Harry Willson Watrous (17 September 1857 – 10 May 1940) was an American visual artist who received an academic education in France. His paintings included genre scenes, stylized figural works, landscapes, nocturnes, portraits, religious subjects, and still lifes. His 1913 painting The Drop Sinister, What Shall We Do with It? has been called the first known portrait of an American interracial family. He is perhaps best known for his enigmatic paintings of sophisticated women, often darkly dressed and seen in profile.
Education and career
Harry Watrous was born in San Francisco in 1857, the son of Charles and Ruth Willson Watrous. He had two brothers, Charles (1854–56) and Walter (1860–1903). Harry's father had been a whaler in his youth and made his fortune during the California Gold Rush."Charles Watrous Obituary," The Sun (New York), 17 August 1891, p. 3. The family moved to New York City in 1864, where his father's wealth allowed the young Watrous to be educated in private schools and to pursue an artistic career at his own pace, without having to worry about making a living.
He traveled to Spain with the deaf American artist Henry Humphrey Moore in 1881, and then to Paris, where he studied under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre at the Académie Julian, and in Léon Bonnat's atelier.Levy, Florence N., editor. American Art Annual, 1903-1904, vol. IV, part II, p. 78. He had paintings accepted at the Paris Salons of 1884 and 1885. He was strongly influenced first by Marià Fortuny and then by Jean Louis Meissonier, who predicted that "someday this young man will be the American Meissonier." Watrous would later contribute a chapter about Meissonier to the book Modern French Masters.Watrous, pp. 91-101. He returned to the United States in 1886.
Beginning in 1883, Watrous painted small genre pictures, "amazing in their almost microscopic detail.""H.W. Watrous Dies; Noted Painter, 83," New York Times, 10 May 1940. These works "of cabinet size…descended directly from such seventeenth-century masters as Metsu, Terborch, and Vermeer," and later, Vibert and Meissonier.It is not a simple matter to reproduce with oil paint the sheen of satins and silks, the softness of furs and the richness of velvets, especially when it comes to doing it on a small canvas with the minute precision required in a picture that is intended to be seen at close range.…The strain upon an artist's eyes in doing such miniature-like work is very great and in the case of Mr. Watrous effectually prevented his continuing it, having seriously affected his sight.
This impairment of his vision began in 1905"Among the Artists," American Art News, Vol. 4, No. 12 (30 December 1905), p. 3. and was temporary,"Watrous, 80, Plans His First Art Show," New York Times, 20 January 1937. but did prompt Watrous to stop painting tiny, minutely detailed genre scenes, and to work on a larger scale and in a broader manner, producing from 1905 to 1918 the idealized female figures for which he is best known. "Perhaps the most original of all his works, these paintings are very enigmatic, suggesting a symbolic intent or at least a psychological strangeness." The paintings often convey a sense of whimsy or quiet melancholy. When the Metropolitan Museum acquired this painting [The Passing of Summer] just after it was completed, the artist explained that in the autumn of 1911 he had observed a woman seated alone at a table in a French restaurant. Watrous asked her, "Well, has Prince Charming appeared?" Her melancholy answer was "No, and this is the passing of summer." This work thus alludes to the fleeting nature of youth and beauty and the loss of opportunity.For a more detailed account, see "The Passing of Summer. An Explanation from Mr. Watrous of the Meaning of His Picture," New York Times, 7 July 1912.
A profile of Watrous from 1923 noted that in these paintingshe displayed a note of humor or of tragedy wholly unknown to his earlier canvases and panels. His humor finds expression in demure revelations of feminine moods and modes, while his recognition of tragic consequences resulting from conscious or unconscious causes is revealed in the two best known of his "problem pictures," called The Dregs and The Drop Sinister…There is a commonly held viewpoint that these particular paintings are of trifling consequence, but those who hold it completely overlook their importance as social records and their rare technique."
Throughout this period, Watrous also painted images of a woman kneeling at prayer. On the first of these, in 1908, American Art News commented, "Harry Watrous' Fair Penitent [aka Devotion] is…well thought out and well painted. There is a decided contrast in this canvas to the risqué Cup of Tea, Cigarette, and She, which Mr. Watrous showed last spring.""Winter Academy Display," American Art News, Vol. 7, No. 11 (26 December 1908), p. 4. The Sun denounced a later example: "The succès de scandale of the Academy [exhibit of 1916]…is called Lead Us Not Into Temptation, a prayer that Mr. Watrous himself should utter each time he feels inclined to paint. It shows a profane young woman in shockingly frivolous gauzes and flamboyant morning cap, kneeling upon a garish prie-dieu for prayers, but judging by the simper upon her foolish face her 'words fly up' while her 'thoughts remain below.' In every way the picture is an offense against good taste.""Academy Show is Lacking in Thrills," The Sun (New York), 16 December 1916, p. 5 The Art World found the same painting "a work of delicate wit and genial satire…intellectually stimulating art.""Harry Willson Watrous: The Connoisseur," The Art World, Vol. 2, No. 5, 17 August 1917, p. 425.
