Frank W. Benson’s Portrait of My Daughters
2007; American Medical Association; Volume: 9; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1001/archfaci.9.5.376
ISSN1538-3660
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Imaging in Medicine
ResumoArchives of Facial Plastic SurgeryVol. 9, No. 5 BeautyFree AccessFrank W. Benson’s Portrait of My DaughtersLisa Duffy-ZeballosLisa Duffy-ZeballosSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Sep 2007AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Frank Weston Benson was born into a prosperous maritime family in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1862. When he was 18 years old, Benson attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. He later traveled to Paris, France, where he attended the avant-garde Académie Julian and studied under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. In Paris, Benson saw the works of the great Impressionist masters and began to experiment with painting out of doors (en plein air) himself, producing works like Paris Parade (private collection). Although Benson's submission was not accepted for the Paris Salon, the official exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, his painting After the Storm (private collection), depicting 2 Breton girls standing on the shore overlooking rough seas, was accepted by the British Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1884. Bolstered by this success, the young artist set up a studio and executed portraits for members of Boston society. One of his most sensitive and intimate paintings is his portrait of the young Gertrude Schirmer (Museum of Fine Arts). In a style derived from John Singer Sargent's intimate portraits of children, Benson portrays her seated in a diminutive rocking chair. Formally perched in a stiff ruffled frock, she seems constrained by the formality of her surroundings; her delicate pink dress emphasizes her youth, and her face conveys the suppressed energy of childhood.Benson served as co-director of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with Edmund Tarbell and continued to teach there until 1930. In his later years, he turned his attention to still-life paintings and etchings of sportsmen hunting and fishing. By the time of his death in 1951, Benson had accrued numerous academic honors and enjoyed unprecedented financial success as well.Benson was a founding member of the society of the Ten American Painters. Known simply as “the Ten,” this society comprised a group of American painters who exhibited jointly: Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Thomas Dewing, Robert Reid, Edward Simmons, Willard Metcalf, and Joseph DeCamp, as well as Tarbell and Benson. Most, but not all, of these artists had adopted the Impressionist style while studying in Paris. More conservative than their French counterparts, the American Impressionists painted in a high-keyed pastel palette with more subtle value contrasts. And, whereas Monet and Renoir occasionally painted urban settings, the Americans painted figures enjoying the countryside or in quiet domestic interiors.Benson was initially hesitant to adopt the Impressionist dissolution of form in the depiction of his figures' faces, which he solidly and realistically rendered. Like Renoir, Benson used tight, even brushstrokes to delineate his subjects' features and limited his experiments with the effects of sunlight on different surfaces to the rendering of the background and his figures' clothing.However, by the turn of the 20th century, Benson had fully embraced the Impressionist credo of representing only impressions, or the effects of light and atmosphere on his subjects. As he instructed his eldest daughter Eleanor, “Don't paint anything but the effects of light. Don't paint things.”1 In his plein-air paintings like Sunlight (Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana) and Eleanor (Museum of Fine Arts), Benson employs characteristic short brushstrokes with a quick application of paint to capture the fleeting effects of light on dappled surfaces, and background details are lost in a surfeit of light. Benson's Hilltop (Malden Public Library, Malden, Massachusetts) depicts Eleanor standing atop a hilltop bluff, accompanied by her brother George, overlooking the shore. Eleanor holds a white kerchief above her head, signaling the unseen ships in the distance. The movement of the handkerchief caught in the breeze is echoed by her blue sash and the hem of her dress, which wave frantically in the sea breeze. Yet amid this swirling rush of fabric, the children's faces are impassive as they gaze out toward the sea.Benson's most beloved paintings evoke the seaside retreat of his country home near Penobscot Bay, Maine. Benson's favorite models were his 4 children, whom he immortalized in paintings evoking the eternal New England summer. Eleanor (born in 1890), was his favorite model, and she posed for some of his greatest plein-air canvases, including Sunlight, Eleanor, and The Reader (private collection), and later posed with her son in Eleanor and Benny (private collection). Benson painted Portrait of My Daughters (Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts) in the summer of 1907 at Wooster Farm, his summer home on North Haven Island in Maine. Earlier that summer, he painted Eleanor alone in profile perched on top of a picket fence before an idyllic landscape background, a beach cabana visible at the left and a view of the sea in the distance. In the present painting, he depicts his 3 daughters half-length before the same background. Fourteen-year-old Elizabeth, on the left, gazes down at the small basket of orange nasturtiums on her lap. Seventeen-year-old Eleanor is on the far right, turned away from the viewer, resting her arm against the railing of the bench, as she looks out toward the ocean beyond. Standing between them, 9-year-old Sylvia grasps a lock of her long brown hair and glances off to the left. Such feminine figural groupings were common in the works of the Boston School. Many of these decorative paintings of women indoors or seated out-of-doors depict “reveries,” and, indeed, each girl seems absorbed in her own thoughts and makes little attempt to engage each other or the viewer. The girls' interior serenity contrasts with the agitated light and movement of their surroundings. Benson employs the Impressionist broken color technique, in which complementary colors are placed next to each other to produce dazzling visual effects. In the landscape behind Eleanor and in the flowers in Elizabeth's lap, Benson placed flecks of blue paint next to dabs of orange to produce a visual resonance of color. His quick, staccato brushstrokes animate the natural surroundings, evoking the rustling leaves in the trees; the wind blows the girls' tresses, and the grasses wave in the breeze. In contrast to the serene stillness put forth by the academic style, with their glasslike surfaces, Benson's canvas scintillates with impasto energy, capturing the sights, sounds, and exhilaration of a perfect summer's day.W. Benson (1862-1951). Portrait of My Daughters, 1907. Oil on canvas, 26 × 36⅛ in. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts.Reference1. Bedford FA. Frank W. Benson: American Impressionist. New York, NY: Rizzoli; 1994:175 Google ScholarFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 9Issue 5Sep 2007 InformationCopyright 2007 American Medical Association. All Rights Reserved. Applicable FARS/DFARS Restrictions Apply to Government Use.To cite this article:Lisa Duffy-Zeballos.Frank W. Benson’s Portrait of My Daughters.Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery.Sep 2007.376-377.http://doi.org/10.1001/archfaci.9.5.376Published in Volume: 9 Issue 5: September 1, 2007PDF download
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