PRESS RELEASE
Our Man in the Field: An exhibition and sale of paintings by
Allen Butler Talcott (1867-1908)
Oct 24 – Nov 28, 2020
A Life Unfinished: Works by Allen Butler Talcott (1867-1908)
by Joe Newman
In January of 1907, Kraushaar Galleries in New York held the only solo exhibition of Allen Butler Talcott’s work during the artist’s brief lifetime. It was a small affair of less than twenty paintings, comprised mostly of studio pictures worked up from plein air sketches captured the previous season while Talcott was in Old Lyme. Talcott depended heavily on his panels. Five years earlier, after his first summer at the Griswold mansion, he wrote to Miss Florence that he “could work for years on the hundred and thirty sketches” he had made and “not exhaust the material.”[1] Talcott painted what he saw, with immediacy and passion, then painted it again, larger and refined.
When reviewing the Kraushaar Galleries show for The New York Times, the critic was aware of Talcott’s burgeoning reputation. He mentions artistic medals won by the artist, likely referring in part to Talcott’s silver medal at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, awarded for a group of four paintings – The Pasture Oaks, Oaks in Bloom, The Connecticut at Deep River, and A Wood Road.[2] Many American Tonalists and early Impressionists enjoyed years, if not decades, of advanced achievement built upon their formative experiences and education overseas. For Talcott, this prime period lasted just over three, from 1904, through the Kraushaar show, up to his premature death on June 1, 1908.
Allen Butler Talcott was born on April 8th, 1867, to Seth and Sarah Talcott of Hartford, Connecticut. Sixteen years prior, Seth Talcott had established one of Hartford’s earliest wholesale apothecary businesses. The firm prospered and by the mid-1880s when Allen was a student at the historic Hartford public high school on Asylum Hill, his father was anxious for a successor.[3] Math and science were both useful subjects for a would-be pharmacist, but Allen filled his school books with accomplished and jocose drawings that betrayed the futility of his academic studies. Allen’s habit of extra-illustration continued through two years of coursework at nearby Trinity College. The family business fell to his brother, Charles.
It was during those years between 1882 and 1886 that Talcott the artist emerged from a boy making diversionary scribblings. A sketch book survives in the family archive that is filled with Talcott’s earliest work, presumably done on family trips to Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, and perhaps most significantly, Fenwick, in the town of Old Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. The vistas over the river and the majestic creep of the waterway would later figure prominently in Talcott’s work at Old Lyme.
Contemporaneous with his enrollment at Trinity, Talcott began taking classes at the Hartford Art Society and enjoyed lessons with the esteemed Dwight W. Tryon (1849-1925), a fellow Hartford native.[4] After a short stint at the Art Students League and perhaps inspired by Tryon’s similar experience, in 1890 Talcott left for France seeking further study. The thought has long been that both his parents supported his ambitions, but, at least initially, Talcott’s father opposed him. The rumor is that his mother financed the trip.[5] Talcott’s sketch book from this initial European period shows a strong interest in domestic life and architecture, and places him at Jobourg, Guernsey, Jersey, and la Hague, all on the northern coast of France. The many portraits in his sketch book exhibit a strong foundation in drawing and his landscapes indicate the young artist was just beginning to tussle with the principles of composition. After a brief return to the United States, he returned in 1891 for a four-year sojourn that would become, as it was for so many, the pinnacle of his artistic education.
