Ernest Ludvig Ipsen

Ernest L. Ipsen (1869-1951) was an American painter specializing in portraiture. He painted hundreds of portraits commissioned by institutions of government, education, religion, and commerce who wanted to commemorate their associates. His subjects include architect Cass Gilbert, General Robert E. Lee, statesman Elihu Root, publisher George Arthur Plimpton, actor Otis Skinner, politician Edith Nourse Rogers, and Chief Justice William Howard Taft. His portrait of Maurice Francis Egan, Minister to Denmark under three U.S. presidents, was presented to the King and Queen of Denmark. He also painted landscapes and seascapes, particularly along the New England coast.

Early life and education

Ipsen was born September 5, 1869, in Malden, Massachusetts to Ludvig Sandöe Ipsen (1840–1920) and Emma Petrea Ipsen (, 1846–1914). His father, an architect and designer, and his mother, a singer, were both natives of Copenhagen, Denmark.
He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 1884 to 1887, under the tutelage of portrait painter Frederic Porter Vinton, who may have influenced his choice to pursue portraiture. He continued his training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (where his father had studied architecture) from 1887 to 1891. His instructors there included Carl Bloch.Lowrey, Carol, ''Ernest L. Ipsen,'' ''A Legacy of Art: Paintings and Sculpture by Artist Life Members of the National Art Club'' (New York: National Arts Club, 2007), pp.132-133. He won a prize for figure studies and a scholarship in life painting.

Career

Following his study in Copenhagen, Ipsen returned to Massachusetts, establishing a studio in Boston's Harcourt Studio building, where he remained from 1900 to 1904. Ipsen eventually moved to New York, where he established a studio on 19th Street. Fielding, Mantle, "Ipsen, Ernest L.," ''Mantle Fielding's Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers'' (New York: James F. Carr, 1965). Ipsen would continue to work out of the National Arts Club Studio on 19th Street until 1934, when he moved to South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

His work was widely praised for its "sincere, honest statements of personality" and he "would be the choice for a serious, carefully considered portrait without dash or technical bravura of any sort, whose very seriousness brings with it both charm of style and surface."

Personal life

On June 15, 1908, Ipsen married Edith Boyden Crocker of Brookline, Massachusetts. They had one daughter, Edith Valborg Ipsen, who was born on April 11, 1909, and died three days later. At the time they were living in Boston's Fenway Studios where Ipsen had moved after the Harcourt Studios building burned down in 1904, destroying not only his home but also paintings stored there. The Ipsens spent winters in Boston and later, New York, and summers at a home they bought in Nonquitt, a section of South Dartmouth on the Massachusetts coast. After an automobile accident in 1938 which seriously impaired Mrs. Ipsen's health, they sold the Nonquitt property and moved to Coconut Grove, Florida, although they still returned north, to New Brunswick, Canada, in the summer.

Edith Ipsen died on January 20, 1948. Ernest Ipsen continued to paint his friends and neighbors, lecture and exhibit locally in Florida until his death in 1951. They are interred at the Walnut Hills Cemetery in Brookline.

Gallery

File:Ernest L Ipsen 1891 Pierre Félix Masseau.jpg, Pierre Félix Masseau, 1891
File:Ernest L Ipsen 1898 Marblehead.jpg, Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1898
File:Ernest L Ipsen 1907 South Dartmouth Landscape.jpg, South Dartmouth landscape, 1907
File:Ernest Ludwig Ipsen - Edith Nourse Rogers - NPG.91.43 - National Portrait Gallery.jpg, Edith Nourse Rogers, 1909
File:Lucy Carnegie Ricketson Ferguson.jpg, Lucy Carnegie Ferguson, c.1920
File:Ernest Ludvig Ipsen 1920 Portrait of Robert H Nisbet.jpg, Robert H. Nisbet, 1920
File:Ernest L Ipsen 1923 William G Watt.jpg, William G. Watt, 1923
File:Ernest L Ipsen 1927 Cass Gilbert.jpg, Cass Gilbert, 1927
File:Ernest L Ipsen 1931 Robert E Lee.jpg, Robert E. Lee, 1931
File:Ernest L Ipsen 1935 The Artists Guide, Maine.jpg, The Artists Guide, Maine, 1935
File:Ernest L Ipsen 1943 Milton H Bird with his champion Irish Terrier Kelvin Colleen.jpg, Milton H. Bird with his champion Irish Terrier Kelvin Colleen, 1943

Notes and references

Notes

References

External links

Short biography on AskART.com

Name Authority at Union Lists of Artist Names Online (Getty)

''Exhibition of portraits''
an exhibition catalog available from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries.
* List of works maintained by the Smithsonian https://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?q=ernest+ipsen

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ipsen, Ernest Ludvig
1869 births
1951 deaths
19th-century American painters
American male painters
20th-century American painters
American portrait painters
Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts alumni
People from Malden, Massachusetts
People from Dartmouth, Massachusetts
People from Miami
19th-century American male artists
20th-century American male artists
American people of Danish descent