Frank Weston Benson
1862 - 1951
Frank Weston Benson was an American Impressionist artist, and a member of the Ten American Painters. Some of his best known paintings "Eleanor", "Summer", depict his daughters outdoors at Benson's summer home on the island of North Haven in Maine. He also produced numerous paintings and etchings of wildfowl.
Frank Benson was born into a successful merchant family in Salem, Massachusetts. He lived in Salem for most of his life. In 1879, he began study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and later at the Académie Julian in Paris.
At the Boston Museum School he befriended Edmund Charles Tarbell and Robert Reid, at the same time teaching drawing classes in Salem and painting. In 1883 he began his studies in Paris, and painted at Concarneau, along with Willard Metcalf and Edward Simmons. His early paintings were conventional landscapes.
After returning to America in 1885 Benson opened a studio in Salem, and in 1888, in Boston, and married Ellen Perry Peirson. In 1889 he began teaching at the Boston Museum School alongside his friend Tarbell.
Benson gained favorable attention in 1888, in his first showing with the Society of American Artists in New York, with a piece that suggested the influence of academic realism rather than impressionism. In 1889 he was awarded the Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design annual, and exhibited with Tarbell. In the late 1880s Benson spent several summers in Dublin, New Hampshire, where he painted with and was influenced by Abbott Thayer.
By the early 1890s he began using his family as subjects. Benson later recalled having realized at the time that "design" was the most important component of painting. Consequently, works of the period evidence a greater interest in and command of pattern, silhouette, and abstract design.
After joining the Ten in 1898, Benson shifted from the decorative painting of murals and allegories, to a genuine interest in plein-air impressionism. The popularity of "The Sisters", a painting which won medals in expositions throughout the United States and in Paris, was a prelude to the successes of the next twenty years, during which time Benson became famous for a series of luminous paintings of his wife and daughters, executed at his summer home in Maine. In 1901 and 1909 he held one-man exhibitions at the St. Botolph Club in Boston.
In 1915 he first exhibited etchings of wild fowl, to popular acclaim. After 1920 Benson turned increasingly to the depiction of landscapes featuring wildlife, an outgrowth of his interest in hunting and fishing, from then on producing a steady and profitable output of etchings and watercolors in this vein. The watercolors, often the products of bird- hunting sojourns to Cape Cod and salmon fishing expeditions in Canada, were favorably compared to similar works by Winslow Homer.
In his lifetime Benson enjoyed retrospective exhibitions at the Guild of Boston Artists in 1917, the Corcoran Gallery in 1921, the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1924, and, showing again with Tarbell, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1938.
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