He attended the Academie Julian and studied under Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921) and Benjamin Constant (1845-1902).[6] His sketch work from this period includes, as might be expected, far more urban scenes, including the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel and market scenes done in Bruges. Meanwhile, he was making great strides working in oil, and in 1892 he completed the picture, Un Cabanon en Provence, that would launch his professional career
Ferguson’s chronology of Talcott’s life suggests that Un Cabanon was one of two paintings Talcott had accepted to the 1893 Paris Salon, the other being identified as Le Croix de Billiers. Only Un Cabanon is listed in the schedule of American paintings exhibited at the Paris Salons found in Lois Fink’s American Art at the Nineteenth Century Paris Salons, which is adapted from the original catalogues.[7] Though it failed to win any awards, Talcott’s showing generated domestic interest in his work, and Un Cabanon appeared stateside in 1894 at the National Academy of Design. There is some debate whether Talcott returned to the Paris Salon that year – the New Britain Museum catalogue and the archives of the Florence Griswold Museum record that he exhibited a painting titled Autumn, while Fink only lists his return in 1895 with two unidentified landscapes. The minor confusion may have originated with the short biography of Talcott that appears in Representative Citizens of Connecticut. According to the family, the entry bears all the marks of relying heavily on the remembrances of Talcott’s widow, Katharine Agnew, which may explain why no textual evidence supports Talcott’s commonly accepted Paris Salon exhibition record. Further, given what is known of both Talcott’s preferred subject matter and his bright palette of the early to mid-1890s, it is unlikely he would have created, much less submitted, an autumnal scene to the Salon in 1894. Nevertheless, he did return to the National Academy in 1895 with two paintings, A French Garden and A Breton Well. Lastly, two small caricatures of Talcott by the German artist Edmund Edel (1863-1934) bear inscriptions dating them “Billiers, 1894,” placing Talcott in Billiers the year after he allegedly submitted Le Croix de Billiers to the Salon.[8]
There is a very strong likelihood that Un Cabanon is the same picture that passed through this gallery a decade ago, showing a humble stucco residence with a terra cotta roof nestled amongst scrub trees with a woman tending the yard in the left middle distance. Signed and dated 1892 in the lower right corner and measuring 40” x 60”, it is a wildly ambitious effort. The high-keyed pinks, blues, and greens that make the painting are tempered by soft yellows and earth tones. Compositionally well-balanced, it is lacking movement or drama, and remains warmly serene. For most artists, painting in the Impressionist mode followed doing so in the Barbizon tradition. But for Talcott, his Salon period in the early 1890s remained his most Impressionistic.
Several French scenes are included in the present exhibition. Of particular note is A French Canal, exhibiting the same high-keyed palette as Un Cabanon, with equal attention to French architecture and the everyday habits of the working class in the Third Republic. Slightly more muted, with accents of pink, blue, and turquoise, is Back Street in France. The pathway disappearing into the left middle distance of the canvas is an unusual element for Talcott, adding perspective that is uncommon in his domestic work.
With the exception of a few examples, Talcott continued in this style throughout his final trip to Europe, a spin through Spain and southern France in 1897.[9] Family tradition has it that he was met by his friend and fellow Academie Julian alum, Frank Vincent DuMond (1865-1951) in Arles, and that the two men rented Vincent Van Gogh’s cottage.[10] Literally and figuratively, it was Talcott’s last full night’s sleep in the house of Impressionism.
Prior to his voyage to Spain and France in 1897, Talcott spent about two years back in his native Hartford, during which he enjoyed one significant bump to his artistic reputation at home. In 1896, Talcott participated in a joint exhibition at the Wadsworth Athenaeum with William Gedney Bunce (1840-1916), Charles Noel Flagg (1848-1916), and Walter Griffin (1861-1935). One of Talcott’s paintings in the exhibition, possibly a work titled November,[11] drew the praise of an established and well-regarded Connecticut artist of the previous generation, Robert Brandegee (1848-1922). In a letter to the editor published in the now-defunct Hartford Post, Brandegee writes:
[I]t is with especial pleasure that we note the beautiful
landscape by Allen Talcott in the southwest corner
of the gallery. We make bold to assert that this picture
has many of the symptoms of a great artist. It is luminous
and of a fine breadth. In fact, we feel pleased all over to
have an artist of Mr. Talcott’s capacity translate our
beautiful Connecticut into immortality.[12]
Brandegee’s letter is telling for two reasons. The first is that it serves as evidence that quickly upon his return from France, Talcott was applying his education to his native landscape. The second is that, though Talcott would be dogged by later critics who claimed some of his efforts were too commonplace, at least one respected voice in American art came out of the gate early with strong support for the new brush.