In 1918, The Moon Path, his "first landscape,""Art Notes," The New York Times, 18 March 1918, p. 11. marked a "new departure for Harry Watrous, a moonlit landscape in the manner of [Ralph] Blakelock,""A Wartime Academy," American Art News, Vol. 16, No. 23 (16 March 1918), p. 2. and until 1923 he painted mainly landscapes and nocturnes. "In their evocative mood, boldly designed compositions, and use of light and dark contrasts, these paintings resemble the work of his friend Blakelock, although Watrous retained the sharp outlines and smooth paint surfaces characteristic of his own early work." Long bedeviled by mental illness, Blakelock died in 1919. Watrous's nocturnes and landscapes in the style of Blakelock may be seen as elegiac and posthumous tributes.
"Around 1923 he began to paint still lifes, usually arrangements of the antique decorative objects he eagerly collected," including a number of Buddhist images. Several objects, tapestries, and pieces of furniture appear in more than one painting, as Watrous recombined them for different effects over the years.
In the 1930s, employing devices that recall "works by earlier American trompe-l'œil ("deceive the eye") painters," he created images of weathered religious icons. The Celebration of the Mass (1930-1935), now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was included in the 1943 exhibit "American Realists and Magic Realists" at MOMA.Miller and Barr, editors. American Realists and Magic Realists, p. 21, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943. He also painted a number of Madonna and Child polychromatic statues. "Exploring a new vein, he exercised a new power and in spite of advancing years made these religious pictures the best of his career."Harry Watrous obituary, New York Herald-Tribune, 12 May 1940.
It was not until he was 80, in 1937, that Watrous had a one-man show, at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York. A reviewer in The New York Times wrote: "Irradiating all that he does is the strong and progressive spirit of the painter himself; a painter who has held fast to the principles in which he believes, yet who has never seemed to fall into inelastic, ossified rote; never, really, to have grown old."Jewel, Edward Alden. "His Own Exhibition Given by Watrous," New York Times, 2 February 1937. Another piece on the exhibit in The New York Times declared, "No American artist is more deeply respected or widely loved than he.…One need not hesitate for a moment to decide that Harry Watrous is doing the best work of his career right now.""Watrous and Eilshemius," New York Times, 7 February 1937.
Watrous was known to have painted only three portraits—one of his brother-in-law, William Gilman Nichols (now in a private collection); Portrait of Mrs. Harry W. Watrous, given by Watrous to the Sweat Museum (now the Portland Museum of Art) along with The Drop Sinister in 1919;American Art Annual vol. 16 (1919), p. 29 Portrait of My Mother ("a beautiful piece of work technically and having so gracious and tender a spirit that it becomes the one portrait in a thousand that really records the individual"),"Watrous in Retrospect," The Art News, Vol. 22, No. 4, 3 November 1923, p. 2. given by Watrous to the Corcoran Gallery in 1926.
The Drop Sinister
Around 1913, Watrous painted The Drop Sinister, What Shall We Do with It?, which was visually similar to his other works at the time, but, by addressing an issue of social and moral concern, was unique among his paintings. It is said to be the first known portrait of an American interracial family. The father wears a clerical collar and holds a Christian newspaper in his hand; on the wall is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and a quotation, "And God said, Let us make man in our own image after our likeness."
The painting caused a stir when it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design and at the Century Club in New York. "Harry W. Watrous preaches and paints well an interesting sermon on the negro question in The Drop Sinister," commented American Art News,""The Spring Academy," American Art News, Vol. 12, No. 24 (Mar. 21, 1914), p. 2. which also called it "one of his best canvases.""Exhibitions Now On," American Art News, Vol. 12, No. 19 (Feb. 14, 1914), p. 6. This "study in the fruits of miscegenation…caused an extraordinary amount of discussion, residents of one typically Southern city threatening to wreck the art museum if it was shown there."M'Cormick, William B. "Watrous, Public Force in Art," International Studio 78 (Oct. 1923), pp. 79-83.
The painting appears to depict a mixed marriage, which was illegal in many states at the time. The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P. journal edited by W.E.B. DuBois, had a different idea about what was going on in the picture:The people in this picture are all "colored"; that is to say the ancestors of all of them two or three generations ago numbered among them full-blooded Negroes. These "colored" folk married and brought to the world a little golden-haired child; today they pause for a moment and sit aghast when they think of this child's future. What is she? A Negro? No, she is "white." But is she white? The United States Census says she is a "Negro." What earthly difference does it make what she is, so long as she grows up a good, true, capable woman? But her chances for doing this are small! Why? Because 90,000,000 of her neighbors, good Christian, noble, civilized people are going to insult her, seek to ruin her and slam the door of opportunity in her face the moment they discover "The Drop Sinister."
Academic offices and awards; controversies