Frank Benson

Painter of portraits, interior views, figural landscapes, and sporting scenes, Frank Weston Benson was a central figure in the Boston-area development of impressionism, the painting of everyday, contemporary subjects with an emphasis on informality and transient light effects. Benson was the son of a prosperous cotton broker and grew up in Salem, on the Massachusetts coast. Encouraged by his mother, an amateur painter, Benson began his art studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There he met Edmund C. Tarbell, who would greatly influence his work. Benson continued his training in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian and in the studios of French academic painters. During the summer months he painted at Concarneau, on the Brittany coast, site of a thriving artists’ colony.

Benson returned to the United States in 1885 and eventually settled in his hometown of Salem. He began his long and successful career as a teacher with positions at the Portland Society of Art in Maine and then at the Boston Museum school, where he remained until 1912. As a painter, Benson was well-received from the start; for example, he won the Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design in New York City the first year he exhibited in that institution’s annual show. Numerous other awards soon followed, and Benson was elected a full member of the academy in 1905. Teaching and exhibiting with Tarbell, with whom he shared a studio, Benson was a leading member of what was known as the Boston School or the “Tarbellites,” a group of Boston-area painters forging a local impressionist idiom through the portrayal of figures in quiet, genteel interiors and subdued light.

 In his early portraits and interiors, typically showing female figures illuminated by firelight, Benson contrasted dramatic lights and shadows using fluidly applied pigment. In the mid-1890s, when he was working on a commissioned pair of murals for the Library of Congress, the artist produced several decorative treatments of idealized women in landscapes. Within a few years, however, these gave way to more spontaneous, loosely painted treatments. Benson is best known today for his portrayals of his wife and children posed in the full sunlight and breezy fresh air of summertime on North Haven Island, Maine, where in 1901 he began to spend his summers. In their out-of-doors execution and bright, luminous color, as well as their informal, contemporary subjects, these works demonstrate Benson’s full embrace of impressionism, then a dominant mode in American art. In 1897 Benson was a founding member of Ten American Painters, or The Ten, a group of American impressionist painters that exhibited together until 1918.

As early as the 1890s, Benson also painted works inspired by his own passions for life in the outdoors. Sportsmen and wildlife, especially birds, were important subjects also in his work in watercolor and etching (a print medium), which remained in great demand throughout his career. One of the most consistently popular artists of his era, Benson was honored with several retrospective exhibitions in his lifetime.