After 1897, Talcott returned again to Hartford and maintained a studio on Pliny Court near Asylum Avenue. In January of 1900, Talcott opened his doors to the public for a studio show that featured approximately thirty paintings, representing work that he had done over the previous few years. The paintings were organized into two groups – views of the Farmington River valley done in a manner showing Talcott’s move away from Impressionism toward a more tonal mood, and a series of bright seaside paintings of Scituate, Massachusetts, that are – excepting Sun and Sea which appears in this exhibition – unheard of in the modern market. The review that appeared in The Hartford Courant offers a brief glimpse of Talcott’s work during what is likely the least known moment of his career:
The paintings, with two exceptions, are in the light key the artist
has made familiar in his earlier works but are much softened in
outline and tone. The largest of the paintings is a dignified composition showing a bluff at the edge of the sea, and the tide sweeping in at its feet
and in the distance a long reach of sea and low-lying hills. The atmosphere is soft and clear in the middle distance, with the summer haze and mist one so often sees at the shore, as the sky line is reached. The coloring is excellent and the whole one of much beauty, suggestive of the restfulness and peace of the sea.[13]
The Farmington pictures included in the open studio also received high praise, but clearly the reviewer found the Scituate pictures to be the more compelling. The show was, for Talcott, the highlight of his career in Hartford. By November of 1901 he had left Connecticut for a studio on 42nd Street in New York, and the moniker of “Hartford artist” in the tradition of Nelson Augustus Moore (1824-1902), Tryon, Flagg, and Brandegee eventually fell from his biography.
It is not clear when Talcott first met Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916) or was encouraged to visit Old Lyme, but it seems likely to have happened in early 1901. Based on his previous experience in Fenwick, he certainly would have been familiar with the locale, just across the mouth of the Connecticut River. Talcott arrived at the Florence Griswold house for the summer season and began creating panels in the same style as the Farmington scenes from his open studio the year before, but adapted to Old Lyme’s varied landscape. He experimented even more with tonal effects and, as already mentioned, his first year at the mansion proved to be among his most productive and fulfilling. He described it as “one of the most delightful summers that I have ever had.”[14]
The next three years were important ones for Talcott in a number of respects. His correspondence shows him to be socially engaged and current with the activities of his Old Lyme colleagues, specifically Louis Dessar (1867-1952), Henry Rankin Poore (1859-1940), Will Howe Foote (1874-1965), and Clark Voorhees (1871-1933). In 1901 he was elected a member of the Salmagundi Club. The following year, he wrote to Florence Griswold that he has “had mild success at the academy and my pictures have been very well spoken of by the papers.”[15] The titles he assigned them indicate his serious move toward the new American Barbizon tradition so vigorously promoted by Ranger. In 1901 he exhibited Connecticut Pasture at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, along with Lord’s Cove and A Group of Oak Trees at the National Academy of Design.[16] Ranger, whom Talcott referred to with unusual formality as “Mr. Ranger,” nominated him for membership in the Lotos Club, an effort that was seconded by the influential collector and noted patron of younger artists, William T. Evans. It appears likely that, rather than contribute initiation dues, Talcott donated a painting, Connecticut Landscape, to the club.[17] Finally, and perhaps most significantly for the on-going development of the Old Lyme Art Colony, it was because of Talcott’s enthusiasm for the venture that DuMond and his wife, the artist Helen Savier (1872-1968), decided to first come to Connecticut. Talcott wrote to Miss Florence, “The DuMonds will be a great acquisition to our colony and I assure you they improve on acquaintance.”[18] It was to Talcott’s credit that the enclave enjoyed its biggest celebrity arrival prior to Hassam’s appearance the following year.
