Brock Churchill Hazard

William Worcester Churchill (1858-1926), like Hazard, was a Bostonian who traveled to Europe for his art education. Born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, he studied briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before entering the inaugural class of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1877. He studied under Emil Otto Grundmann before departing for Paris, where he was a pupil of Leon Bonnat from 1878 to 1885 and of Edmund Tarbell in 1884–1885 in Paris, and again in Boston from 1885 to 1888. Churchill was an active member of Boston’s art community as a member of the Guild of Boston Artists, the St. Botolph Club and the Boston Art Club. His first studio was on Irvington Street, where he received students on Saturday afternoons. He then moved to the Harcourt Studios, where he was an unfortunate victim, along with William Paxton, Joseph DeCamp, Edmund Tarbell and others, of the disastrous 1904 fire that destroyed much of his life’s work. Following the fire, Churchill served on the five-person committee that organized the construction of the new, more spacious Fenway Studios on Ipswich Street, where he enjoyed a corner unit on the top floor of the building until his death. It was in this studio that Churchill painted Woman Reading on a Settee (Fig. 2), which shows his talent for portraying light and conveying atmosphere. Like other Boston School painters, Churchill’s interior scenes recall Dutch Old Master paintings in their quiet, restrained elegance, streaming light and studied placement of objects. Churchill’s refined brushwork, particularly his graceful handling of the model’s face, bears similarities to that of a younger Boston School painter, William McGregor Paxton. In landscapes like Pond with Sailboats (Fig. 1), Churchill continued to focus on effects of light, and on the play of light and shadow on water. As in his interior paintings, the scene is thoughtfully composed: the graceful arch of the tree, the strong vertical of the sailboat at the center of the composition, and the gentle curve of the perimeter of the pond, dotted with boathouses. In 1927, the now-retired Dr. Taylor and his wife made the same move west as Arthur Hazard had four years earlier, to homes in Borrego Springs and Julian, California. Their Hazard and Churchill paintings were hung in their formal, winter home in Borrego Springs and were part of Mable Taylor’s life until 1975, when some of the paintings were moved to Cathryn (Ludeman) Mahoney’s home in Boston and others to Cathryn’s son and daughter-in-law’s home in Guilford, Connecticut. Cathryn’s death in 1985 reunited the paintings in Guilford, where they have remained until the present time. The collection is distinguished by an uninterrupted descent of nearly a century within the Taylor, Ludeman and Mahoney families. It is not surprising that Dr. Taylor identified with these works by Arthur Hazard and William Churchill. The paintings exemplify the beauty, refinement and elegance that were central to his life with Mable Taylor. They invite the viewer into a private 7