Madge Tennent ( Madeline Grace Cook; June 22, 1889 – February 5, 1972) was a British-born American artist known for her monumental oil paintings of Native Hawaiian women. Born in Dulwich, London, raised in Cape Town, and trained at the Académie Julian in Paris under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, she settled in Honolulu in 1923 and devoted the remaining five decades of her career to Hawaiian subjects.
Tennent's signature works are large-scale canvases depicting Hawaiian women in sweeping, architectonic compositions suffused with vibrant color. Drawing on her academic training and the formal innovations of Post-Impressionism, she developed a distinctive style that synthesized European modernist techniques with a deep engagement with Hawaiian culture and people. Her output evolved continuously, from early portraits indebted to Renoir and Cézanne, through the monumental polychromatic oils of the mid-1930s, to the restrained, near-monochrome canvases of the 1940s.
During the 1930s, Tennent exhibited to critical acclaim in London, New York, San Francisco, and Paris, including exhibitions at the Wertheim Gallery in London (1935, 1937) and representation at the 1939 New York World's Fair. At the time of her death, many critics considered her the most important individual contributor to Hawaiian art in the 20th century. Her works are held by the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among other institutions.
Biography
Early life
Madge Tennent was born Madeline Grace Cook in Dulwich, London, the first of two daughters of Arthur and Agnes Cook. Her father was an architect, seascape painter, and fine craftsman in woodcarving, while her mother owned, edited, and wrote for a weekly magazine titled South African Women in Council. By 1894, the family had settled in Cape Town, where the Cooks took a lively interest in comparative religion and matters of psychic and astrological inquiry. Madge and her sister Violet were raised in this stimulating environment, learning to read and write at an early age. Agnes was an accomplished pianist who taught Madge to play. Her parents' efforts to promote tolerance among various races and creeds left a lasting impression on their elder daughter.
Paris (1902–1906)
Although she had attended an English boarding school and, later, a French convent school in Paris, Madge had little formal general education. Her aptitude for drawing prompted her parents to enroll her at the age of twelve in the Cape Town School of Art, where classes were limited to drawing from casts, still life, and portraiture; within a year, she had mastered and surpassed the curriculum. The family relocated to Paris so that she could pursue more advanced training.
At the Académie Julian, she attracted early attention for her skill and was invited to study under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a prominent artist-educator closely identified with Academic art. In a competition among students from five academies, the thirteen-year-old placed fifth with a full-length charcoal drawing of a nude model. She worked long hours each day, and with her family she frequently visited the Louvre, where she measured her progress against the old masters.
Return to Cape Town and early career (1907–1915)
The Cooks had been immersed in the cultural life of Paris, but financial reverses forced their return to Cape Town in 1907. Madge was soon appointed headmistress in art for several girls' schools in different cities of South Africa and director of a government art school in Cape Town. At eighteen, she began exhibiting her work widely. In response to one such exhibition, a critic observed, "One must be a mystic to recognize the meaning with which the pictures are invested."
In 1909, Madge married Bertie Phillips Denham; the marriage ended in divorce by 1914. By 1913, she had established her own art school and resumed her piano recitals. Attending one was Hugh Cowper Tennent, a chartered accountant from New Zealand who was stationed in Cape Town with the Natal Light Horse regiment. One of eleven children of Robert and Emily Tennent, Hugh courted the 26-year-old Madge for three months following their introduction. The two were married on July 25, 1915, and shortly thereafter embarked for New Zealand.
New Zealand and British Samoa (1915–1923)
In New Zealand, Tennent was appointed head instructor at the Government School of Art in Woodville, where the couple lived while Hugh awaited further military orders. On June 11, 1916, she gave birth to Arthur Hugh Cowper Tennent, the first of two sons. When orders came, Hugh was posted to France in support of the Allied effort in World War I. Tennent relocated with her infant to the home of Hugh's parents in Invercargill for the duration of his service abroad.
Hugh returned from France in 1917 with a badly wounded arm. An accountant by trade, he was offered a position as treasurer to the government of British Samoa, which he accepted. The Tennents lived in Samoa for six years, during which time Tennent was drawn to the Polynesian people and devoted much of her time to drawing charcoal portraits of Samoans. The experience planted the seeds of what would become her life's artistic preoccupation. Midway through the family's six years in Samoa, an extended holiday in Australia allowed her to study for a few months under the painter Julian Ashton, who directed his own school of art in Sydney.
Honolulu (1923–1972)
In 1923, en route to England to enroll their sons in school, the Tennents stopped over in Honolulu. What was intended as a brief visit became permanent: the couple were persuaded by members of the local cultural elite, including the poet Don Blanding, to stay. Tennent was immediately captivated by the Hawaiian people, and she would devote the remainder of her life to rendering them in her art. Hugh established a chartered accountancy practice in the city.