In 1903, Talcott exhibited two more paintings at the National Academy, New England: April and The Gnarled Oaks, the hanging of which perhaps softened the sting of one critic who labeled a grouping of Talcott’s work appearing alongside that of Carl Blenner’s (1862-1952) at Katz Gallery as “too facile and insipidly pretty.”[19] Two other paintings, The Haunt of the Whippoorwill and A Summer Morning were hung that year at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford. His showing there, and his brief return to his native city, may have been precipitated by his mother’s illness. Sarah Talcott had been tremendously supportive of her son’s career, had accompanied him to Europe, and had stayed with him at the Griswold house – the DuMonds, in fact, inherited her room. Her death in 1904 affected Talcott deeply and, as she always did for her charges, Miss Florence offered comfort in his despair. Talcott wrote to thank her for the flowers she laid by his mother’s side.[20]
This low point in Talcott’s personal life coincided with his professional peak. His career prior to the awarding of the 1904 St. Louis Exposition silver medal had been buoyed by warm though not ecstatic praise – one reviewer called him a “capital landscapist”[21] – and he was not immune to the occasional critic standing before his pictures asking of the artist, so what? Like most of the Old Lyme Art Colony artists, Talcott believed in the sanctity of nature. He was rumored to have recited poetry, specifically Robert Browning, while he painted. He covered his trade paperbacks of Rudyard Kipling and others with canvas, painted them, and affixed a bookplate of his own design. He was an honest painter, respectful of emotional truth, and to finally be recognized on a national scale, at a time of great personal loss, must have been an overwhelming experience.
1904 was also the year that Talcott moved from 42nd Street to a new cooperative formed by a coalition of Lyme artists at 27 West 67th Street. Included in the effort were Childe Hassam (1859-1935), Jules Turcas (1854-1917), Dessar, and Talcott’s friend, DuMond. Family rumor has it that Talcott, possessing some private wealth, was able to finance a good portion of the studio’s creation. It was as if the artists sought to preserve a little of the Lyme spirit amidst the chaos of the city – they socialized frequently, often bringing their spouses along, and held dances and teas. Talcott soon returned to his jovial self. Painting excursions to the Palisades led to an acquaintance with Katharine Agnew, daughter of the prominent ophthalmologist, Cornelius Rea Agnew, whose summer estate, Hillcrest, overlooked the Hudson River.[22] After a short courtship, they married in 1905.
In 1903, Talcott had purchased 130 acres on a small rise of land overlooking the Connecticut River for $2,500 from William and Anne Miner. He added to his property the following year by purchasing a tract near Calves Island across the road from his newly-renovated home for the price of one painting. His holdings were added to again in 1906 with the acquisition of an additional span of riverfront property from Richard Waite that included an 18th-century former customs house, since converted to a private residence. [23] All told, within a year after their honeymoon, Allen Butler and Katharine Talcott were among Old Lyme’s largest landowners and were heavily vested in promoting the interests of the town. Talcott could paint an infinite variety of scenes in all lights and seasons without ever leaving his estate.
Happy in his new life, he continued to work. In 1906, he exhibited Early April and Return of the Redwing at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, with the latter appearing alongside April on Chipmunk Point at the National Academy that same year. He also joined in a group show in New York, perhaps at the 67th Street Studio, though the details are unknown. The following year, he exhibited the tonal and lush Dusk at Dick Waite’s Landing, which appears in the present show, at the National Academy. Also shown here, alongside its original sketch, is April Mists, exhibited in 1906 at the Worcester Art Museum. As if to illustrate the inherent importance of his plein air paintings as significant works in their own right, the sketch panel of April Mists bears the exhibition label of the Pennsylvania Academy of Art on its verso.
