Eugene "Bud" Leake pronounced "Leaky" (31 August 1911 – 21 January 2005) was a landscape painter and president of the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work was characterized by a consistent commitment to the depiction of the landscape, not following ever-changing trends of contemporary art in the 20th century. In an October 2000 Baltimore Sun article Glenn McNatt wrote that, "For the past quarter century, Leake has been recording that landscape in all its moods and seasons, from riotous sun-drenched spring mornings to the magical glow of autumnal sunsets. His paintings are imbued with an unmistakable sense of place that only one who has lived in and loved the surrounding landscape can create."McNatt, Glenn. "The Light Years of Landscapist Eugene Leake." ''The Baltimore Sun'' 22 Oct. 2000, Arts sec. The Baltimore Sun. The Baltimore Sun. Web. 7 Feb. 2012 "Leake belongs to the long tradition of American artists who have had often-rapturous love affairs with nature. His work are heirs to the spirit of the oil sketches of English master

John Constable John Constable (; 11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English landscape painter in the Romanticism, Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedha ...

(1776-1837) and the early works of French landscape artist Camille Corot (1796-1875), both of whom insisted that painting must be based on observable facts and reflect the truth of the moment." In a 1993 ARTnews article Tom Weisser wrote: "Leake's great strength is his ability to capture the essence of things with economy and easy grace. Light, space, and climate materialize in his pictures from what seems to be an absolute minimum of brushwork. His paint has a soft, buttery quality. Yet the viewer can almost feel the flat, hard cold of Leake's gray winter mornings, the snap of his autumn afternoons, and the electricity in his gathering summer skies."

Early life

Eugene Leake was born in

Jersey City, New Jersey Jersey City is the second-most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey, after Newark.Eugene W. Leake and Marion (Paige) Leake. Growing up he was surrounding by paintings belonging to his grandfather. The collection included, American painters, Ralph Blakelock, J. Francis Murphy, and E. Irving Couse.Hankin, Craig. Maryland Landscapes of Eugene Leake. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. Print. As a teenage student at the Hill School in

Pittston, Pennsylvania Pittston is a city in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is situated between Scranton, Pennsylvania, Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Wilkes-Barre in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The city gained prominence in the late 19th an ...

Leake requested an art class so frequently that the school hired an instructor from

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

to teach him once a week. Leake explains, "'Here was an artist who rode the train up from Philadelphia every Saturday morning to teach me and one other boy - two students out of 450,' says Leake, his voice still tinged with disbelief.'"

Early career

In 1930 Leake briefly attended the Yale School of Fine Arts but soon dropped out having found "... its Beaux Arts orientation tedious and uninspiring." Next, he left Connecticut and traveled south. At twenty-two, Leake traveled through the southwest and

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

before returning to

Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its cap ...

. Back in New England, Leake built a studio and made a living painting commissioned portraits and teaching art classes. In 1937 he joined the Art Students League in New York and began showing his paintings at galleries in the area. He had his first one-man show at the

Walker Gallery The Walker Art Gallery is an art gallery in Liverpool, which houses one of the largest art collections in England outside London. It is part of the National Museums Liverpool group. History of the Gallery The Walker Art Gallery's collection ...

in 1937 after which he was invited to participate in national group shows at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, the Art Institute of Chicago and the

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, Leake first took a job at a defense plant, then later joined the Navy, where he continued to paint watercolors during his off hours. After the war Leake became the director of The Art Center in Louisville, Kentucky and held the position for a decade. Then, at age 48, decided to finish his degree at Yale School of Art and Architecture. The artist subsequently earned his BFA in 1960 and his MFA in 1962. When Eugene Leake attended

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

Josef Albers Josef Albers (; ; March 19, 1888March 25, 1976) was a German-born artist and educator. The first living artist to be given a solo show at MoMA and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, ...

had recently retired from the chair of the School of Art but continued to be a presence on campus. Leake described an experience with the

Bauhaus The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the Bauhaus (), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., 200 ...

master: "Albers came to my studio one day. I was painting semi-abstract landscapes, horizontal bands of color. He said to me, 'I've heard about you. You are de old Prix de Rome - type painter. Mit underpainting und all dot garbage?' I said, 'Yeah, I learned all that.' And Albers looked at my painting and said, 'Vot you doing here? Dis is about color! It's a metamorphosis!'"

