Ambrose McEvoy, Mrs. Cecil Baring, 1917, Oil on Canvas, Approx. 50 by 40 in., Tate Gallery, England

Ambrose McEvoy, Gwen John (1876–1939), 1900, Oil on Canvas, approx. 27 by 20 in., National Museum, Wales

Ambrose McEvoy (1875-1929), Miss Helen Morris – a Study, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 30x25 in., Private Collection

Ambrose McEvoy, Self-Portrait, circa 1900, Oil on Canvas, 30.3 by 20.5 in., Private Collection

Everybody’s been asking me, in point of fact begging me, to write about Ambrose McEvoy.  “When are you going to write about Ambrose,” they ask.  “Don’t keep us in suspense like this.”  But maybe I’m just hearing the uncharacteristically nagging voices of my usually compliant multiple personalities, the ones I have depended upon throughout my life for the requisite role playing to avoid any kind of serious responsibility and the stress that goes with it.

At any rate, I am now writing my long overdue tribute to Ambrose McEvoy, his life and career.  I don’t know why I’ve been so derelict in fulfilling my obligation to Ambrose.  That duty was assigned to me when I came across his name in a biography of Walter Sickert many years ago.  And Ambrose McEvoy was one of the first subjects I jotted down when I began planning for this transient blog of mine a couple of years ago.

Arthur Ambrose McEvoy (1878-1927) was an English artist who made his reputation as a painter of seemingly sketchy but exquisite portraits of fashionable society ladies in oil and in watercolor.  His father, a Scots-Irish engineer and mercenary soldier who served as an officer with the Confederate Army in the American Civil War, was a friend of James McNeil Whistler.  Both of them encouraged Ambrose to pursue his ambition to become a painter. 

Now I don’t really enjoy going off on tangents, honest, but McEvoy’s father, Charles Ambrose McEvoy (1827-1905), is definitely worth a little mention here.  He was some piece of work.  He was born in Glasgow to Irish parents, but his family immigrated to America when he was just one year old.  He remained in America as a British subject for 40 years before returning to England, where he died in 1905 in his 78^th year.  After many wacky twists and turns during his early years, the elder McEvoy became a Captain in the Confederate Army, a friend of Generals Lee and Jackson, a member of the force that captured the abolitionist John Brown at Harpers Ferry, and the celebrated inventor of torpedoes and submarine mines for the Confederate Navy.  He got to know Whistler through his friendship with Whistler’s brother, William McNeil Whistler, a Confederate Army physician.  I’m not making this up.  It’s on the website of the American Civil War Round Table (UK).  Now I must get back to the son, Arthur Ambrose McEvoy, who was only a mere portrait painter.

At the age of 15, McEvoy enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and studied there for three years. Upon his arrival, McEvoy already had a reputation for a fine technical skill in oils acquired from his study with Whistler.  His classmates included William Orpen and Augustus John.  Ambrose and John became fast friends, and McEvoy shared studio space with John for awhile. 

Familiarity often bred romance in those days, and when Ambrose was 20 he entered into a brief and stormy affair with John’s sister, the painter Gwen John, who was reportedly devastated when he announced his engagement to Mary Spencer Edwards (1870-1941), a fellow student at the Slade who was eight years older than him.  They married in 1901.  Mary McEvoy was an excellent painter of portraits, flowers and interiors with figures in a quiet style after the Dutch masters and similar to the interiors painted by her husband and Gwen John. 

Mary Spencer Edwards McEvoy (1870-1941), Girl Reading, 1901, Oil on Canvas, 20.9 by 17.2 in., Tate Gallery, England

During her husband’s career, Mary McEvoy put her own painting on hold to raise their son and daughter, but resumed painting and exhibiting after McEvoy’s death from pneumonia in his 49^th year, caused, they say, by overwork and “over-indulgence.”

While a student at the Slade, McEvoy was keen on copying Titian and Watteau at the National Gallery. You can perceive a little of the latter’s wispy approach to form and color in McEvoy’s paintings. And like Whistler’s work, McEvoy’s paintings convey a delicate, vaporous sense of form, color and atmosphere.

Unlike most early 20^th Century portrait painters, McEvoy liked to experiment with compositions and paint handling techniques, incorporating impasto and washes in the backgrounds, draperies and other secondary elements of his portraits.   And he mixed natural and artificial light in some portraits for a “footlight effect,” just as Orpen did on occasion.  According to an account in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, McEvoy “painted landscapes throughout his career, and watercolours which he would draw and paint solidly, then put under running water, and then scrub and scrape, adding accents in chalk or ink and floating on colours which fused into delicate opalescent harmonies.”  I couldn’t readily locate any satisfying watercolor images to reproduce here.

Early in his career, McEvoy also painted moody landscapes and dim interiors with figures before focusing on portraiture after 1915, when he exhibited to great success a portrait of his wife, Mary, at the National Portrait Society in London.  Although McEvoy was best known for his female portraits, he painted a number of fine portraits of officers and enlisted men during the First World War.  In the opinion of one contemporary reviewer, however, McEvoy’s aesthetic interests were not perfectly suited to capturing the kind of “vivid interpretation of character…we want of male portraiture today in England.”