With such success behind him, the time was right in 1907 for Talcott to be honored with a solo show of his work. Given Kraushaar Galleries well-known role in promoting the careers of the Ashcan painters, to whom Impressionists of the Old Lyme school were steadfastly opposed, the venue might seem at first an unlikely stage for an artist such as Talcott. But in fact Charles W. Kraushaar, founder of the gallery, had expressed an interest in the European Barbizon School painters by the late 19th Century.[24] With his brother John’s encouragement, Charles had begun to add more native-born artists to the gallery’s palette. After his death in 1917, John would focus on the new modernists, but for the time, Kraushaar Galleries was perhaps the ideal place for Talcott – established enough to expect strong sales and traditional enough that Talcott’s landscapes would not seem like artifacts from a previous age.
Unfortunately, the gallery records, now at the Archives for American Art at the Smithsonian, do not offer any indication of what pictures may have sold. The exhibition did, however, receive at least one positive review:
[Talcott] unites an uncommon sense of the structure and
underlying skeleton of a landscape with a feeling for color.
Clearing Clouds at Sunset is a case in point. The scene is a
rocky plateau above the Connecticut River, which lies beyond
and below; hilltops and modulations of the surface of the land
are clearly defined without the loss of color; moreover, the atmospheric distances are beautifully told, and the cloudscape in the upper
register is not only striking, but bears an important part. Indeed,
the title, Clearing Clouds, may be said to characterize the mobile
element in the composition and justify the name of the picture, but
the whole is so well-balanced that foreground and distance are scarcely secondary to the clouds.[25]
Though speaking about one picture, the reviewer, perhaps more than anyone else, has captured what is distinctive about Talcott’s work. There are no subservient elements. All properties blend together – color, composition, movement, technique – to create what might be termed an image wall. One sees a Talcott painting immediately and entirely. Few pictures by the artist offer an easy avenue “into” the picture (he seldom painted roads or streams), and perhaps this tendency explains why some critics could never find a hook on which to hang their comments, but the ability to recreate a scene so that it presents itself in a heartbeat is a remarkable talent in its own right.
Allen Butler Talcott, who stood 5’ 11”, not 5’ 8” as occasionally noted, was a happy man. He enjoyed his friends, he enjoyed his family, and photographic evidence suggests that he also enjoyed his meals. A prankster (he and Frank DuMond once snuck off to a disreputable neighborhood in New York to buy garish suits which their wives later burned), there survives with his descendants a favored tankard adorned with the family crest.[26] The commonly held belief is that Talcott died suddenly from a heart attack while painting on his property over looking the Connecticut. The fact is, he had been unhealthy for some time and suffered from angina.[27] He did indeed collapse while painting, but died a week afterward. Appearing on the cover of this catalogue is a panel showing the lawn sloping upward toward his house. On the verso appears, “one of Talcott’s last paintings,” written in Katharine Talcott’s hand. In all likelihood it is, in fact, his last.
The crushing sense of loss experienced by his friends in Old Lyme has been well-documented. Laudatory obituaries appeared in most of the Hartford and New York papers, but it was Charles Vezin’s (1858-1942) remembrance published in The New York Herald that has become the go-to source for pithy statements about Talcott’s professional approach and style of painting. Much of Vezin’s eulogy takes oblique aim at the post-Impressionists, specifically members of The Eight whose group show the previous February at Macbeth Galleries was already being recognized as a major turning point in American art. Placing Talcott in opposition to those artists, Vezin writes:
He loved beauty and life, and his fellow man; he believed that
the world, despite all the evils of the day, is getting better. He
never spoke or thought ill of any one. All this his pictures express.
