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Leopold Seyffert (1887-1956), In My Studio, 1931, Oil on
Canvas, 60 1/2 by 54 1/4 in. , Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Washington, D.C.
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Duane Van Vechten, 1924, Oil on Canvas, 50 by 40 in.,
Private Collection. Ms. Vechten was the
daughter of wealthy banker Ralph Van Vechten.
She was an early member of the Taos, New
Mexico artists’ colony and a patron of artists.
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| Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955), Duane Van Vechten, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 50 by 40 in., private collection. Painted two years later. What a contrast. Both great portraits. |
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| Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), 1919, Oil on Canvas, 47 by 38 in., New York Historical Society |
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My
Family, 1928. Oil on canvas, 76 3/4 x 51 1/2 in. Brooklyn
Museum. Painted in their Paris
apartment. Left to right, Helen Fleck
Seyffert (1891-1951), and sons Peter (1917-2003) and Richard Leopold
(1915-1979). Richard would later become
a portraitist like his father.
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| Katherine Abbott Bigelow, 1932, Oil on Canvas, 30 by 25 in.,
Private Collection |
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| Bobby, Oil on Canvas |
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| Daniel Zuloaga (a Spanish ceramist and Ignacio Zuloaga’s uncle), Oil on Canvas |
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The Lacquer Screen, 1917, Oil on canvas, 54 3/16 by 60 in., Acquired 1918 by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
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It’s thrilling to view the work of painters from the past who
had a keen eye for the nuances of brilliant color and could draw swiftly, accurately
and decisively with a fully loaded brush in such a way that their subjects are
brimming with life on canvas.
Leopold Gould Seyffert (1887-1956) had that rare combination
of skills, as evidenced by a number of outstanding paintings he produced early
in his career. That gift is not so
evident later on when he was busy cranking out excellent but unremarkable
commissioned portraits in competition with many other highly accomplished
portrait painters plying the trade in the first half of the 20th Century. Seyffert was one of the most successful of
all of them, and yet he remains one of the most unrecognized by the general art
public. He painted over 500 commissioned
portraits in a 49-year career, sometimes as many as 25 a year – an incredible
feat. His subjects included such
notables as Henry Clay Frick, Fritz Kreisler, Leopold Stokowski, Andrew Mellon,
Samuel H. Kress, Elizabeth Arden, Samuel Gompers, Charles Lindbergh, David
Sarnoff and members of the Du Pont family.
He also painted a portrait of the famous “Golden Age” contralto
Louise Homer, which is on view in the gallery of opera stars on the first
level of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln
Center. I coincidentally paid more attention to this
painting Monday night while attending the Met’s performance of Lehar’s The
Merry Widow. The Homer portrait shows
that, even as good as Seyffert was, he didn’t hit a home run every time at bat when doing commissioned portraits. But given his talent and the fact he was much
in demand, he must have had a pretty good batting average. And I might as well add that most of the portraits
of the fabulous, world-famous opera singers in the Met gallery aren’t very good. A lot of them, in fact, are mediocre jobs that
look like they were done from publicity photos.
I could say more, but I’ll just bite my tongue.
Seyffert’s relative obscurity is not unusual for sought-after
painters of commissioned portraits when their time on earth has ended. After the painting is unveiled and hung on
the boardroom wall or above the fireplace in a stately mansion, chances are you
won’t hear about the painting or the painter again, that is until the
corporation decides to deaccession its art collection or the heirs get tired of
looking at Grandma hanging on the wall and put her up for auction.
Before he really got down to business with his commissioned
portraits, Seyffert created a number of nude figure paintings from 1916 to 1922
that “were so well received when they were exhibited throughout the country
that they were usually immediately acquired for major museums,” according to a
blurb on the website of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
He also drew charcoal portraits ala Sargent and painted landscapes, floral still lifes and a few
excellent self-portraits. I was blown
away when I first came across his brilliant, creamy 1931 self-portrait “In My Studio”
while doing a little Internet research a
while back on Ignacio Zuloaga, one of my favorite painters. Seyffert had studied briefly with Zuloaga in Spain
in 1914, after studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1906 until 1913
with Thomas Pollock Anschutz, William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux and Hugh H.
Breckenridge. I’m guessing that
Zuloaga’s paintings of nudes inspired Seyffert to create a similar body of
work. And it looks like he took quite naturally
to the fluid brushwork of Chase and Beaux for his own smooth yet
vigorous paint handling technique.
The aforementioned In My Studio is such a perfect example of
what can be accomplished with oil paint if one has self-confidence and a complete
mastery of the craft. If you look closely
at the base of Seyffert’s neck, for example, you can see, even in reproduction,
how gorgeous that patch of flesh painting is, with fluid strokes of beautiful
color showing just enough anatomy to be totally convincing as the real thing.
