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About Guy C. Wiggins
Guy C. Wiggins was the second generation of a three-generation family of painters. Inheriting the skill and legacy of landscape painting from his father Carleton Wiggins, Guy would develop a style that incorporated the color and techniques of French Impressionism along with emerging American concepts.
Wiggins' unique style and abilities brought him early acclaim, and throughout his life he strove to maintain and the integrity and independence of his style. According to Adrienne L. Walt from American Art Review, in a 1977 article, "his resolution was to constantly emphasize color, elevating it above all else and achieving luminosity through it ."
Born in 1883 in Brooklyn, New York, Guy began his training under his father. Around the turn of the century, he enrolled in architecture and drawing at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. He later studied painting at the National Academy of Design. At the age of 20, Wiggins became the youngest artist to have his work accepted into the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Wiggins was also awarded the Hartford Prize from the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts in 1917, the Norman Wait Harris bronze medal from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1917 and later the Connecticut Academy of Fine Art's Flagg Prize on two other occassions.
Old Lyme, Conneticut became Wiggin's summer home around 1920, where he became one of the youngest members of the Old Lyme colony of painters that congregated there. As early as 1899 the artists flocked to Old Lyme and developed an art colony in the home of Florence Griswold. For almost twenty years artists paid $9 a week to live and paint the open fields, rivers and streams, their shores, and the pastures of the Connecticut countryside. Original members of the group include Childe Hassam, Henry Rankin Poore, Frank Vincent DuMond and Carleton Wiggins.
Hassam began teaching and working in Old Lyme about 1903 where he painted a well-known series of landscapes of "The Church at Old Lyme". This series did much to popularize the area as a popular destination for budding artists.
Prior to the onset of World War I, Wiggins painted the local scenery of the English countryside. It was there he met his wife Dorothy Stuart Johnson. The couple returned the States and set up home in Connecticut until 1937. It was during this period that many of his New England scenes, like the one presented here, were painted. These works prompted yet another recognition from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1922. He was awarded their J. Francis Murphy Memorial Prize. Wiggins continued to work from his New York Studio, painting the cityscapes and snow scenes he has become famous for.
Based on the influence of teachers and greatest American landscape painters, Impressionists, and other art movements, Wiggins revives a feeling of contentment in the simple things of life, taking away the extreme highs and lows of change, and restoring the American dream. Old Lyme, Conneticut in the 1930's was the Bedford Falls of Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life", where the elevation of the human spirit becomes the only factor worth considering. |
Paintings by Guy C. Wiggins
| Winter on Wall Street |
| oil on canvas: 25 x 30 inches |
| signed: lower right |
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