His art was optimistic, like all that is young and healthy….[28]
Vezin, the ranking curmudgeon of Old Lyme, took great pride in his high-brow prose. A private letter to Talcott written by a New Haven art collector, Munson Taylor, perhaps paints a slightly more genuine picture of Talcott’s art in the world. Taylor writes to Talcott after seeing both a group of Talcott’s work and the Macbeth show:
I want to tell you, my son, how much I enjoyed your share in the
show on Nineteenth Street, whence I have just returned. By golly,
sir, but you are going some in that ‘Cedars’ thing! Thank God that you…are painting textures and the character of things – trees, flesh,
velvet, fur, water! I saw those damned ugly dreams of those thrice
damned fools at Macbeths also – the mud, the paint, the clamor, the bad drawing, the schoolboy craze to do a stunt!...To hell with Glackens, even if he can put figures on a canvas! What is Prendergast trying for? Why doesn’t Henri (even in his Smiling Child) do something beside asking us to consider ochre and vermillion against slate color? Royal Cortissoz hits them – the whole crew – when he suggests that they ought to go to school under a good master.[29]
Munson, Vezin, and perhaps the whole community of Old Lyme artists were grateful that Talcott’s wide form stood firmly in the path on the way toward visual despair.
After his death, Talcott’s work continued to find an audience. Later in 1908, Shipman Art Gallery exhibited twenty-five of his paintings. In 1913, the New Britain Museum of American Art, founded by Talcott’s uncle, John Talcott, acquired Barberry Field, Lyme for the then-record price of $1,400. Folsom Galleries also held a show of his work. In 1915, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco selected April at Chipmunk Point to appear along with a fifteen-foot mural by DuMond. Sometime about 1943, the Lyman Allen Museum in New London, Connecticut allegedly exhibited approximately fifty of his sketches, though no record of the show survives.[30] But it was in 1909 that Katharine Talcott took the greatest step in preserving Talcott’s legacy by donating one of his masterpieces, Return of the Redwing, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reproduced here in color for the first time and accompanied in the exhibition by Talcott’s original sketch, Return of the Redwing captures a sense of vernal renewal, showing the Lyme landscape soaked from recent rains with most trees still dormant. Accenting the picture are the eponymous birds, a flock of male red-winged blackbirds, with their bright epaulets in sharp contrast to the near-tonal landscape as they twist and flitter about, reminding themselves of the delights of home.
There is one, final and oft-repeated erroneous detail in the history of Talcott’s painting. Rumor has long held that much of Talcott’s surviving work was washed away from his widow’s home in Old Saybrook during the Hurricane of 1938. This is untrue. In 1938, two specially-constructed slotted trunks filled with Talcott’s sketch panels languished in storage at the Lincoln warehouse in New York. When the warehouse closed around 1941, the trunks were relocated to a boathouse on the Old Saybrook property. Three years later, in September during the height of hurricane season, a new storm sawed its way up the eastern seaboard, capsizing numerous wartime vessels, including the USS Warrington with the loss of all hands. The storm pounded the Connecticut coast. The boathouse flooded. A few loose paintings were destroyed. But the trunks – filled with the buoyant work of an abbreviated lifetime – the trunks floated.
[1] Allen Butler Talcott to Miss Florence Griswold, White Plains, New York, January 11th, 1902 (Florence Griswold Museum Archives, FG26.2a). Many thanks as always to my colleagues at the Florence Griswold Museum, Amy Kurtz Lansing and Nichole Wholean, for their invaluable assistance. I am especially grateful to Margaret Chidley for her work on transcribing the Talcott letters in the museum’s archives.
[2] Charles B. Ferguson, Allen Butler Talcott (1867-1908): Painter of Landscapes, exhibition catalogue (New Britain and Old Lyme: New Britain Museum of American Art and Lyme Historical Society, 1983), 4.
[3] “Allen Butler Talcott” in Representative Citizens of Connecticut: A Biographical Memorial, ed. Samuel Hart (New York: American Historical Society, 1916), 396.
[4] Ferguson, 3.
[5] Interview with the artist’s granddaughter, Mrs. Priscilla Spahn, Randolph, Vermont, January 29th, 2008. I wish to thank Mrs. Spahn, and her husband, Mr. Arnold Spahn, for their remarkable work in preserving Talcott’s legacy. Their enthusiasm made this exhibition and catalogue possible. Mrs. Spahn also generously annotated both the New Britain Museum exhibition catalogue and a previous Cooley Gallery exhibition catalogue, Allen Butler Talcott (1867-1908): the Poetry of Light and Land, and by doing so corrected several persistent errors in Talcott’s biography.
