Art Catalog
An original oil painted by French impressionist Claude Monet purchased for only $500 and a color engraving from John James Audubon’s Birds of America of a pair of red-shouldered buzzards that were misidentified by Audubon himself are among the works featured in the Union League Club of Chicago Art Collection.
The 312-page book features highlights of the Club’s extensive collection
of more than 750 works of art, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper,
and decorative arts. In addition to Monet and Audubon, the catalog features
works by a broad range of artists, including: Ivan Albright, George Wesley
Bellows, Roger Brown, Richard Hunt, George Inness, and Walter Ufer.
The catalog introduces the public to one of the city’s hidden treasures, with up-to-date information on the Club’s entire collection as well as detailed entries on 125 selected works of museum caliber American art. The Club’s collection is especially strong in midwestern art. The entries for featured works include scholarly essays by Union League Club curator Marianne Richter and art historian Wendy Greenhouse, with contributions by Eden J. Pearlman, curator of collections, Evanston Historical Society and Dean A. Porter, professor of art history, University of Notre Dame and director emeritus, Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame. Neil Harris, Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of History at the University of Chicago, wrote the book’s introduction.
The catalog includes for the first time information on each object’s record of exhibitions and publications, as well as its provenance. This is the sixth time the Club has published a catalog of its art collection. The last publication was in 1987.
Following are some highlights of the artists and works featured in the Union League Club of Chicago Art Collection catalog:
Monet oil painting – a $500 investment
Among the works featured in the Union League Club of Chicago Art Collection is Pommiers en fleurs (Apple Trees in Blossom; Le Printemps; Springtime) by Monet. According to Club records, the 1872 oil painting was acquired by the Club in 1895 for just $500 – approximately 25 percent to 30 percent of its value at the time. The acquisition made the Club one of the early Chicago collectors of Monet.
While Club members today marvel at the purchase price, the response to Pommiers en fleurs at the time it was acquired was lukewarm. According to Club lore, then-president John H. Hamline reportedly remarked, “Who would pay $500 for that blob of paint?”
Audubon plate features misidentified bird
Internationally acclaimed naturalist and artist John James Audubon devoted nearly two decades of his life to his pioneering work, Birds of America, a portfolio containing 435 plates depicting 1,065 life-size birds. Audubon strove to include every species of bird found in North America in the comprehensive work that was engraved and published by R. Havell & Son of London. It appeared serially between 1827 and 1838. Audubon was determined to depict birds as they appeared in nature based on his own observations of their habits and habitats.
For the large drawings he made for plates of Birds of America, Audubon worked quickly with freshly killed specimens to capture the living color of their plumage and he wired them into positions that mimicked their natural living state. The plates were printed onto the largest sheets of paper manufactured at the time to allow representation of even the largest birds in life-sized proportions.
Birds of America featured three images of the red-shouldered buzzard (buteo linneatus), which Audubon had misidentified as the red-shouldered hawk (falco linneatus). One of these images, which was acquired by the Club in 1957, illustrates the characteristics of the male and female of the species and is based on a drawing Audubon made near St. Francisville, La., in 1825.
Golden Gloves champ finds success on another kind of canvas
Robert Barnes moved out of his parents’ home in Wilmette, Ill., during his senior year in high school and settled on Chicago’s South Side, where he worked as a bartender and took up boxing. He became the 1951 Golden Gloves Boxing Champion as a flyweight in his league. At the same time Barnes was perfecting his punches on the boxing canvas, he was sharpening his strokes on another kind of canvas, becoming a promising young artist whose talent as a painter had captured the attention of the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Chicago.
In 1952, one of Barnes’s paintings was selected for “Momentum,” an annual independent exhibition organized by students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. That same year, Barnes enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduation he moved to New York where he formed relationships with Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, two artists who influenced his work. Barnes first received important critical notice in 1959 when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York acquired one of his paintings.
Barnes’s Bocuse (1980), depicts celebrated French chef Paul Bocuse. The work, part of a series of portraits of famous chefs, is representative of Barnes’s reversal of traditional portraiture in which the sitter is framed by a setting that refers to one of his or her accomplishments or interests. In Bocuse, the chef’s renowned cuisine appears in the foreground, while Bocuse himself remains a background figure, defined by his culinary artistry.
Autumn landscape believed painted following artist’s paralyzing stroke
Alexander Helwig Wyant was considered one of America’s greatest landscape artists. He was a member of the Hudson River school of artists, which dominated landscape painting in the middle decades of the 19th century.
As a young sign painter, Wyant was inspired to pursue formal artistic training following a visit to an exhibition of the work of George Inness, a prominent American landscape painter. In 1863, Wyant began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design in New York and was elected a full-time member of the Academy in 1869.
