Hawthorne Voorhees Catalog

5 T he first painting that I ever sold on my own was by Clark Greenwood Voorhees [ fig. 1 ], a delicate, yet strong evocation of poetry within the landscape. This image left an indelible imprint on me, leadingme to seek out more works by the artist and to delve into his life’s work. Now, as our gallery is mounting a large-scale exhibition on Voorhees, I feel that I have truly come full circle, both as an admirer of the artist and as a dealer with the ambition to rediscover the greatest talents of American art. It is with a true love of Voorhees’ unique style that this exhibition was born, a love for the flickering of light, the rich softness of color, and the rippling of texture, all inherent in his touch. While Impressionist pictures often seem most effective when viewed from afar, I urge the viewer of Voorhees’ works to inspect them closely and appreciate their tactile delicacy, the warp and woof of the artist’s imagination. An exuberant cyclist, Voorhees first visited and fell in love with Old Lyme, Connecticut, while on a bicycle trip in 1893. He returned several times throughout the 1890s and, in 1896, became the very first of the Old Lyme artists to stay at the now-famous Florence Griswold House, which was soon to become the center of a burgeoning art colony in Old Lyme. By the turn of the century, many other artists had followed in Voorhees’ footsteps, setting up studios inOld Lyme and soon forming what American art scholarWilliam H. Gerdts has called “the most famous Impressionist-oriented art colony in America.” Voorhees achieved considerable recognition during his lifetime, exhibiting regularly along with the other members of the Old Lyme Art Colony as well as at exhibitions held by the National Academy of Design, the Society of American Artists, the AmericanWatercolor Society, the Carnegie Institute, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He was also the recipient of several honors, including a bronze medal at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. The Light Lies Softly aims to bring out his talents and reveal the beauty of his distinc- tive brand of Impressionism, one that was tempered by a lasting allegiance to the tenets of Tonalism. Foreword