Maryland Institute College of Art

In June 1961 Eugene Leake moved to

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean to ...

after graduating from Yale to "take on the task of reviving the nearly moribund Maryland Institute," as its new President. "He recruited the best artists he could find as teachers, among them the painters

Grace Hartigan Grace Hartigan (March 28, 1922 – November 15, 2008) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and a significant member of the vibrant New York School of the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle of friends, who frequently inspired one another in t ...

and Raoul Middleman, sculptors

Norman Carlberg Norman K. Carlberg (November 6, 1928 – November 11, 2018) was an American sculptor, photographer, and printmaker. He is noted as an exemplar of the modular constructivist style. Early life and education Carlberg was born in Roseau, Minnes ...

and

Stephanie Scuris Stephanie Scuris (born 1931) is a Greek-American artist and arts educator known for her large-scale Constructivism (art), Constructivist sculptures. She taught at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltim ...

, and painter-printmaker

Peter Milton Peter Winslow Milton (born 1930) is a colorblind American artist who was diagnosed with deuteranopia after hearing a comment about the pink in his landscapes. Milton's black and white etchings and engravings often display photorealistic detail wi ...

." "Leake has found success and recognition not only as an artist but as one of the finest teachers and arts administrators of the recent past. He was for 13 years president of the

Maryland Institute College of Art The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is a private art and design college in Baltimore, Maryland. It was founded in 1826 as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, making it one of the oldest art colleges in the U ...

, an institution he almost single-handedly remade from a cobwebbed, struggling vocational training academy into one of the most respected art schools in the nation." Despite his demanding schedule at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the painter never stopped painting and developing. In 1974 Leake retired from his role as president of the Maryland Institute College of Art In 2013 a new residence hall was open named Leake Hall after him.

Mid to late career

"When he retired from the Institute in 1974, he was 63 and

he school's He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' ...

renaissance was assumed to be his life's magnum opus. But he retired to the rural Maryland countryside north of Baltimore, where he took up the solitary life of a creative artist and ontinued asa successful and respected landscape painter." He continued to work until his death in 2005. In the autumn of 1974 Eugene Leake became the first Johns Hopkins University artist-in-residence. He "founded the program as an informal opportunity for Hopkins students, regardless of experience, to learn the fundamentals of drawing and painting -- to learn to see." In ''The Baltimore Sun'' art critic Glenn McNatt described Leake's work and legacy: "Leake's brushstroke was like the man himself: precise, energetic, joyous, and ever attuned to the mysterious universal vibration through which paint is transformed into a living thing. Though his art looked exceedingly simple, it was also miraculous, and for this he was, and will be forever, beloved by generations of Marylanders."McNatt, Glenn. "A Painter of Simple, Honest Art." The Sun altimore23 Jan. 2005, Arts & Society sec.: 8E. Print.

Selected solo exhibitions

Source: :C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland :Green Mountain Gallery, New York, New York :Hamilton Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina :Jacobs Ladder Gallery, Washington, D.C. :Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland :Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland :National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. :Tatistcheff and Company, New York, New York :Towson State University, Towson, Maryland :University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky :University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky :Walker Gallery, New York, New York :York College, York, Pennsylvania

Selected group exhibitions

Source: :Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois :Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas :Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland :Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York :Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio :Cincinnati Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio :Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York :Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York, New York :Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, New Jersey :M. Knoedler and Company, New York, New York :Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York :Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York :Owensboro Museum of Fine Art, Owensboro, Kentucky :Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, New York :Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania :Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Selected public collections

Source: :Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland :Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. :J.B. Speed Museum, Louisville, Kentucky :Owensboro Museum of Fine Art, Owensboro, Kentucky :University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky :University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina :Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland

Selected private and corporate collections

Source: :Equitable Bank :Equitable Life Assurance Society of America, New York :Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Baltimore Branch :Johns Hopkins University :Maryland Institute College of Art :Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, New York :Noxell Corporation :Piper and Marbury :Robert and Jane Meyerhoff :United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company :Weinberg and Green

References

External links

Eugene Leake at C. Grimaldis GalleryEugene Leake on Artnet
{{DEFAULTSORT:Leake, Eugene Artists from Baltimore 20th-century American painters American male painters 21st-century American painters 21st-century American male artists American landscape painters Maryland Institute College of Art faculty Johns Hopkins University 1911 births 2005 deaths People from Monkton, Maryland 20th-century American male artists