Horace Talmage Day

Horace Day (3 July 1909 – 24 March 1984), also Horace Talmage Day, is a painter of the American scene, born in China, who came to maturity during the Thirties and was active as a painter over the next 50 years. He traveled widely in the United States and continued to explore throughout his life subjects that first captured his attention as an artist in the Thirties. He gained early recognition for his portraits and landscapes, particularly his paintings in the Carolina Lowcountry.

Horace Day called himself a regional painter, interested in depicting the scenery of his adopted South. The style he chose to portray the landscapes and people of the South was a brand of Romantic Realism influenced by Claude Lorrain and Jacob van Ruisdael and also by the resonances in that landscape that he perceived with the rural, subtropical landscape and colonial architecture of southern China where he spent his early years. He primarily worked outside, as a plein air painter, using quick impressionistic brush strokes to record the scene. Horace Talmage Day was the eldest of four children born in Amoy (now Xiamen), China of American missionary parents during their service with the American Reformed Mission in Fukien Province, China. The mission had bases of operation in Amoy and in Fuchow.[1] Mission families in Amoy resided in the foreign enclave on the island of Gulangyu in Amoy harbor, an urban area that has become known for its Nineteenth Century colonial architecture. In Fuchow, the mission families were situated closer to the area’s peasant villages. The Day family served in both locations.

By the age of twelve, Day was painting quite accomplished landscapes of south China scenes in both oil and watercolor.[2] One of his most cherished books on art was a book on the drawings of Claude Lorrain that he acquired as a teenager, before he began his studies at the Art Students League of New York. These early inspirations are reflected in the work done by Day throughout his career.[3]

Following his graduation from the Shanghai American School in 1927, Day came to the United States to study at the Art Students League of New York. While there, he studied with, Kimon Nicolaides, Boardman Robinson, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, later serving as an assistant to Nicolaides.[4] One of his drawings was selected to illustrate an exercise in the classic work by Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw, that was assembled by Nicolaides’ students following his premature death.[5]

Day’s promise as a painter was immediately recognized at the Art Students League. He was awarded summer fellowships by the Tiffany Foundation while studying at the Art Students League and exhibited in every Tiffany Annual Exhibition during the years 1930-33. The first inclusion of Day’s work in a national exhibition dates from 1931, when his work was included in an international exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1933 until his military service in World War II, Day was represented by the Macbeth Gallery in New York – one of the major commercial venues of the time.[6]

Day’s work gaining recognition included portrait studies, floral still lifes, urban scenes and rural landscapes of subjects in New York, Vermont, Georgia and the Carolina Lowcountry.[7] He continued to explore each of these subjects through the balance of his life. Examples of such work are in public and private collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Robert Hull Fleming Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Morris Museum of Art.[8]

Following completion of Day’s studies at the Art Students League, Day was named artist-in-residence at the Henry Street Settlement in New York. Founded by Lillian Wald, the Henry Street Settlement was in that period one of the pivotal centers of creative energy in New York. In 1936, Day was named the first director of the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, Georgia.[9] During that period, he first discovered the landscape of the Carolina Lowcountry while continuing to paint in Vermont.

In 1941, Day married the artist, Elizabeth Nottingham, who had also studied at the Art Students League of New York, and the two joined the faculty of Mary Baldwin College. Except for time on leave for military service, during which Day continued to paint, and a one-year visiting appointment at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1946-47 with their friend Edward Lanning, Day thereafter was a Professor of Art at Mary Baldwin until his retirement in 1967.[10] Except for 1946-47, when Horace Day and Elizabeth Nottingham took a one-year visiting appointment at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Days continued to teach jointly at Mary Baldwin College and during summers to continue to develop their careers as artists until the death of Elizabeth Nottingham in 1956. Favored venues during this period were Vermont, West Virginia, the rugged landscape of southwest Virginia, particularly the cliffs at Eggleston on the New River in Giles County, a subject that Day painted repeatedly over a period of 30 years, and the Carolina Lowcountry, especially Edisto Island. Both artists preferred to paint outdoors and directly from nature; and both were equally skilled in watercolor, ink, and oils.[11] At the time of Elizabeth Nottingham’s death, she was also gaining significant national recognition.[12]

For the last seventeen years of Day’s career, between 1967 and 1984, Day was an Alexandria, Virginia, resident. While continuing to travel widely, in the American West and the South, Day produced a number of paintings of city life in Old Town Alexandria, portraits of black and white Alexandrians of the period, nearby landscapes, gardens of Alexandria’s historic houses and still lifes. Even though painted comparatively recently, it was observed when the work was exhibited in 2003 that while the work in aggregate captured an image of Alexandria in transition, the paintings were linked in some ways more closely to the South of 50 years before than to contemporary life.[13]