[6] Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 395.
[7] Fink, 395.
[8] Talcott family archive.
[9] Ferguson, 4.
[10] Interview with Spahn, January 29th, 2008. Mrs. Spahn received the Arles legend from Ms. Elizabeth DuMond, Frank DuMond’s daughter.
[11] Florence Griswold Museum archives, The Connecticut Artists Project, survey by Joan Horn, March 3, 1997, Group Exhibits, 1-2.
[12] Robert Brandegee, undated letter to the editor, The Hartford Post, 1896. Talcott family archive.
[13] Review in The Hartford Courant, January 27th, 1900. Florence Griswold Museum archives.
[14] Allen Butler Talcott to Miss Florence Griswold, White Plains, New York, Thanksgiving Day, 1901 (Florence Griswold Museum Archives, FG26.1).
[15] Allen Butler Talcott to Miss Florence, White Plains, New York, January 11th, 1902 (Florence Griswold Museum archive, FG26.2a).
[16] See The Annual Exhibition Record of the National Academy of Design: 1901-1950 (Madison: Sound View Press, 1990), 496-497, and The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Madison: Sound View Press, 1989), 466, for complete exhibition listings.
[17] Talcott followed this contribution with another donation of a painting, described in the club archives as being 24” x 30” and titled Seascape. The club no longer possesses the picture and its whereabouts are unknown. Most Talcott seascapes are a mystery – perhaps this picture was left over from the 1900 Hartford studio show when Talcott showed his Scituate work. The artist is not known to have done any such views after 1901. Seascape and likely Connecticut Landscape were sold by the club either in 1946 or 1947. Many thanks to Nancy Johnson, archivist at the Lotos Club, for her generous assistance and helpful correspondence.
[18] Allen Butler Talcott to Miss Florence Griswold, White Plains, New York, January 20th, 1902 (Florence Griswold Museum archives, FG26.3).
[19] “Art Exhibitions – Old Paintings at the Union League Club”, review in The New York Tribune, April 11, 1903, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
[20] Allen Butler Talcott to Miss Florence Griswold, Watch Hill, Rhode Island, July 18th, 1904 (Florence Griswold Museum archives, FG26.5).
[21] “Young American Painters – Show of Ideal Figures, Land and Seascapes at the Arts Club”, review in The New York Times, February 6th, 1904, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
[22] Interview with Spahn, January 29th, 2008.
[23] Property records, Town of Old Lyme, Volume 5, 385. Many thanks to Eileen K. Coffee, Assistant Town Clerk of Old Lyme, for her kind assistant.
[24] Stephanie L. Ashley, A Finding Aid to the Kraushaar Galleries Records, 1901-1968 in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, <http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/findingaids/kraugall.htm#a2>
[25] “Moods of Nature – Landscapes from the Connecticut River at the Kraushaar Galleries”, review in The New York Times, January 25th, 1907, 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Many thanks to Mr. Robert Mueller, Chairman of the Curatorial Committee at the Salmagundi Club, for bringing this exhibition and review to my attention.
[26] Interview with Spahn, January 29th, 2008.
[27] Interview with Spahn, January 29th, 2008.
[28] Charles Vezin, “Influence of an Art Career,” in The New York Herald, June 28, 1908, Literary and Arts Section, 3.
[29] Munson Taylor to Allen Butler Talcott, February 11th, 1908. Talcott family archive. Royal Cortissoz, one of the leading art critics of his day, was generally an advocate of traditional representational art. He especially appreciated painters of the Barbizon school like Talcott, calling the style “imaginative naturalism plus individuality.” See H. Wayne Morgan’s Keepers of Culture: The Art-Thought of Kenyon Cox, Royal Cortissoz, and Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1989), 72.
[30] Interview with Spahn, January 29th, 2008.