Try it yourself and you are bound to fail.
Such a passage has to be painted boldly with broad strokes from a big brush
fully loaded with juicy paint, and perhaps a little blending with a soft brush
at the end to get that seamless unity of skin tones. I’m just speculating, you understand. I didn’t see how he did it. And that’s always the great mystery with
beautiful painting – how was it accomplished?
All we can do is guess. Don’t let
anyone suggest otherwise.
Before the portrait commissions started pouring in, Seyffert
played semi-professional baseball, as did his
contemporary, George Bellows. A lot of
the bravura painters from those days were macho men who excelled at some
athletic activity before settling on the greatest sport of all, alla prima oil
painting. To be really good at it, you
have to be physically fit and under 60 years of age, give or take a few years. You get quite a workout dashing back and
forth in front of your easel to get a living, breathing portrait painted life-size
in one sitting. Today’s artists who insist
on working from life photographically on a painting for weeks on end, putting
every close-up detail on an emotionless face, should be sentenced to six months
in an alla prima boot camp to learn how to get some life in their paintings. I can’t imagine the proper punishment for
those enormously successful portrait “painters” who copy beautiful photographs
so perfectly that you can’t tell the difference. Maybe just a worldwide ban on such despicable
acts.
Seyffert was born in California,
Missouri, in 1887, the sixth of
seven children of Hermann and Emma Tweihaus Seyffert. The family soon moved to Colorado
Springs, Colorado. In 1890,
his German immigrant father, a contractor, fell off a roof and died, leaving
the family members “to work or marry early.”
I assume Leopold was no longer a toddler when he painted cakes at a
local bakery and glass eyes for a taxidermist.
Following an older brother to Pittsburgh
in 1904, Seyffert worked as an office boy for John Worthington, a Standard Oil
geologist who loaned him money to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. Seyffert painted portraits of Worthington
family members to repay the debt.
You can read a lot about Seyffert’s life and painting career
on the Internet, including an extensive biographical entry on Wikipedia. Much of this information comes from Robert Seyffert, Leopold's grandson and a painter himself, who is trying his best
to get his exceptionally talented grandfather back in the limelight. Most recently, Robert arranged a showing of
Leopold’s work early this year at the Union League Club, a private social club
in New York City. Unfortunately I didn’t get to the show. I’m missing out on everything these
days. Holy creeping inertia!
Seyffert made three trips to Europe
as a young man – in 1910, 1912 and 1914, copying from Velazquez at the Prado,
admiring the work of Hals and painting the locals when he could, including
peasants in Vollendam, Holland. He went on that first trip to Europe
in 1910 with his fiancée, Helen Fleck, also an artist, and her mother. Leopold and Helen were married in 1911. They resided
in Paris off and on for some years,
hobnobbing with quite a few members of the cultural and social elite, including
Zuloaga, Stokowski, Hemingway and Man Ray. The couple had three children, a girl and two
boys. One of the boys, Richard Leopold,
became a portrait painter himself and taught at my alma mater, The Art Students
League of New York, as his father had done years before.
Leopold and Helen divorced in 1930 and he married Grace
“Bobby” Vernon, who for over 15 years had modeled for many of those nude figure
paintings of his that were such big hits with collectors. That phase of Seyffert’s career is the subject
of a brief essay on LACMA’s website regarding one of Seyffert’s nude figure
paintings in its collection. Here is an
excerpt:
“The most modernist works Seyffert was ever to produce,
these canvases were no doubt influenced by the nude studies painted by his
friend Arthur B. Carles. Both men used the same model, beautiful red-haired
Grace Vernon, better known as ‘Bobby’, who would later become Seyffert’s second
wife. In several paintings Seyffert placed Bobby in highly decorative interiors
with an ornate oriental screen, panel, or drape as a backdrop. Her body was
treated as a single form and her extremities generalized or attenuated. In The
Lacquer Screen, 1918 (Pennsylvania Academy
of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia),
the curves of the nude echo the calligraphic lines in the Chinese coromandel
screen behind her…”
In my opinion, Seyffert’s nudes also owe a debt to Zuloaga,
who used boldly patterned and lushly painted draperies to dramatize the nude figure
in paintings he was creating in Spain
around the same time. But Zuloaga’s
nudes are actually bold portraits of his unclothed subjects, in contrast to the stylized
nudes created by Seyffert and Carles.
It is said that Seyffert eventually ruined his health from
smoking and drinking, but he continued painting commissioned portraits until
near the end of his life. When Bobby died in 1950, a new model and companion,
Ramona, took care of him until he died of esophageal cancer in 1956, in his 69th
year. Ah, yes, artists and their models
once again. I’m tickled to add another
footnote to the old, old tale. And being
primarily a still life painter myself, a little envious, as well.
