![]() Philadelphia Sketch Club logo | |
![]() Clubhouse, at left | |
Formation | November 20, 1860 |
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Purpose | Artists' club |
Headquarters | 235 South Camac Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107-5608 |
President | Richard A. Harrington [1] |
Website | http://sketchclub.org |
The Philadelphia Sketch Club, founded on November 20, 1860, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is one of America's oldest artists' clubs. [2] The club's own web page proclaims it the oldest. [3] Prominent members have included Joseph Pennell, Thomas Eakins, A.B. Frost, [4] Howard Chandler Christy, and N.C. Wyeth. [5]
The club's mission is "to provide a community for visual artists, appreciation of the visual arts and visual arts education." The club's low-cost workshops and competitions are open to the public. All interested artists are invited to apply for membership. The club's activities are sustained by gifts from members, friends and nearly 20 major foundations, corporations and historical organizations. [6]
The club has held shows and exhibitions since its founding. Medal winners from the club's shows include Violet Oakley, John Folinsbee and Betty Bowes. In April 2008, the club held its 145th Annual Exhibition of Small Oil Paintings at the club's main gallery. [7]
The club's art collection includes 44 portraits of members painted in the 1890s by Thomas Anshutz; more than 125 etchings by members of the Philadelphia Society of Etchers; and sculpture, stained glass, ceramics, bronze plaques, medals and metal work by its own members. The Club lends pieces to other organizations and exhibitors from time to time. The Club's archives contain information from artists associated with the club.
The Sketch Club was founded by George F. Bensell and his brother, Edmund Birckhead Bensell; Edward J. McIlhenny; Henry C. Bispham; John L. Gihon; and Robert Wylie — all students at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where they felt that they lacked design opportunities. Since its beginning, the Club has endeavored to offer affordable life drawing classes and mount exhibitions to display local artists' work. [3] [5]
In 1866, the club held its first annual exhibition. The review in The New York Times began:
The impression made upon the visitor to the exhibition of paintings by the Philadelphia Sketch Club at the Derby Gallery, is one of disappointment rather than of pleasure, however modest may be his expectations before entering. True, there are in the collection a number of good paintings, and a few of more than passing merit. This, at least, might be considered guaranteed by the presence of several names in the catalogue pleasingly familiar to the connoisseur, but in a collection of over two hundred and sixty paintings exhibited, a selection doubtless from a larger number, it would not have been unreasonable to have expected a more frequent recurrence of that pleasure with which visitors linger near an occasional work of art. [8]
The article goes on to discuss 19 of the pieces in detail and eight in passing "deserving of special mention."
Among the Club's famous members was Thomas Eakins, who was the life drawing and anatomy instructor for several years until he left in 1876 to become an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His honorary membership was revoked in the same 1886 scandal that cost him his position at PAFA.
Thomas P. Anshutz joined the Sketch Club in 1877 and was President of the Club from 1910 until his untimely death in 1912. Available for viewing, the clubhouse's upper walls of the library hold an important group of 44 portraits [9] of early members painted by Thomas Anshutz while he was Dean of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Anshutz offered to paint portraits of other members with the only requirement that each sitter provide his own canvas of uniform size.
Its current clubhouse, assembled from three brick row-houses from the 1820s, is listed in the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places [10] and the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing property to the Washington Square West Historic District.
The Sketch Club purchased two of these units in 1902 and the third in 1908. Shortly after their purchase, the first two row-houses were extensively renovated to form a single building. The third property was connected internally to the other two in 1915. The three adjoining basements formed a large Rathskeller (dining room) and kitchen. The first floor rooms include a billiard room, library, archive room, sitting room and vestibule areas. The second floor rooms and attics formed a large, sky-lit exhibition gallery and classroom. [11]
The club has staged an annual Philadelphia District High School Students Art Exhibition since 1984; the 26th show took place February 1–21, 2010. [12] A jury awards prizes.
The Sketch Club was a male-only club for its first 130 years. Philadelphia's club for women artists, the Plastic Club, was formed in 1897. [13] For more than 100 years these two organizations had an amiable and cooperative relationship, just three doors apart on Camac Street.
The Sketch Club received its 501(c)(3) non-profit status in early 1990. Several months after that, the club decided to begin seeking and accepting women members. Reasons behind this effort included making the club a more inclusive and modern-thinking organization, as well as the financial benefits of a larger membership base. Around this time, the Plastic Club also began accepting male members for many of the same reasons. [14]
Today, more than 50% of the Sketch Club members are women artists. In the mid-1990s, the Sketch Club elected its first woman president, Betty MacDonald, who had also served as president of The Plastic Club.
