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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.
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| 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 |
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| Ambrose McEvoy, Mrs. S.S. Howland, Oil on Canvas, approx. 40 by 30 in., Bradford Museums and Galleries, England |
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| Ambrose McEvoy, Portrait of an American Lady with Pearls,1924, Oil on Canvas, approx. 40 by 30 in., Bolton Library & Museum Services, England |
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| Ambrose McEvoy, Miss Teddy Gerrard, 1921, approx. 30 by 25 in., Manchester City Galleries, England |
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| Ambrose McEvoy, Mrs. Cecil Baring, 1917, Oil on Canvas, Approx. 50 by 40 in., Tate Gallery, England |
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| Ambrose McEvoy, Gwen John (1876–1939), 1900, Oil on Canvas, approx. 27 by 20 in., National Museum, Wales |
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| Ambrose McEvoy (1875-1929), Miss Helen Morris – a Study, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 30x25 in., Private Collection |
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| 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 78th 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.
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| 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 49th 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 20th 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.
