Charles Sprague Pearce

Charles Sprague Pearce ( born October 13, 1851 in Boston, † March 18, 1914 in Auvers -sur -Oise ) was an American painter.

The predominantly living in France artist first worked as a portrait painter and later turned to subjects in the style of Orientalism and Japonaiseries to. In his early work, there are repeated biblical themes, which he carried out according to the rules of the Académie des Beaux -Arts. After he had settled the mid-1880s in Auver -sur- Oise, he devoted himself primarily to the representation of peasants, its now freer style of painting was oriented in style and color choice on Impressionism. The Europe and America equally successful artists participated with six murals on decorating the Library of Congress in Washington DC

Life and work

Youth in the United States

Charles Sprague Pearce was born on October 13, 1851, the son of a wealthy family in Boston to the world. His father, the merchant Shadrach Houghton Pearce, negotiated with Chinese porcelain. The mother, Mary Anna Sprague, was the daughter of American poet Charles Sprague. In addition to the early contact with the products of foreign countries in his father's import business and the literary tradition of the family, played by parents with piano and violin house music belonged to the embossed culture of childhood of the later painter.

His schooling was Pearce at the Brimmer School and the Boston Latin School, where he showed his artistic talent early on. After completing school, he worked for five years in the trading business of his father Shadrach H. Pearce and Co., before he decided to on the advice of William Morris Hunt, to be trained in Paris as a painter.

Education in Paris

In August 1873 Pearce arrived in Paris and enrolled in the studio of a successful and well-known for his works in the academic style of painter Léon Bonnat. Among his classmates included other American painters such as John Singer Sargent, Edwin Howland Blashfield and Milne Ramsey. Pearce first took over the wide choice of subject of his teacher and worked on genre pieces, history paintings and portraits, where he also has his style on the oriented by Bonnat, how can the treatment of light and shade read in the works this time. He remained until 1875 at the Atelier Bonnat and became friends with other American painters living in Paris as Chester Loomis and Frederick Arthur Bridgman. With the latter, he undertook in the fall of 1873 a three-month study trip to Egypt, where he made numerous drawings. From there warm weather Pearce also promised to improve his ailing health. In the winter of 1874/75 he traveled together with the painter William Sartain for study purposes to Algeria.

Oriental influences

In spite of his collected during trips to Egypt and Algeria impressions Pearce turned in Paris, first of portrait painting and debuted at the Salon of 1876 with the portrait of the American writer Ellen Hardin Walworth. In the same year he sent a factory for the World Exhibition in Philadelphia.

A year later, in the Salon of 1877, was followed by a biblical theme. One of the ten plagues is the subject in the painting Lamentations over the Death of the First -Born of Egypt ( mourning the death of the firstborn of Egypt). In this work he added a ancient Egyptian coffin and murals in the composition. This devotion to religious subjects was under the clear influence of Bonnat and was considered at that time as little progressive. The integration of oriental motifs themselves had idols in painters such as Jean -Léon Gérôme, Eugène Fromentin and Eugène Delacroix and found the audience with great interest. He showed more biblical themes in the Salon of 1879 ( Abraham's sacrifice ) and 1881 ( The Beheading of John the Baptist ). In the salon latter work received an honorable mention and in its subsequent presentation in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is an award first class. In addition, there is the Orientalism in the work of Pearce in the representation of landscapes of the East, the usual local clothes and the description of customary practices, which he often reproduces in almost photographic precision. An example of this is the painting The Arab Jeweler ( The Arab Jeweler ), in which he showed an oriental craftsmen in appropriate clothing and environment for models of European genre painting.

He is dedicated to subjects that are influenced by Japonism in the early 1880s. Like his fellow painter Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and James McNeill Whistler, he added objects such as kimonos, Japanese Fans or porcelain in his paintings, which he in stores, such as that of Siegfried Bing in the Rue Chauchat, or in La Porte Chinoise Madame Desoye in the Rue de Rivoli acquired or knew from the magazine Le Japon Artistique. Unlike the Arab motifs, it shows in these subjects not won by Travel Impressions, but used only in Paris available props to decorate his pictures. Thus resulting in the 1883 painting Femme à l' Éventail to see (Woman with a Fan ) not Asian but a European woman, dressed in a kimono and a Japanese fan in her hand. The significantly influenced by impressionism painting Reading by the Shore this reduces Japonism on an imported umbrella, the beach on the French coast protects clad in European dress woman from the sunlight.

Moving to Auvers- sur -Oise

1884 Pearce moved with his French wife of Paris in the 35 km northwest location, Auvers- sur -Oise, where he had purchased a farm to spend the rest of his life. In subsequent years, farmers and children belonged in the tradition of Jean -François Millet and influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage Jules Breton and his favorite subjects. His formerly exact style of painting changed itself toward a freer and a representation based on the Impressionism color choice. It further regularly in the Salon, and participated in numerous other exhibitions in France and abroad, where he often received awards for his work. In 1889 he worked in the jury of the Paris World's Fair and was in Paris advisory body for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

At this time he was commissioned six murals in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington DC shape. This 1896 finished Bildzyklos covers topics such as family, religion and work. In 1904, he again traveled to the United States, where he worked as a member of the Paris Committee at the World's Fair of St. Louis. He also cooperated in the preparation of the first exhibition of American artists in Belgium, which was in 1894 to see in the world exhibition in Antwerp. In the same year he received the appointment as Knight of the Legion of Honour. In 1906 Pearce last time at the Salon de Paris in part, pointing Jeune Picardie again one since the 1880s preferred rural theme. Charles Sprague Pearce died in 1914 at his home in Auvers- sur- Olise and found his final resting place in the local cemetery.

Works in public collections

• Lamentations over the Death of the First -Born of Egypt, 1877, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
• The Arab Jeweler 1882, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• Fantasy, 1883, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia
• A Cup of Tea, 1883, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
• Young Girl Brittany, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis
• A Village Funeral in Brittany, 1891, Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, Massachusetts
• Six murals: The Family, Religion, laboratory, study, recreation, rest, 1896, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
• The Shawl, 1900, Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin
• Landscape, Musée franco- américain du château de Blérancourt, Blérancourt
• Le Retour du troupeau, Musée franco- américain du château de Blérancourt, Blérancourt