A slender monograph on McEvoy’s work, with 34 black and white illustrations, was published in 1924 when the artist was 46  and had been painting for 31 years.  Sadly, as fate would have it, he only had three more years to paint.  The author wrote that McEvoy was “an unabashed romantic” whose “adventures are in the aesthetic world alone,” where grappling with “tones and qualities of surface” were his primary concerns.  After much grandiose analytical praise of McEvoy’s work in oil, watercolor and drawing, the author of this monograph, identified therein only by the initials R.M.Y.G. (That’s Reginald Morier Yorke Gleadowe, in case you might be wondering, as I certainly was) concludes that a painter with the “fine-wrought delicacies” of an Ambrose McEvoy sees “the things eternally worth seeing.” 

The author concludes his encomium to McEvoy with words that so perfectly describe my own work that I plan to use them for my next Artist’s Statement: “You must go to the flowers, the clouds, the waves to match his faultless rhythms, his pure fantasies.  Untouched by theory or faction, trusting his eye, practicing untiringly his hand, he will enrich the world with inventions, born of his taste, and patiently wrought in the image of God.” 

On the other hand, the Oxford Index has this to say about McEvoy’s work:  “His most characteristic pictures are of beautiful society women, often painted in watercolour in a rapid, sketchy style. They can be merely flashy or cloyingly sweet (during the First World War one critic joked that at a time of sugar shortage, McEvoy was ‘a positive asset to the nation’), but the finest have something of the romantic air of refinement of Gainsborough, an artist he greatly admired.”

After the Slade, Ambrose worked with Walter Sickert in Dieppe, France, and that association is the reason I got interested in McEvoy in the first place, and for a very silly reason.  By the way, you can spot Sickert’s influence in some early interiors Ambrose painted.

Anyway, I was reading that biography of Sickert, and in the recounting of an evening get-together, the subject of McEvoy came up.  A women artist who was part of the Sickert camp was quoted as saying something like, “Alas, Poor McEvoy.  He sets his palette and waits patiently for the sitters who never come.”  I don’t remember the exact quote.

I had just finished my painting studies in art school and was hoping to follow in the giant footsteps of one of my instructors, a noted  portrait painter.   But I was encountering obstacles that McEvoy most certainly had to overcome to become successful.  McEvoy persevered, and at the height of his career, he was painting up to twenty-five oil portraits a year.   I laughed so hard when I read that “Alas, poor McEvoy” quote. But then the years flew by and left me alone, waiting patiently myself for the sitters that never came.

Paintings that Inspire

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), Still Life with Flowers, Bowl of Fruit and Pitcher, 1865, Oil on Canvas, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

Georges Daniel de Monfreid (1856-1929), Still Life with Oranges, 1903, Oil on Board, 23 by 32 1/4 in., Private Collection

If you are forced to primarily focus on painting still lifes for one reason or another, you’ve got a big inspiration problem to deal with.  I’ve met many painters over the years who just won’t paint still lifes on a regular basis.  Some just keep enrolling in art school classes so they can paint portrait and figure models year after year at relatively low cost.

It is innately more interesting and exciting to paint the human figure or a babbling brook in a sylvan landscape than a coffee pot and two apples.  And after a couple of years of painting mostly still lifes, you get pretty sick of your own setups.  Attempting to arrange the same pots and pans and fruits and vegetables and dreary flowers from the local markets in a novel way can make you physically ill, if not suicidal.  Of course, if you enjoy painting photographically every tile on the wall of a subway station or every detail of an old sewing machine, I guess inspiration is of no great concern to you.

Fortunately, there were many fabulous still life painters from past generations whose work is so inspiring that it gives me the strength to carry on within the genre that fate has cruelly thrust upon me.  I know of one guy who paints retro Dutch Old Master still lifes with a fair amount of precision, but without the astounding brushwork finesse of his 17th and 18th century role models.  He gets big bucks for his carefully composed paintings, which include rare and expensive objects that he has the chutzpah to borrow from the owners.   I can’t imagine anyone loaning me anything of value or of interest to put in my still lifes.

Now, for my own amusement and absolution, I’m going to fasten my seat belt to describe a little series of paintings I’ve created over the past couple of weeks that were based on elements in two still life paintings that I think are masterpieces.  One is by Fantin-Latour and the other is by Georges Daniel de Monfreid (1856-1929), a friend and follower of Gauguin. 

Both paintings include a wine decanter similar to one I have in my possession.  Mine has an etched fruit design that I was unable to discern from my vantage point.  Fantin painted his decanter without its stopper and de Monfreid with it.  I did versions both ways, but I preferred painting my decanter with its stopper, even though its muted transparency presented many rendering problems.

Fantin included in his still life a beautiful red-lacquer tray that looks like it would be far more interesting to paint than any trays I have.  I used a tray overlaid with a Carl Larsson picnic scene for my first painting.  I was disappointed that my setup prevented me from identifying it as such.  For my second painting I included a silver-plated art deco tray that I had been using for years as a base for some jars of turpentine and painting mediums.  I had to clean the tray and touch up with oil paint (crudely) some of the chipped off-white enamel on the handles.  I’m sorry now I didn’t take better care of this lovely tray.  Both paintings were based solely on Fantin’s painting.   

