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Portrait of Mary Spencer Fuller

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Portrait of Mary Spencer Fuller

1914
oil on canvas
36 in. x 30 in. (91.44 cm x 76.2 cm)
Bequest of Henry Melville Fuller, 2002.20.2

Frank Weston Benson
American
1862–1951

A leader and founder of the group known as the Ten American Painters, Frank Benson did much to popularize Impressionism in the United States. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1862, Benson studied art for three years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, before traveling to Paris in 1883. Following two more years as a student at the Académie Julian, Benson returned to the United States, where, in 1886, he became the first instructor of the Portland, Maine, Society of Art Drawing School. By 1889, he had opened a portrait studio in Boston and taken a position as instructor at the Museum of Fine Arts School. Benson was associated with the Museum School for many years, and along with his friend Edmund Tarbell (q.v.), he helped to make it a leader among American institutions of its kind.

Benson's painting style, a combination of French academic techniques and the high-keyed palette of the Impressionists, won numerous admirers among artists and public alike. His prizes and awards were many and included medals at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1892 and the Paris Exposition Internationale of 1900. In 1898 Benson became a founding member of the Ten, a group of prominent Impressionists who had banded together against the exclusionary practices of the National Academy of Design. By the late 1890s Impressionism had gained a large and appreciative following, and from the time of their first exhibition, the work of the Ten became synonymous with the best that the younger generation of artists had to offer. Benson enjoyed almost continual success throughout his career. Later in life, he earned added acclaim for his watercolors and etchings of sporting and game subjects. The artist died at eighty-nine in 1951.

The Currier's Portrait of Mary Spencer Fuller is an engaging image of a rosy-cheeked young girl with red hair and blue eyes. Wearing a crisp white dress, she sits in a small chair and clasps a doll in her lap. Brilliant against a dark landscape backdrop, she appears almost angelic, yet the disarming quality of her pose and expression testifies to childhood authentically observed.

Children were among Benson's favorite subjects. A family man himself, the artist evidently delighted in the unself-conscious transparency of his child sitters. In contrast to the aestheticized introspection that typifies his images of young women, Benson's children display a variety of emotions and a sense of verve that are appealing in their spontaneity. Although as a studio portrait it is more formal than Benson's genre paintings, Portrait of Mary Spencer Fuller is nevertheless expressive of childish curiosity, impishness, and perhaps even impatience as the young sitter seems ready to spring from her seat as soon as the session is over.

Benson completed Portrait of Mary Spencer Fuller in 1914, shortly after returning from his annual summer fishing trip to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. In a letter addressed to the sitter's grandmother from his home in North Haven, Maine, the artist wrote:


Coming home from Canada I found the picture of the golden haired girl in my studio here and I pitched right in as soon as I could get to work and finished it-that is to say in all except a few minor things that will be done in a few days -a week perhaps. I have improved it a lot -I am sure you would say so if you could see it now, and I shall hold it at your disposal as soon as it is thoroughly dry so that it can be packed.(1)



A few weeks later, the painting, complete with a frame chosen by the artist himself, arrived in Manchester, where it remained in family hands until it was bequeathed to the Currier Museum of Art by Henry Melville Fuller in 2002.

VSD


NOTE

1. Frank Benson to Mrs. L. M. French, July 31, 1914. Letter contained in object file, Currier Museum of Art.

REFERENCES

Frank W. Benson: A Retrospective. Ex. cat. Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, 1989.

Donelson F. Hoopes. The American Impressionists. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1972.


Exhibition
1985 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Heirlooms: Historical Art and Decorative Art from New Hampshire Collectors." Sept. 6 - Oct. 13.

2006-2007 Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, "Masterpieces from the Currier Museum of Art." Sept. 2006 - Oct. 1, 2007.

Provenance
Mary Spencer Fuller (sitter)
Gift to Henry Melville Fuller (the sitter's brother)
Bequest to Currier Museum of Art, 2002


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