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About Gertrude Schell
Gertrude Schell began her studies at West Chester State Teachers College then transferred to the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, where she would later become a faculty member (1930-60). She was a member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, then in 1934 she joined the group known as the Philadelphia Ten, a group of women painters. Schell’s landscapes have been characterized as “powerful, personal, majestic, striking and theatrical.” An impressionist would never utilize such dark values as burnt umber and black but Schell loved to juxtapose the darkest darks and the lightest lights for dramatic effect. Forms often give a silhouette effect.
Schell herself stated one of her goals was “to record moods of nature rather than to give photographic representations of scenery.” She was part of the mid twentieth century “Romantic survival” in American painting, which was a step beyond impressionism in its choice of more dramatic effects of nature over the sunny atmosphere of impressionist landscapes. She also belonged to the regionalist movement in her preference for home-grown American subject matter; she once pointed out that since American painters had learned from the old masters, one ought to capture the beauty right here at home. Besides Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Mystic, Connecticut, the rugged Gaspé Peninsula in Canada, north of Maine, attracted Schell. Schell was honored with a solo show in 1962 at the Woodmere Art Gallery in Philadelphia and two years after her death there was a memorial exhibition.
In describing another image of the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec, Patricia Sydney states how it “focuses on poverty and dullness, on struggle and hardship. Schell’s drab colors and roughly textured paint reflect the monotony of life in this remote area and define a landscape where poor farmers eke out an existence.” Loading the Wagon appears to be from the same area. Men are at work at a horse-drawn wagon at the edge of a bay, loading goods. The human forms are dramatically back-lit and cast long gray-violet diagonal shadows. Across the bay, at the foot of a massive cliff is a village, hugging the shore line. The buildings have been rendered in a highly subtle manner, in blue-violet, and the effect is wonderful. The theme recalls Ashcan subjects of industrial workers, though the location is a harsh, rocky, remote location that would have pleased Rockwell Kent, who sought out similar “primitive” sites in Alaska, Maine, and Greenland.
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Paintings by Gertrude Schell
| Loading the Wagon |
| oil on canvas: 25 x 30 inches |
| signed: lower right |
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Click Picture to Enlarge |
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