I loved the way Fantin arranged his orange segments and a cut open pomegranate.  He sensitively captured the exact same juicy fullness that one observes in atmospheric space when painting from life by natural light, something I’ve never quite been able to accomplish.  I did a mediocre job on my orange slices and didn’t know how to cut open my pomegranate, so just used it whole in the pedestal bowl a couple of times.  However, I was competent enough to slice a red grapefruit the long way and used it in a few of my paintings because I felt that the halves were interesting and lovely in both color and design.

Fantin’s potted plant, with its irregularly spaced small white blossoms and fulsome leaves, anchors his composition so perfectly.  I went out and bought some really boring mums for $5 from a local shop for my second painting.  There are millions of people living in New York City and hundreds of flower shops, but you can’t find the flowers that Fantin painted anywhere.  And as one of Fantin’s female students told him, “I already know how to paint.  I came here to learn how to arrange flowers,” or words to that effect.  I used the mums in a couple of rather insipid ways and bought some wilted, out-of-season sunflowers from Trader Joe’s for one painting.

The paintings by Fantin and de Monfreid both feature a pedestal bowl holding some fruit.  Fantin’s finely crafted bowl is quite elegant and he painted it superbly.  I saw the de Monfreid painting in a Sotheby’s London auction catalog some years ago and loved the bowl shape so much that I actually commissioned a potter exhibiting at the local flea market to make a somewhat similar one for me.

I’m in love with de Monfried’s design, color scheme and the way he captured the truth to nature, just as Fantin did, in the objects he included in his painting, especially the empty wine glass and decanter.  I didn’t have a red plate to place under my decanter, so I had to make do with the white plate, which I normally use to hold the varnish when I varnish my paintings.  De Monfried’s draped table inspired me to add a lady’s scarf in my last four paintings in this series.  The scarf is not nearly as beautiful as his blue cloth, which complements his oranges so well.  But I had fun analyzing the squares of the scarf in perspective and mixing its colors, which were attractive combinations of raw umber, yellow ochre, a touch of alizarin, white and black.

I really love Fantin’s warm, dusty yellow ochre background and charcoal gray foreground.   A couple of drapes I possess matched those colors and I’ll use them more in the future because the colors are so easy to mix and so harmonious – yellow ochre, raw umber, maybe a little cadmium red light or alizarin, white and black.  Happy is the painter who hits on a harmonious color combination for his still lifes that is easy to mix and pleasing to look at.

Both paintings I used for inspiration were painted from a vantage point well below eye level.  I normally paint my still life setups from a vantage point just a little below eye level while standing at my easel, so this was an interesting departure for me, and I hope to be doing more paintings with this viewpoint in the future.  One advantage to this approach is I can lower my window shades to get more light into my dreary home studio and still get a fairly decent high angle of light on the objects I’m painting. 

Now, about those ellipses or ovals.  Ellipses are always challenging to paint, but fun as well.  Some painters paint almost all their cylindrical objects at eye level to avoid dealing with the ellipses.   Some always obscure one outside curve of the rim or base of a pot or bowl by placing another object in front of it.  And looking down on bowls and things accentuates these ellipses.  This leaves you with a curious illusion to deal with when painting them in a still life from a fixed vantage point, because unless you are standing directly in front of a bowl, for example, the ellipses always look a little lopsided.  Painting all the objects with ellipses in your still life wherever they are located as if they are perfectly symmetrical as seen from directly in front of them is one way to solve the problem, I guess.  But that's not being true to nature.  Maybe ellipses are not as big a problem for traditional painters as you might think when the entire painting is otherwise close to the truth in color and atmospheric effects.  Most of my ellipses exhibit lopsidedness to some degree, I’m afraid.  I’ve never been good at painting perfectly symmetrical objects.  It takes quite a bit of concentration on these lopsided ovals for me to get them to look right in space from their respective positions across the picture plane.  You know what – I’m giving myself the impression that I don’t know what I’m talking about.  And I may be right!  Let’s move on.

Some of my paintings in this series were done over old ones, so they didn’t photograph very well.  They look so much better in real life, trust me.  But my paintings, and those of all painters working today in the realist tradition, seem to lack the comfortable certainty of human vision shown in the two paintings created by Fantin and de Monfreid.  We no longer trust our eyes alone to analyze and interpret nature.  Our view of the natural world has been corrupted by constant exposure to high-definition digital tomfoolery.  There is no turning back to those days of visual innocence enjoyed by all the great painters of the past whose work inspires us to paint the same things they did.

So that’s more than enough “texting” on this low-budget painting excursion inspired by my two friends, Fantin and de Monfreid.  They got me started.  All I had to do was move things around a bit.  Now I can throw away all the rotting fruit and think about what to paint next.  I believe I narrowly escaped going to the dark side of the old adage, “To borrow from one painter is stealing; to borrow from many is research.”  But I'm wrong about a lot of things and I may be wrong about that, too.

Couldn't resist adding one more to the series.  Now I'm free again!