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About Louis Betts
As early as 1906, a well respected art writer referred to Louis Betts as a "genius." He pointed out the artist’s originality, technique, and "ability to see, comprehend, and utilize some aspects of nature that most artists do not grasp." Often likened to *John Singer Sargent in his work, Betts was a superb figure painter and was skillful with a fully loaded brush, with which he rendered objects among a variety of colorful textures in carefully arranged spaces. As the son of Edwin Daniel Betts, an accomplished painter, Louis’s artistic ambitions were encouraged during his youth. According to one account, Louis executed his first portrait commission at the age of fourteen and received payment in the form of violin lessons. Music became an avocation for him.
After Louis’s mother died, his father married one of her sisters, but he found it difficult to make a living as a professional artist in Little Rock, Arkansas. Soon the Betts family moved to Chicago, where Louis, as the eldest of several children, earned his living by painting vignettes on tea trays and working at other incidental decoration jobs. By the early 1890s, he was doing more lucrative commercial art work, including illustrations. Louis studied oil painting under his father and in his early twenties began to submit work to various local exhibitions. By 1898, Louis lived at 4720 Calumet Avenue and had already exhibited at the *Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Artists’ Show. He painted typical American *genre subjects, such as Old Fish Shanties, Mother is Gone, and Where Birds Stay. By working as an illustrator, he was able to provide for his new bride, Miss Kirchenknabe, and also study painting at the Art Institute. Around the turn of the century, he was drawn to New York, where jobs in illustration abounded.
In 1901, Betts showed portrait drawings to the art director of St. Nicholas magazine, A.W. Drake, who advised him to stop "wasting . . . time illustrating" and join the summer painting classes at *Shinnecock Hills Summer School (Long Island) under *William Merritt Chase. One week later, Betts and his wife were living in a Shinnecock Hills boarding house after he had become a student of Chase. Betts was capable of producing a portrait likeness, but when Chase saw one of them, he exploded: "I don’t want perfect likenesses painted in my class. . . .I want to take hold of the nose and reach back for an ear." Betts’s wife had to convince her husband to remain at Shinnecock; however, by the end of the summer, he won the Whiting Prize. The influence of Chase’s Shinnecock landscape style remained evident in Betts’s few canvases of such subjects painted during his career. His practical application of a style roughly tied to impressionism came primarily as a result of study under Chase. Completely won over by Chase, he followed him to the *Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for the following fall semester. While living on Cherry Street in one small room of a boarding house, Betts eked out a living from a commission to illustrate Emerson Hough’s The Bad Man. When other commercial jobs were refused, he was able to devote ample time to painting.
Betts was rewarded for his perseverance in 1902, when the Pennsylvania Academy presented him with a two-year *Cresson Travelling Scholarship. He devoted the following two years to studies in Europe. First stopping in Holland, he copied the works of *Frans Hals and studied other great Dutch masters. Much of his time was spent in Haarlem, where he lived for about a year. Here, he received his first important commission from Baron Kroll, who was a guiding force at the Haarlem Museum of Art. |
Paintings by Louis Betts
| Ladies in the Garden, Old Lyme |
| oil on canvas: 40 x 30 inches |
| signed: lower left |
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| Portrait of Eliphalet Cramer |
| oil on canvas: 47 1/4 x 32 1/4 in. |
| signed: upper left |
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