Robert Hale Ives Gammell (1893 – 1981) was an American artist best known for his sequence of paintings based on

Francis Thompson Francis Joseph Thompson (16 December 1859 – 13 November 1907) was an English poet and Catholic mystic. At the behest of his father, a doctor, he entered medical school at the age of 18, but at 26 left home to pursue his talent as a writer a ...

's poem " The Hound of Heaven". Gammell painted symbolic images that reflected his study of literature, mythology, psychology, and religion.

Early life and education

Gammell was born into a wealthy family in

Providence, Rhode Island Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts ...

and attended Groton prep school. He spent much time alone drawing, and by his teens expressed his desire to pursue art. He went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where his teachers included Edmund C. Tarbell, Joseph DeCamp, and Philip Leslie Hale, all members of the Boston School of painters. He went to the Académie Baschet where he studied with Henri Royer and William Laparra in Paris, but his studies were interrupted by World War I, during which he served with the U.S. military. Returning to Boston, Gammell painted

mural A mural is any piece of graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate. Mural techniques include fresco, mosaic, graffiti and marouflage. Word mural in art The word ''mural'' is a Spani ...

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

landscapes A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the p ...

. He aspired to more imaginative subjects, but he felt restricted by what he considered his inferior drawing and compositional skills. He

apprenticed Apprenticeship is a system for training a new generation of practitioners of a trade or profession with on-the-job training and often some accompanying study (classroom work and reading). Apprenticeships can also enable practitioners to gain a ...

to painter and teacher William McGregor Paxton, also of the Boston School, who was considered an expert in these skills. Paxton had been a student of the French

academic An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, ...

painter

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 ...

, who was himself a student of

Paul Delaroche Hippolyte-Paul Delaroche (17 July 1797 – 4 November 1856) was a French painter who achieved his greater successes painting historical scenes. He became famous in Europe for his melodramatic depictions that often portrayed subjects from English ...

The Hound of Heaven

In the 1930s Gammell's skill caught up with his ambition. Unlike many of his Boston School peers, he was less interested in portraits and landscapes than in symbolic and mythological images. Although the decade of the 1930s had been his most productive, it ended in a mental breakdown. While recovering, he discovered in '' Psychology of the Unconscious'' by

Carl Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, phi ...

a way to approach what he considered his greatest artistic achievement: a

sequence In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is calle ...

of paintings depicting " The Hound of Heaven", a religious poem by

(1859 – 1907). The poem had captured Gammell's imagination when he was a boy, and for years he had made notes and sketches about it. In Thompson's poem a man is pursued by God. According to Gammell, in the catalog he wrote to accompany the sequence's first exhibit in 1956, he interpreted the poem not so much as a religious conversion as "a history of the experience known as an emotional breakdown". He wrote that Jung's work had provided the link between "myths, symbols, and poetic imagery, and the perpetually recurring emotional patterns of human life from which they evolved." The series of 23 paintings was titled ''A Pictorial Sequence Painted by R. H. Ives Gammell Based on The Hound of Heaven''.

Writing and teaching

In 1946 Gammell published a book of art criticism, ''Twilight of Painting,'' in which he argued that modern art, with its emphasis on abstraction, undermined the tradition of European craftsmanship. He tried to explain how this problem had occurred and how it might be solved. In Gammell's lament he revealed the aspects of painting he admired: classical, realistic, representational, and

. He wrote a book of essays published posthumously, ''The Boston Painters, 1900-1930''; edited ''Shop Talk of Edgar Degas''; and wrote a monograph about the Boston painter Dennis Miller Bunker. Starting in the 1940s, Gammell taught at Fenway Studios in Boston in a room down the hall from where he painted. His student, the painter Robert Cormier, said Gammell's classes included the study of

anatomy Anatomy () is the branch of biology concerned with the study of the structure of organisms and their parts. Anatomy is a branch of natural science that deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old science, having it ...

, memory drawing, and the sight-size method. Another student was Richard Lack, the founder of Classical Realism. Lack recalled that Gammell wanted his students to be immersed in culture. He was a member of the

Boston Athenæum The Boston Athenaeum is one of the oldest independent libraries in the United States. It is also one of a number of membership libraries, for which patrons pay a yearly subscription fee to use Athenaeum services. The institution was founded in ...

and encouraged them to borrow books, attend museums, the symphony, and the opera.

Early life and education

The Hound of Heaven

Writing and teaching

References

Further reading