The club's members have included artists in all mediums: illustration, painting, sculpture, architecture, photography and other forms of the visual arts. Current member Bruce H. Bentzman listed[ citation needed ] the most prominent of the club's current and former members as:
Eliza Cecilia Beaux was an American artist and the first woman to teach art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Known for her elegant and sensitive portraits of friends, relatives, and Gilded Age patrons, Beaux painted many famous subjects including First Lady Edith Roosevelt, Admiral Sir David Beatty and Georges Clemenceau.
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important American artists.
Charles Allan Grafly, Jr. was an American sculptor, and teacher. Instructor of Sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for 37 years, his students included Paul Manship, Albin Polasek, and Walker Hancock.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the first and oldest art museum and art school in the United States.
Edward Willis Redfield was an American Impressionist landscape painter and member of the art colony at New Hope, Pennsylvania. He is best known today for his impressionist scenes of the New Hope area, often depicting the snow-covered countryside. He also spent his summers on Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where he interpreted the local coastline. He frequently painted Maine's Monhegan Island.
Walter Emerson Baum was an American artist and educator active in the Bucks and Lehigh County areas of Pennsylvania in the United States. In addition to being a prolific painter, Baum was also responsible for the founding of the Baum School of Art and the Allentown Art Museum.
Thomas Pollock Anshutz was an American painter and teacher. Known for his portraiture and genre scenes, Anshutz was a co-founder of The Darby School. One of Thomas Eakins's most prominent students, he succeeded Eakins as director of drawing and painting classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Bo Bartlett is an American Realist painter working in Columbus, Georgia and Wheaton Island, Maine.
George Francis Stephens (1859–1935) was an American sculptor, political activist and co-founder of a utopian single-tax community in Arden, Delaware.
The Agnew Clinic is an 1889 oil painting by American artist Thomas Eakins. It was commissioned to honor anatomist and surgeon David Hayes Agnew, on his retirement from teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.
William Rush and His Model is the collective name given to several paintings by the American artist Thomas Eakins, one set from 1876–77 and the other from 1908. These works depict the American wood sculptor William Rush in 1808, carving his statue Water Nymph and Bittern for a fountain at Philadelphia's first waterworks. The water nymph is an allegorical figure representing the Schuylkill River, which provided the city's drinking water, and on her shoulder is a bittern, a native waterbird related to the heron. Hence, these Eakins works are also known as William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River.
Susan Hannah Eakins was an American painter and photographer. Her works were first shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she was a student. She won the Mary Smith Prize there in 1879 and the Charles Toppan prize in 1882.
Edward Hornor Coates was a Philadelphia businessman, financier, and patron of the arts and sciences. He served as a director of the Mechanics National Bank in 1873, was chairman of the Committee on Instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1883 to 1890, and held the position of Academy president from 1890 to 1906.
Art Students' League of Philadelphia was a short-lived, co-operative art school formed in reaction to Thomas Eakins's February 1886 forced-resignation from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Eakins taught without pay at ASL from 1886 until the school's dissolution in early 1893.
Frank Benton Ashley Linton was an American portrait-painter and teacher. He was a student of Thomas Eakins, studied the École des Beaux-Arts, and won a bronze medal at the 1927 Salon Nationale in Paris. Likely a closeted gay man, he lived with pianist Samuel Meyers for more than thirty years.
William Sartain was an American artist, known for the moody tonalism of his paintings, and interests and influences that spanned Orientalism and the Barbizon plein air approach to art. Friend to Thomas Eakins, son of artist John Sartain and brother to artist Emily Sartain, Sartain was one of the founders of the Society of American Artists and later became president of the New York Art Club.
The Ironworker's Noontime is an 1880 painting by the American painter Thomas Anshutz.
David Frost Sellin was an American art historian, curator, educator, and author. He taught at a number of universities, worked on the staffs of several museums, and served as curator of the U.S. Capitol, 1976-1980.
Charles Bregler was an American portrait painter and sculptor, and a student of artist Thomas Eakins. Bregler wrote about Eakins's teaching methods, and amassed a large collection of his minor works, memorabilia and papers. Following Bregler's death, his widow safeguarded the Eakins collection for decades before selling it to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Frederick William Weber was a chemist, artist, columnist and businessman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An expert on the chemistry and physics of paint materials, Weber served as treasurer, technical director and eventually president of F. Weber & Company, Inc., an artists’ supplies manufacturer founded in 1853. Weber developed new techniques for the manufacture of inks and pigments, and played a major role in the introduction of synthetic resins to the paint-making process.