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About Edwin H. Blashfield
Born in New York City on 15 December 1848, young Edwin watched the departure of Union troops as a teenager from the Boston Common fence. He was a student at the Boston Latin School, and at the age of eighteen, William Morris Hunt saw some of his drawings and urged him to study in Europe. Edwin began under Léon Bonnat under whom he remained for long periods (1867-70 and 1874-80) and he also took the advice of Jean Léon Gérôme. The latter told him: "Surround yourself with everything that you can, — casts, photographs, terra-cottas, vase paintings, — and look at them constantly with all your might." Bonnat, on the other hand, prompted Blashfield to loosen his brushwork, in emulation of Velázquez and Ribera’s strong chiaroscuro and he emphasized drawing with the brush. His students began immediately to draw after live models rather than Antique casts, yet he still stressed good draftsmanship. Blashfield achieved a balance between Bonnat’s severe realism and Gérôme’s more idealized art with its sharp contours. Blashfield’s The New Dress of 1874 (The Cowan Collection; The Parthenon, Nashville), compared to similar full-length portraits by Bonnat, is more tight in technique, fussier in details, and rather static in its symmetrical composition. Closer to Bonnat’s looser, painterly vision is the American painter’s Suspense: Boston People Watching from the Housetops the Firing of Bunker Hill (Home Insurance Co., New York), a historical genre painting dated 1882.
H. Barbara Weinberg pointed out Blashfield’s eclecticism: he embraced Bouguereau’s gradual (sculptural) way of modeling from dark to light, Bonnat’s more painterly technique, and Puvis de Chavannes’ flattened decorative effects. However, Gérôme’s influence endured: The Emperor Commodus Leaving the Arena at the Head of the Gladiators (Hermitage Foundation Museum, Norfolk, Virginia) of 1878 draws on Gérôme’s similar scenes inside the Colosseum. Commodus, dressed as Hercules, appeared in the arena hundreds of times as a gladiator. Blashfield exhibited this work in 1878 in the Paris Salon, where his paintings appeared between 1875 and 1892. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy (London). Blashfield executed other subjects of ancient Rome and allegories, such as Inspiration (unlocated), shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, along with a portrait of Mrs. Blashfield, which reappeared on the art market in 1981 (Sternberg Galeries, Chicago). Blashfield also took part in the World’s Columbian Exposition where another portrait of his wife (unlocated), the large and popular Christmas Bells (The Brooklyn Museum), and The Angel with the Flaming Sword (Church of the Ascension, New York) were hung. The Angel with the Flaming Sword showed up again at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (1901). The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia has his Temple of Medinet Habu, dated 1887, an accurate record of a late Egyptian temple. Blashfield served as president of the Society of American Artists (1865-96). His exhibition activity at other annual shows includes the National Academy of Design (1872-1937), the Boston Art Club in 1883 and 1896, and the Pennsylvania academy of the Fine Arts (1881-94).
But the idealistic Blashfield soon realized that mural painting would be the aim of his career. His first decoration was at the World’s Columbian Exposition where various painters contributed to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Blashfield represented the arts of the goldsmith, the ironworker, the maker of armor and the worker in bronze. That year (1893) he and his wife settled in New York City and in 1896 he executed the dome of the Library of Congress, which represents The Evolution of Civilization, twelve winged personifications of ancient and modern nations, and Human Understanding, a partially nude female figure who unveils herself. The pensive figure of America is an engineer seated behind a dynamo. In the High Appellate Court House in New York Blashfield painted The Power of the Law in 1899, the same year he worked in the library of G. W. C. Drexel in Philadelphia.
Blashfield received continual mural commissions in the new century, beginning with Prudence Binding Fortune in the board room of the Prudential Insurance Company in Newark, New Jersey (1901). Two years later he painted The Uses of Wealth for the Citizens’ Bank of Cleveland and the Court Room in Baltimore, Maryland, where The Edict of Toleration by Lord Baltimore and Washington Laying His Commission at the Feet of Columbia are two main panels. The latter is typical in its juxtaposition of historical personages and allegorical figures, in the European tradition. Writers have pointed out how the billowing flags add a sense of movement within a spatially restricted painting area. The frieze is pure American Renaissance decoration. Kenyon Cox explained how in Blashfield’s composition, "the larger implications of the story are much more clearly expressed than they could be by a realistic representation of the scene that occurred at Annapolis in 1783." (The Classic Point of View, 1909, p. 76).
Then in 1904, Blashfield worked on murals in the Minnesota State Capitol, St. Paul. One lunette is Minnesota, Granary of the World, in which the two powerful, frontally posed oxen are presented with dignity as such animals would appear in a Roman sacrificial ceremony. Here they stabilize the composition of allegorical figures, and support the imposing Sovereign of the Harvest above in the center. A year later, Blashfield painted Westward for the State Capitol in Des Moines, Iowa, in which four flying allegories lead another team of oxen west through a brambly, untamed wilderness, apparently designed to justify Manifest Destiny. There is a neoclassical elegance in these figures, who recall French precedents such as the female allegories by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon.
Also in 1905, Blashfield painted the apse in the Drexel Memorial Chapel of Philadelphia’s Church of the Savior, in a Sienese Trecento style. Kneeling angels, mostly in profile, feature abstract, two-dimensional halos, complete with richly ornamental gold tooling. This archaic style was utilized by other American mural painters, including John Singer Sargent. Blashfield published Mural Painting in America in 1913 and edited an edition of Vasari’s Lives. Like Kenyon Cox, he was a highly serious, traditional and academic artist who believed foremost in representing classical beauty and subjects of moral significance. Between 1920 and 1926 he served as president of the National Academy of Design. During his directorship, the Academy celebrated its centennial in 1925; at the opening ceremony, Blashfield declared:
Let us say that conservative, like other Academies, our has been, but we hope, conservative of the best. The champion of continued rather than sporadic progress, it has never-theless upon its rolls the names of nearly all the most original and individual thinkers among American artists. Later mural commissions include that for the Detroit Public Library (1921-22). Blashfield died in 1936.
Allegory of the Arts is an unfinished ébauche for a mural. One might regard the seated figures on the pedestal as allegories of sacred and profane music, while the other figures are not that obvious. The man on the far right appears to be the painter Velázquez and perhaps the Roman soldier on the left represents the art of war, who puts away his weapon. The woman in front of the altar/pedestal has lit a ceremonial tripod. Undoubtedly, Blashfield would have added further symbolic accessories and more figures, perhaps an architect and a sculptor. The large panel is a valuable record of an American Renaissance painting in progress. It points to the serious nature of Blashfield’s art, the emphasis on graceful figures, classical beauty and draftsmanship. The twilight landscape and the expression of most figures here create an atmosphere of nostalgia, almost a feeling of melancholy. |
Paintings by Edwin H. Blashfield
| Allegory of the Arts |
| Oil on canvas: 89 f x 44 inches |
| signed: lower right |
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