Wyant, who painted with his right hand, suffered a paralyzing stroke during an expedition to the Far West in 1873. The condition forced him to learn to paint with his left hand and confined him to smaller canvases. The stroke also may have accelerated a shift by the artist from the tightly executed, detailed panoramic approach of his early career to a freer, more atmospheric style – a shift which began in the late 1860s when Wyant was under the influence of the Barbizon school of French painters, English romantic painter John Constable and Inness.
Beginning in the mid-1870s, Wyant painted in the Adirondack Mountains and later moved to the Catskills in 1889. The Union League Club’s Autumn, an undated work, is believed to have been painted post-paralysis, during the artist’s years in the Catskills.
Daniel Webster at Marshfield one of a series by renowned portraitist G.P.A. Healy
One of the most successful portraitists of the 19th century, George Peter Alexander Healy portrayed a veritable who’s who of American and European notables during his career. A self-taught artist, Healy produced hundreds of portraits including numerous official presidential images and, after the Civil War began, those of military figures. Among the artist’s patrons was King Louis-Phillipe of France.
An 1848 portrait by Healy of U.S. statesman Daniel Webster at Webster’s
country estate in Marshfield, Mass., hangs in the Union League Club of Chicago.
The portrait, Daniel Webster at Marshfield, was painted from life
and is the last of several portraits painted by Healy in preparation for a
large historical painting, Webster Replying to Hayne, commissioned
by King Louis-Phillipe. Webster Replying to Hayne depicts a famous
senatorial debate between Robert Hayne of South Carolina and Webster, a prominent
lawyer and U.S. senator, who during his career also served as a congressman,
Secretary of State and ran for the U.S. presidency.
Daniel Webster at Marshfield, which appears unfinished with visible ruled pencil lines of architecture, depicts Webster as a country squire, wearing a loose coat and broad-brimmed hat at a jaunty angle. The subject’s left hand supports one end of his rifle, while dead game on a bench behind him illustrate Webster’s success as a gentleman hunter. A thick-limbed tree echoes the upright stance of Webster’s stocky form. Healy paid particular attention to Webster’s head, capturing the great orator’s intense gaze, set mouth and craggy brows that distinguished the statesman’s visage.
Healy established a studio in Chicago in 1855 and resided in west suburban Elmhurst, Ill., for approximately a decade. Thomas B. Bryan, a Chicago lawyer and Healy’s neighbor in Elmhurst, purchased the portrait from Healy. Bryan, who served as president of the Club in 1897, donated the Webster portrait as well as two other Healy originals also painted from life – portraits of Stephen A. Douglas and Gen. John C. Fremont – to the Union League Club of Chicago.
Sketchbook provides insights into Albright’s fondness for movement, “controlled chaos”
Ivan Le Lorraine Albright’s Knees of Cypress (Reflections of a Cypress Swamp) was painted in March and April 1965 on the Saint Mary’s River in southern Georgia, near the plantation home of his sister-in-law, Alicia Guggenheim.
Albright, one of three sons of Adam Emory Albright, a successful Chicago painter who specialized in depictions of barefoot children, used sketchbooks to create a master plan for each of his paintings. In the Knees of Cypress sketchbook, which is also part of the Union League Club of Chicago’s art collection, Ivan made careful notation of the specific times of day that shadows were best for highlighting both the trees and the cypress “knees” – roots that protrude above the earth.
A realist, Ivan’s images typically featured exaggerated forms and minute detail. As with all his works, Ivan did not paint the scene from one point of view but instead altered his vantage point continuously to create a feeling of movement. He noted in the sketchbook, a leather-bound book with 25 pages of notes and sketches in both graphite and ball-point pen, that he wished to create a painting that would show “movement and hysteria to the knees.” Albright once commented that he focused on “creating compositions that are dynamic, moving, at war, in conflict” and that various objects in his paintings fall, rise spiral or move sideways “in a kind of controlled chaos.”
Ivan Albright was commissioned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to create the shocking portrait which is the centerpiece of the 1945 film, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Portraitist and subject were both Club members
A portrait of James William Pattison, a well-known artist, art critic, lecturer and Chicago editor has the distinction of being the only portrait in the Union League Club of Chicago’s art collection in which both painter and subject were Club members and artists. The portrait, painted in 1906 by fellow Club member Louis Betts, emphasizes Pattison’s face and hands over the dark clothing of the rest of his figure – a portrait style that was characteristic of Betts’s teacher, noted artist William Merritt Chase.
