William McGregor Paxton (June 22, 1869 – 1941) was an American painter and instructor who embraced the
Boston School paradigm and was a co-founder of
The Guild of Boston Artists. He taught briefly while a student at
Cowles Art School
Cowles Art School (Cowles School of Art) was established in 1883, in a studio building located at 145 Dartmouth Street in Boston, Massachusetts. It was one of the largest art schools in the city and boasted an enrollment of several hundred until it ...
, where he met his wife
Elizabeth Okie Paxton, and at the
Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. Paxton is known for his portraits, including those of two presidents—
Grover Cleveland
Stephen Grover Cleveland (March 18, 1837June 24, 1908) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 22nd and 24th president of the United States from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. Cleveland is the only president in American ...
and
Calvin Coolidge—and interior scenes with women, including his wife. His works are in many museums in the United States.
Early life
He was born on June 22, 1869 in
Baltimore
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
to James and Rose Doherty Paxton.
William's father moved the Paxton family and established a catering business in
Newton Corner, Massachusetts in the mid-1870s.
Education
Paxton attended
Cowles Art School
Cowles Art School (Cowles School of Art) was established in 1883, in a studio building located at 145 Dartmouth Street in Boston, Massachusetts. It was one of the largest art schools in the city and boasted an enrollment of several hundred until it ...
on a scholarship he attained at the age of 18. He studied with
Dennis Miller Bunker
Dennis Miller Bunker (November 6, 1861 – December 28, 1890) was an American painter and innovator of American Impressionism. His mature works include both brightly colored landscape paintings and dark, finely drawn portraits and figures. One ...
and Cowles and then went to
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
to study under
Jean-Léon Gérôme
Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904) was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was "arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880." The ra ...
,
at
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts (; ) refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The term is associated with the Beaux-Arts style in architecture and city planning that thrived in France and other countries during the late nineteenth centur ...
.
Maryhill Museum of Art
Maryhill Museum of Art is a small museum with an eclectic collection, located near what is now the community of Maryhill in the U.S. state of Washington.
The museum is situated on a bluff overlooking the eastern end of the Columbia River Gorge. T ...
said he also studied at
Académie Julian in Paris.
He returned to Cowles and studied with
Joseph DeCamp
Joseph Rodefer DeCamp (November 5, 1858February 11, 1923) was an American painter and educator.
Biography
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he studied with Frank Duveneck. In the second half of the 1870s he went with Duveneck and fellow students ...
, who also taught
Elizabeth Vaughan Okie.
She became Paxton's student and then his wife.
Marriage
Paxton became engaged in 1896 to
Elizabeth Vaughan Okie,
and they married on January 3, 1899.
They traveled to Europe together
and often spent their summers on
Cape Cod
Cape Cod is a peninsula extending into the Atlantic Ocean from the southeastern corner of mainland Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. Its historic, maritime character and ample beaches attract heavy tourism during the summer mont ...
and
Cape Ann
Cape Ann is a rocky peninsula in northeastern Massachusetts, United States on the Atlantic Ocean. It is about northeast of Boston and marks the northern limit of Massachusetts Bay. Cape Ann includes the city of Gloucester and the towns of ...
.
They lived in
Newton, Massachusetts
Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is approximately west of downtown Boston. Newton resembles a patchwork of thirteen villages, without a city center. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the population of Ne ...
, first on Elmwood Street with his parents.
About 1916 they resided or had a studio on Ipswich Street in
Fenway Studios
The Fenway Studios are artists' studios located at 30 Ipswich Street, Boston, Massachusetts. The studios were built after a disastrous 1904 fire at Harcourt Studios in which many artists lost their homes, studios, and work. Business and civic lea ...
in Boston.
They later purchased a house in Newton Center on Montvale Road.
Paxton's wife managed his career
and modeled for many of his works, like the painting in which she was dressed for the ball. "William McGregor Paxton... benefited from an art-savvy wife who supported his career, using her energy in the bet that his offered the more secure future," said author and art historian Rena Tobey. The couple had no children.
Career
Paxton taught from 1906 to 1913 at the
Museum of Fine Arts School
and painted briefly at
Fenway Studios
The Fenway Studios are artists' studios located at 30 Ipswich Street, Boston, Massachusetts. The studios were built after a disastrous 1904 fire at Harcourt Studios in which many artists lost their homes, studios, and work. Business and civic lea ...
in Boston.
He worked at the Harcourt Street Studios in Boston and when it burned in 1904 he lost close to 100 paintings. He then went to the Fenway Studios for a brief period but then moved on to the Riverway Studios, also in Boston. He is primarily known for his
portrait
A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expressions are predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this r ...
s
and painted both
Grover Cleveland
Stephen Grover Cleveland (March 18, 1837June 24, 1908) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 22nd and 24th president of the United States from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. Cleveland is the only president in American ...
and
Calvin Coolidge.
Maryhill Museum of Art
Maryhill Museum of Art is a small museum with an eclectic collection, located near what is now the community of Maryhill in the U.S. state of Washington.
The museum is situated on a bluff overlooking the eastern end of the Columbia River Gorge. T ...
says of his artistry, "Paxton was well known for the attention he gave to the effects of light and detail in flesh and fabric. His works often present idealized views of women, such as this portrait (''The Red Fan'') of his wife Elizabeth",
like
Henry James
Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...
