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About Barton S. Hays
The self-taught Indiana portrait painter Barton Stone Hays (1826-1914) is best known as the teacher of William Merritt Chase. In his youth he painted two panoramas with scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then he turned to smaller-scale genres. Under Hays, the young Chase began by painting still-lifes. Hays also taught women students at McLean’s Female Seminary in Cincinnati, and in 1869 he was commissioned to execute the portrait of former Governor of Indiana William Henry Harrison, who also served as president of the United States. Hays exhibited twelve works at the Indiana Exposition of 1874. Work by Hays may be found in the Indianapolis Museum of Art and in the Art Association of Richmond, Indiana. At the age of 42, Hays moved to Minneapolis.
Previously in Europe, painters almost always presented flowers artfully arranged in a vase. In the 1870s, Martin Johnson Heade painted cut flowers, set against a blank background, as if suspended in air. Then in the following decade he placed flowers, including roses, on the edge of a table, but usually on a cloth. Perhaps most striking are his magnolia blossoms. A single pink rose is the subject of a small watercolor by Henry Farrer (1874). Later in the 1890s, Emil Carlsen painted American Beauty roses lying on the edge of a table. In Roses, Hays presents the antithesis of the grandiose, Baroque still-lifes of Holland. His small bouquet of roses, centered on a limestone slab, has all the simplicity of a song by Stephen Foster, another American original. It gives the effect of freshly cut flowers soon to be placed in a vase. There is a clear source of light, perhaps from a studio skylight from the upper left. Lacking any traces of impasto, the treatment is similar to that of Martin Johnson Heade, in that it is thinly painted and reveals pencil drawing underneath.
In Christian iconography, the red rose was associated with Christ’s blood and thus stood for God’s love, then it became a symbol of the Virgin Mary, the "Queen of Heaven," surrounded by roses, especially in the North. She is called a "rose without thorns," as she was without original sin, in connection with the rose of Eden, which had no thorns. The rose became popular in American gardening when it was widely imported in the 1840s, and by 1880 it was the favorite flower of still-life painters. John La Farge was famous for his watercolor renderings of roses. Bruce Weber reminds us that the "American artistic passion for the rose occurred simultaneously with the flower’s rise to dominance in the nation’s commercial market. . . . Roses were all the rage." |
Paintings by Barton S. Hays
| Roses |
| Oil on canvas: 9½ x 13½ inches |
| Signed: lower left |
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