Bringing to Light
Vose Galleries gives a new legacy to impressionist Theodore Wendel
Vose Galleries gives a new legacy to impressionist Theodore Wendel
Renowned among artists like Joseph Decamp,theodore Robinson and Willard Metcalf,theodore Wendel’s landscapes should have made him a household name. But even though he exhibited excellence in oils and pastels,wendel lacked the self-promotion skills of his contemporaries, and his legacy as an impressionist faded.
The underappreciated artist was the subject of the recent exhibition Bringing to Light atvose Galleries in Boston, which serves to bolster Wendel’s reputation in the 21st century.
Wendel was born in the American Midwest and studied at Mcmicken School of Art in Cincinnati before moving to Munich to study at the
Royal Academy there.“that’s where he learned of an artist called Frank Duveneck, who wasn’t that much older than him but was creating a lot of waves as a monumental teacher,” explains gallery director Careyvose. Along with his close friend Decamp, Wendel became part of a group of painters known as the “Duveneck
Boys,” traveling around Europe and studying with the eponymous artist. In 1886,Wendel traveled to Paris, and began to come into his own as an artist. Instead of focusing on figural work like many of the other American artists in the city, he turned his attention to landscapes.“he visited Giverny for the first time in 1887 along with a lot of other early American impressionists,” Vose says.“they were the first wave of American artists to find out about Giverny and Monet.”
His time there transformed his style, and even Claude Monet was rumored
to have thought highly of Wendel. His Giverny painting The Harvest Gleaners is on display atvose Galleries.“it’s a gem, with the light coming through the trees and women harvesting in the field,” Vose describes.
Wendel wrote to an acquaintance in 1888,“There is still a very great charm in the uncommon character of light and color here [in Giverny] for me especially (especially in sunlight) that I have not met with elsewhere.
The iridescent shimmer in the land provokes experiment, and tends to run up large color bills.you, too, would feel its sway…” The Harvest Gleaners exemplifies Wendel’s fascination with Normandy’s light and colors.
While most of the American artists Wendel painted with in France eventually settled in Newyork City to establish themselves,wendel made a life for himself in New England. He took up teaching in Newport, Rhode Island, and Gloucester, Massachusetts, and he exhibited his paintings in Boston.
His work was well-received and noted for its original perspective, with The Boston Evening Transcript writing, “[Wendel] is not a blind follower of Monet. He has seized the motive power of the master’s work; and, returning to America, after a couple years of hard study, has evolved a method and manner of his own, simple, broad, beautiful.” He even made a splash as one of the first artists to exhibit his pastel paintings alongside oils.
While Wendel continued to exhibit in Boston, he was destined for a quieter life. It was while teaching at the Cowles Art School that he met his wife,
Philena Stone, and after their wedding (where Decamp served as his best man) and honeymoon in Europe, the pair settled on Philena’s family farm in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Wendel not only painted the land there—he worked it. “Ipswich in a way took the place of the bucolic farm scenes in Giverny from his early years,” says Vose. The Lower River, Ipswich, on display at the gallery, shows off a similar quality of light to those Giverny
landscapes, while Pitching Hay, Upper Farm depicts the hard, honest work of rural life.
In 1917,Wendel suffered an infection in his jaw that continued to plague him for the rest of his life, reducing his artistic output significantly, and a fire in his studio destroyed much of his early work. After his death, many of his remaining paintings stayed in the collection of his family, unseen, while his legacy diminished.
“He was very much an artists’ artist and revered by his contemporaries, but didn’t know how to—or maybe didn’t care to—get it out there,” saysvose.“he was more about painting the paintings, communing with the landscape and feeling what the landscape was telling him rather than being a businessman.” Vose Galleries had been trying to find a way to showcase Wendel for years—decades, even—and the gallery’s relationship to Wendel’s work dates all the way back to the 1920s.“we actually have some letters sent between my great-grandfather and Theodore Wendel,” says Vose.
Her parents first began discussing the possibility of a book with Wendel’s son and grandson back in the 1980s. Finally, in 2019, Laurene Buckley published Theodorewendel:true Notes of American Impressionism, and it became a springboard for something bigger. “That was when the family decided it might make sense to put some of the paintings on the market,”vose says.they decided to sell around 30 paintings, most of which had never been for sale before, or even seen by anyone from outside of the family. These are the paintings that make up the basis of thevose exhibition.they span from early in Wendel’s career in the 1880s to 1917.
“I think if anyone is at all familiar with his contemporaries, either his Boston School contemporaries or the Duveneck Boys, or even his early Giverny contemporaries, they’ll realize that he was every bit as good as his fellow artists, he just wasn’t very good at self-promoting,”vose says.
After Wendel died, Frank Benson wrote to his widow,“he was really a true artist, and a very fine one, only he did not know what it meant to make his candle shine in the world.”