George de Forest Brush

George de Forest Brush (1855-1941)

George de Forest Brush was born in Shelbyville, Tennessee. From 1870 to 1873 he studied at the National Academy of Design in New York, where Lemuel E. Wilmarth was his primary instructor. In October 1873 he enrolled in the painting atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris, and in March of the following year he was accepted for admission to the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, where he studied for two years. He matriculated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in March 1876 and entered the drawing studio of Adolphe Yvon. By 1878 he had completed his study with Gérôme, but he remained in Paris for another two years, returning to the United States in 1880.

The following year Brush was elected to membership in the Society of American Artists, and he began making illustrations for magazines such as Century and Harper’s. In summer 1881, he traveled west with his brother, Alfred, visiting California and then Wyoming and Montana, where he studied and sketched Indians of the Arapahoe, Shoshone, and Crow tribes. The paintings of Indian subjects that he executed for the next eight years were done in the fluid anatomical style of his former teacher, Gérôme.

From 1882 to 1884 Brush taught at Cooper Union and the Art Students League in New York. He married his student Mary Taylor (Mittie) Whelpley in 1886, and they eloped to a village in Quebec, Canada, where he continued to paint Indian subjects. Their first child, Alfred, was born in Canada in 1887 but died the following winter. A second child, Gerome, was born in 1888, followed by the birth of six daughters. The seven children and their mother became the subjects of Brush’s famous mother and child groupings as well as individual portraits.

In 1888 Brush won the First Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design and was elected an associate of the Academy. Ten years later he was elected a charter member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and won many awards, including the gold medal at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the gold medal at the Paris International Exposition in Chicago in 1900.

Travels took him to North Africa, France, England, and Italy. The family lived in New York and eventually settled on a farm in Dublin, New Hampshire, which Brush purchased in 1901. He continued to paint not only portraits commissioned by wealthy clients but also many fine paintings of family members, including his grandchildren.

In 1930 Brush was the subject of a retrospective at Grand Central Art Galleries in New York, and three years later he had a second retrospective, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. He died in a hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, at the age of eighty-five.

Artist’s Daughter (Mrs. Pearmain), ca. 1915

Oil on panel, 37 x 28 in. (94 x 71.1 cm)

Signed (upper right): Geo De Forest Brush

Talcott Art Fund and Mrs. H. Bowditch (1947.1)

“Artist’s Daughter” is a portrait of Nancy, the eldest of the Brushs' six daughters. The portrait originally was to have depicted Mrs. Walter B. James, the wife of a prominent New York physician. However, when the James family objected to the substitution of an entirely different dress for the one intended, Brush recovered the work and painted his daughter Nancy’s face in place of Mrs. James's.1 (1) The shoulders and square neckline of the original portrait are still visible.

The Italian Renaissance gown may have been inspired by a collection of costume plates that Brush brought back from Paris. His skill as a draftsman is especially evident in the sleeves. A preliminary drawing for the sleeve (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) shows the exquisite cascading folds of fabric.

Brush put considerable time into the treatment of drapery. When drawing folds, he referred to an armature of wood and wire with cloth draped over it that he kept in his studio.2 (2) He made preparatory studies of elaborate draperies as well as of hands and heads. The draftsmanship skills that Brush had learned at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts guided him throughout his career.

Brush worked to make colors glow in his paintings. He tested different color schemes and used flowers like zinnias as models to match shades in the velvets he bought, particularly the deep orange and red tones. When he painted on panel, as in the New Britain portrait, he used well-seasoned wood, braced on the back to prevent warping. He worked in tempera or in oil and used underpainting in green or red, some of which is visible in this painting.3 (3)

Nancy, who was born in Paris on July 4, 1890, was a favorite model for her father, and he included her as a young child in several of the mother and child groupings for which he is famous. This portrait is a “superb likeness” of Nancy with her shiny brown hair, gentle eyes, and delicate mouth.4 (4) In 1909, when she was nineteen, she married Brush’s student Robert Pearmain, who died of leukemia in 1912. The couple had a daughter, Mary Alice Pearmain, who was born in 1911. In 1916 Nancy married Dr. Harold Bowditch of Boston, a widower with two young children. Nancy was herself an accomplished painter with a lifelong interest in the theater. She published several plays as well as a biography of her father and was also a designer of costumes and sets. She died in Dublin, New Hampshire, in 1949.

JBM

Bibliography:

Nancy Douglas Bowditch, “George de Forest Brush: Recollections of a Joyous Painter” (Peterborough, N.H.: William L. Bauhan, 1970); Joan B. Morgan, “George de Forest Brush, 1855-1941: Master of the American Renaissance”, exhib. cat. (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1985).

NOTES:

1. Nancy Douglas Bowditch Papers, ca. 1900s-1970s, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. In a letter dated January 5, 1913, that the artist sent to Nancy from “Vilino Sans Souci, 68 Poggia Imperiali, Florence” he wrote, “The picture referred to was the portrait of Mrs. James which I painted your head onto. I thought you would surely understand.” Because the date of this letter has been changed by hand to 1914, a dating of about 1915 for the painting is generally accepted . A postcard sent to the New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA files) by Nancy Douglas Bowditch on February 16, 1973, states: “About the painting of me by my father, I am surprised that it is not dated. He usually dated pictures. I don’t know exactly when I sat for the ill-fated portrait--but it was approximately 1915, I think.”

2. Bowditch, “George de Forest Brush”, p. 79.

3. Brush's painting method is outlined in Ibid., pp. 80-81.

4. Nelson C. White to Charles Ferguson, March 11, 1969, NBMAA files. On page two of his letter, White, who knew Nancy Bowditch personally, describes the portrait: “It is, by the way, a superb likeness of her as well as a fine example of Brush.” In a 1909 wedding photograph, Nancy and her husband, Robert Pearmain, stand beside Brush and his son Gerome. The likeness of the portrait to Nancy can be seen in this photograph (Bowditch, “George de Forest Brush”, fig. 32).