's portrayal of women in his novels ''
The Portrait of a Lady'' (1881) or ''
The American'' (1877). His models, often daughters and wives of his patrons, were depicted as refined, cultured women of "conspicuous leisure", and equated with the "precious aesthetic objects surround them", like the women of
Thorstein Veblen
Thorstein Bunde Veblen (July 30, 1857 – August 3, 1929) was a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism.
In his best-known book, ''The Theory of the Leisure Class'' ...
's ''Theory of the Leisure Class'' (1899) who reflect the wealth of their husbands or fathers.
He crafted elaborate compositions with models in his studio, using props that appear in several paintings.
Paxton and several other Bostonian artists were inspired by
Johannes Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer ( , , see below; also known as Jan Vermeer; October 1632 – 15 December 1675) was a Dutch Baroque Period painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. During his lifetime, he was a moderately succe ...
.
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 ...
says of Paxton's ''Tea Leaves'' (1909) in their collection:
Paxton employed a technique where only one area in his compositions was entirely in focus, while the rest was somewhat blurred, something he called "binocular vision" and credited to Vermeer. He began to employ this system in his own work, including ''The New Necklace'', where only the gold beads are sharply defined while the rest of the objects in the composition have softer, blurrier edges.
Paxton is one of the key figures in the
Boston School of painting and a co-founder of
The Guild of Boston Artists with
Frank Weston Benson and
Edmund Charles Tarbell
Edmund Charles Tarbell (April 26, 1862August 1, 1938) was an American Impressionist painter. A member of the Ten American Painters, his work hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian ...
.
Between 1926 and 1927, he was interviewed by Dewitt Lockman with 85 other artists and architects associated with the National Academy of Design. Records from the interview are held at the
New York Historical Society and the
Archives of American Art
The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 20 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washingt ...
. Paxton was made a full member of the
National Academy of Design
The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the f ...
in 1928.
Paxton died of a
heart attack
A myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when blood flow decreases or stops to the coronary artery of the heart, causing damage to the heart muscle. The most common symptom is chest pain or discomfort which ma ...
when he was painting his wife in their Montvale Road living room. He was 72 years of age.
An exhibition was held in his memory at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from November 19 through December 14, 1941. His papers—including sketches, correspondence, and photographs—are held at the
Archives of American Art
The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 20 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washingt ...
at the
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...
in Washington, D.C.
Other selected paintings
File:Paxton31.jpg, ''In the studio'', 1905
File:William McGregor Paxton, Tea Leaves, oil on canvas, 1909, Metropolitan Museum of Art.jpg, ''Tea Leaves,'' oil on canvas, 1909, Metropolitan
Museum of Art
File:William paxton1.jpg, ''Girl combing her hair'' or ''Young girl with a mirror'', 1909,
File:William McGregor Paxton, The New Necklace, 1910.jpg, ''The New Necklace'', 1910, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
File:The Figurine by W. Paxton - 1921.jpg, ''The Figurine'', 1921, Smithsonian American Art Museum
File:William McGregor Paxton Nausicaa.jpg, '' Nausicaa,'' circa 1941
Collections
*
Brooklyn Museum, New York
*
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
*
Cleveland Museum of Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in Cleveland, Ohio, located in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on the city's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian ...
, Ohio
*
Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
*
Detroit Institute of Arts
The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), located in Midtown Detroit, Michigan, has one of the largest and most significant art collections in the United States. With over 100 galleries, it covers with a major renovation and expansion project comple ...
, Michigan
*
Indianapolis Museum of Art
The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) is an encyclopedic art museum located at Newfields, a campus that also houses Lilly House, The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park: 100 Acres, the Gardens at Newfields, the Beer Garden, and more. It ...
, Indiana
*
Maryhill Museum of Art
Maryhill Museum of Art is a small museum with an eclectic collection, located near what is now the community of Maryhill in the U.S. state of Washington.
The museum is situated on a bluff overlooking the eastern end of the Columbia River Gorge. T ...
, Washington state
*
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 ...
, New York
*
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
*
National Academy Museum and School
The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the fi ...
, New York
*
, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
*
Princeton University Art Museum
The Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) is the Princeton University gallery of art, located in Princeton, New Jersey. With a collecting history that began in 1755, the museum was formally established in 1882, and now houses over 113,000 works o ...
, New Jersey
*
Sheldon Museum of Art
The Sheldon Museum of Art is an art museum in the city of Lincoln, in the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. Its collection focuses on 19th- and 20th-century art.
History
Sheldon Art Association
In 1888, The Sheldon Art Assoc ...
,
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln (Nebraska, NU, or UNL) is a public land-grant research university in Lincoln, Nebraska. Chartered in 1869 by the Nebraska Legislature as part of the Morrill Act of 1862, the school was known as the Univers ...
, Nebraska
*
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
*
Union League of Philadelphia
The Union League of Philadelphia is a private club founded in 1862 by the Old Philadelphians as a patriotic society to support the policies of Abraham Lincoln. As of 2022, the club has over 4,000 members. Its main building was built in 1865 and ...
,
References
Further reading
;Exhibition catalogs
*
*
*
;Books
*
External links
William McGregor Paxton National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
William McGregor PaxtonSmithsonian Institution, Art Inventories Catalog
Paintings at Athenaeum
{{DEFAULTSORT:Paxton, William McGregor
19th-century American painters
19th-century American male artists
American male painters
20th-century American painters
American Impressionist painters
Artists from Baltimore
Académie Julian alumni
1869 births
1941 deaths
Boston School (painting)
20th-century American male artists