During her first years in Honolulu, Tennent supported her family as a portrait painter, producing commissioned likenesses of children and adults, mainly from Caucasian families. This commercial work gave way in the late 1920s to the paintings of Native Hawaiian and multiracial subjects for which she became known. She became closely associated with the Honolulu Academy of Arts (now the Honolulu Museum of Art), where she was a frequent lecturer and participant in group exhibitions from the institution's early years.
By the mid-1930s, Tennent had established an international exhibition career, sending paintings to major shows in London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Her 1935 and 1937 exhibitions at the Wertheim Gallery in London brought her critical attention in Europe, and Local Color (1934) was selected to represent Hawaiʻi at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
During the mid-1950s, Tennent suffered the first of several heart attacks, prompting her to shift from large-scale work on canvas to smaller pieces on paper. She was diagnosed with a permanent heart ailment in 1958, and by 1965 she had largely discontinued working and moved into Maunalani Hospital near Mānoa. Her husband Hugh died in 1967. She died in Honolulu on February 5, 1972, at the age of eighty-two. Her funeral was held at St. Andrew's Cathedral.
Art and style
During her early years in Honolulu, Tennent worked primarily as a portrait painter for the city's Caucasian families. Although this commercial work was financially successful, her imagination was already engaged with the Native Hawaiian and multiracial people she longed to portray. Influences of European antecedents — Manet, Renoir, Cézanne — permeated her transitional paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s: Bathers (1926), Hawaiian Girl (1926), Girl with Apples (1926), Makuahine (1927), and Olympia of Hawaii (with Apologies to Manet) (1927). Olympia of Hawaii, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, exemplifies Tennent's early engagement with vivid color and her adaptation of line and form to the bright, warm hues of Hawaiʻi.
The majestic, explicitly Polynesian women of Tennent's mature style surfaced in works such as Reclining Girl (1929) and Three Filipino Ladies (1930), which synthesized European modernism's languid, architectonic femininity with her own sustained commitment to Polynesian subjects. Applying paint generously with a palette knife, she avoided sensuousness in the representation of skin texture, instead imbuing her figures with a trademark sense of strength and grandeur, as in Holoku Ball and Hawaiian Singer (early 1930s). As Tennent's canvases grew in ambition, they grew in physical scale; when standard-issue canvas could no longer accommodate her vision, she sewed pieces of canvas together to attain the desired size.
By the mid-1930s, Tennent's works had evolved into the large-scale oils of Hawaiian women that remain her hallmark. She tapped a brilliant, decidedly tropical color palette for Hawaiians Hanging Holoku, Lei Queen Fantasia, and Local Color (all 1934), depicting women engaged in lei-making, dancing, and other island traditions. Hawaiian Bride (1935), one of the few paintings with which Tennent was "almost satisfied," marked a turning point in her style; there, as in the concurrent Girl in Red Dress (1935) and Two Lei Sellers (1936), she achieved an ethereal intensity with softer hues and blurred, iridescent forms. In these works, whirling wisps of complementary oils fuse the figures to their floral surroundings, visualizing the bonds that Tennent perceived between the body and spirit of Hawaiʻi. In the summer of 1935, several of these canvases traveled from Honolulu to Europe for a series of exhibitions that established her presence on the international art circuit.
Tennent's refusal to feel entirely satisfied with her output, even in the face of widespread acclaim, reflected her conviction that the artist evolves through conscious effort. This conscious evolution became strikingly apparent in the early 1940s, when Tennent's vibrant, swirling colors and thick, granular strokes gave way to a subdued monochrome, as in Three Musicians Subdued in Harmony (1940). Thereafter followed paintings in shades of ocean blues and earthy island sepias on linen, such as Hawaiian Three Graces (1941), Three Hawaiian Women (1941), and Three Hawaiians in a Library (1943). Three Hawaiian Women, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates this stark contrast to the polychromatic blaze of her earlier works and reflects her belief that "every true artist knows that his work must evolve or die. Therefore the moment that he has perfected some type or style of expression peculiar to himself, he must move on or become academic."
Working on a smaller scale in the 1950s, Tennent executed a series of portraits featuring Hawaiian aliʻi in oils, prints, and watercolors; she depicted Hawaiian royalty as figures of heroic proportions and serene countenance, conveying what she called "a gentleness that tends to make a predominance of convex lines, only seen in the great art of the world." Until her death in 1972, Tennent continued to diversify across media and scale, but she never strayed from her Hawaiian subjects.
Artistic creed
In her 1949 autobiography, Tennent articulated a twelve-point artistic creed summarizing her aims and working principles:
To make heavy forms lyric. To discover fourth-dimensional interest and to make it animate, bringing it down from its imaginative dimensions to a three-dimensional technique in color, form, and rhythm. To attempt something profound and universal in a usual and typical Hawaiian subject. To organize and paint a big subject as one would conduct a symphony. The two in a last analysis being very much akin. To make color perform, where possible, the work of tone. To give vibration and coloural movement, as it is in nature.