Betts’s technique, which made use of rapid, long, fluid brushstrokes to capture his sitters while they were “fresh,” was much admired. “His grasp of character and essentials is revealed in a broad and dashing manner. Nothing finicky and small, nothing pretty and studio-made, sullies his brush” a critic noted in 1918.
Another painting by Betts that hangs in the Club – a portrait of prominent Chicago attorney Luther Laflin Mills – is reputed to have narrowly escaped destruction. According to Club lore, the portrait, painted in 1898, was rescued by Chester M. MacChesney, chairman of the board of directors of Acme Steel Company and president of the Chicago Galleries Association, just moments before it was to have been tossed into a trash fire. MacChesney had been walking on the campus of Northwestern University when he noticed a group of boys burning trash and papers removed from one of the buildings. Later, in 1952, at the suggestion of Mills’s son, Matthew, a Union League Club member, MacChesney donated the portrait to the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation.
Other featured works
In 1935, the Union League Club commissioned one of Chicago’s best-known muralists, Miklos Gaspar, to create a series of murals chronicling the activities of the Union League Boys Clubs, now the Union League Boys and Girls Clubs. Gaspar had gained international attention for the murals he created for the General Motors building at the 1933-34 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago. The work is composed of 28 murals that include scenes from two Boys Clubs in the city as well as the Union League Boys Club camp in Salem, Wisconsin.
Another renowned muralist, Edwin Howland Blashfield, was commissioned in late 1925 by the Union League Club to create a mural over the fireplace in the Club’s lounge. Blashfield, who was 77 at the time of the commission, had risen to prominence previously for a mural he created for one of the eight domes in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts building, the largest structure at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Blashfield’s Patria was unveiled in 1926 to help symbolize the Union League Club’s motto, which was inscribed on the fireplace: “Welcome to Loyal Hearts: We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag and keep step to the music of the Union.” The central figure of the mural, Columbia, is depicted holding the Constitution in her left hand, while seated next to her are allegorical figures of Fortitude and Justice.
One of the most important painters of the American West, Thomas Hill, is represented in the Union League Club’s art collection. Hill painted approximately 5,000 views of the Yosemite valley region in Southern California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The Club’s Yosemite Valley, painted in 1892, is a later version of another Hill painting titled Crescent Lake.
Several contemporary artists represented
Ed Paschke, Richard Hunt, Ruth Duckworth, and Roger Brown are among the contemporary
artists whose works are featured in the Union League Club of Chicago Art
Collection. Chicago natives Paschke and Hunt, along with German-born
Duckworth are all Distinguished Artist members of the Union League Club. The
distinction recognizes them for their contributions to the cultural enrichment
of the city of Chicago.
A collaboration among imagist Pashke and the art group and media library (art)n produced the Club’s Primondo, a vivid electric image that combines art and technology. In the work, a representation of George Washington derived from Pashke’s earlier work, Prima Vera, merges with that of an Egyptian pharaoh.
Hunt, a 1957 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been described as “one of the most gifted and assured artists working in the direct metal open-forum medium … not only in his own country and generation but anywhere in the world.” The Club’s Sidearm evokes numerous images, all of which have been significant in Hunt’s body of work – flames, a bird in flight, branches, and the ancient Greek winged Nike of Samaothrace.
Ruth Duckworth is widely recognized for her seminal role in the 20th century ceramics movement. Her work reflects her interest in cycles of nature and female forms. She creates small porcelain sculptures and large stoneware murals that are often created as public commissions. Her sculptures are exhibited in museums worldwide. Duckworth’s porcelain wall mural, a gift to the Club in 2003, is untitled as is all her ceramic work. “I hate giving things names, because it limits people’s ideas about it,” Duckworth once stated.
Roger Brown was one of the foremost artists of Chicago Imagism, a movement that developed in the 1960s. Brown’s “Chicago Taking a Beating,” depicts the manmade world, symbolized by its architecture, as being ultimately at the mercy of the natural world. The painting, which is featured on the back cover of the Union League Club of Chicago Art Collection catalog, has a surreal, dream-like quality and appears to be a humorous representation of Chicago landmarks such as the Sears Tower, Hancock Building and Aon Building bending under attack from the city’s infamous wind. It contains the hallmarks of Brown’s work: black contour lines, repeating forms, flat and minimally shaded color, silhouetted figures and a flattened sense of space. Brown, who grew up in small towns in Alabama, was a graduate of both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Academy of Art in Chicago.
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Union League Club of Chicago Art Collection (Union League Club of Chicago, 2003 $125 hard cover/$50 soft cover), features more than 150 pages of text and 150 color photos of selected works of the Union League Club of Chicago’s private art collection.
