Charles Hawthorne 1872-1930

Raised in Richmond , Maine near the Kennebec River , Charles Hawthorne became known as the leading influence in the Provincetown , Massachusetts art colony in the early part of the 20th century. His father was a sea captain, and Charles developed an early interest in marine subjects and respect for the hard lives of those whose lives centered around them.

He went to New York at age 18 and worked in a stain glass factory while enrolled at the Art Students League with Vincent DuMond, George De Forest Brush, and from 1896 with William Merritt Chase at Shinnecock. With Chase, he helped found the Chase School which became the New York School of Art, and he taught there and managed it for several years.

He also had a one year trip to Holland where he was influenced by the tonalist style of Franz Hals and was inspired to open his own school of art in Provincetown , Massachusetts , a fishing village. There in 1899, he established the Cape Cod School of Art patterned after the Chase School . He taught the tenets of Impressionism and plein air painting along with his own color theories. Like his mentor, Chase, he conveyed a love of teaching with a love of painting landscapes that infused outdoor light with a wide range of color.

His paintings there of Portuguese fishing families and other realistic and impressionist work brought him many prizes and also many student followers. He was a much loved teacher and was known for marching his students down to the water in glaring sun and makes them paint models with a two-inch putty knife. The results were called "mud-heads" because the figures looked like blobs--simple masses of reflecting color. In this way, he taught his theory of capturing patterns of light and dark before the details.

During his lifetime, he got much recognition including the Hallgarten prize from the National Academy of design in 1904 and awards form The Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Among his affiliations were the Salmagundi Club and the American Watercolor Society. In addition to his year in Holland , Hawthorne traveled to Paris and Italy during his career and was made a full member of the French Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1913.

By 1916 the historic fishing village of Provincetown had become the largest art colony in the world luring such artists as George Ault, Gifford Beal, Reynolds Beal, Henry Demuth, Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Ellen Ravenscroft, Ben Shahn, Agnes Weinrich, and William Zorach to its shores. According to historian Ronald A. Kuchta, " Provincetown is the origin of many famous paintings in the history of the twentieth-century American art, not only the place where they were painted, but where they were first exhibited, discussed and sold."

The Cape Cod School of Art was the first outdoor summer school for figure painting and grew into one of the nation's leading art schools. Under thirty years of Hawthorne 's guidance, the school attracted some of the most talented art instructors and students in the country including John Noble, Richard Miller, and Max Bohm. At his school, Hawthorne gave weekly criticisms and instructive talks, guiding his pupils and setting up ideals but never imposing his own technique or method.

 Although Hawthorne is considered more of a realist, he managed to keep Monet's style and the flame of Impressionism going into the twentieth century when others abandoned his style, and he extended Impressionism to become somewhat structural in teaching his students to "differentiate between color and tone and to re-create the illusion of light without employing the Impressionist’s formula."

In reflecting on Hawthorne 's career, writer Duncan Phillips said Hawthorne was regarded as "both a great teacher and a great painter." Critic Leile Mechlin said, "There are those who believe, and with reason, that Hawthorne 's largest contribution to art in America was through the medium of his teaching." This grand appreciation of Hawthorne 's teachings by his peers and students and his aversion to self-promotion gave him the reputation of being a painter's painter.  

The Hawthorne principle of teaching stimulated his school. Stephen Gilman wrote, "We came to Provincetown conceited, hoping to get a finishing course, and were literally dragged back to consider matters so elementary and so fundamental we had all forgotten the little we ever knew of them."

 "This deliberate insistence of fundamentals was the thing that marked Charles Hawthorne as a great teacher," Gilman continued. "A lesser man would have been tempted to show off. A lesser man would have succumbed to the questions about trifling things. A lesser man would have wandered into verbal bypaths. But he was strong because of his simplicity. He was strong because he had the courage to repeat over and over again his fundamental concept of art, knowing full well that should his hearers once understand his meaning they would never be able to forget it."  

Hawthorne had the enviable situation as an artist of being appreciated while he still lived by his fellow artists and by the general public. Early in his career, museums across the country collected his works including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.