Theodore Wendel

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, painter Theodore Wendel was a pioneer in the development in the United States of a new approach to landscape painting, inspired initially by the loose, open brushwork, bright color, and attention to local settings associated with impressionist painter Claude Monet (1848–1926). Wendel was born in Midway, Ohio, where his father, a German immigrant, ran a general store. He studied art in Cincinnati and there met the influential painter Frank Duveneck. In 1878, when Duveneck returned to Munich, Germany, where he had studied earlier in the decade, Wendel and his friend Joseph DeCamp joined him along with other Midwestern painters in an informal group known as the “Duveneck Boys.”

Wendel took up etching, a print medium, in addition to painting. Working in Venice and Florence as well as Germany, he remained in Europe until 1882, when he returned to the United States to work successively in Newport, Rhode Island, New York City, Cincinnati, and Boston. In 1886 he enrolled in the Académie Julian in Paris and spent the summers of 1887 and 1888 in the rural Normandy village of Giverny, Monet’s adopted home. The landscape paintings Wendel made there are considered among the earliest by an American artist to incorporate the strategies of impressionism. When he returned to Boston in late 1888 and exhibited his French paintings in his studio in 1889, critics acknowledged Wendel’s full conversion to the new mode, evident especially in his use of bright colors and purple-blue shadows.

Based in Boston, where he was an instructor at Wellesley College and at the Cowles Art School, Wendel also taught and painted at Newport, and at Cape Ann and Gloucester, Massachusetts. Boston galleries welcomed the works of the American artists associated with Giverny, and Wendel’s paintings, pastels, and watercolors of coastal and rural settings were well received by critics. Borrowing some of Monet’s subjects and technical strategies, Wendel’s paintings typify the American approach to impressionism in incorporating also the poetic, lyrical, shadowy effects associated with the movement known as tonalism.

In 1897, the artist married and made a two-year visit to Europe, touring France and Italy. On his return, he settled on a farm in coastal Ipswich, Massachusetts. There he became one of a group of landscape painters who mined the local scenery for their experimental application of new trends in landscape painting. Ipswich’s rural landscapes and village life inspired some of Wendel’s finest works. The artist retained his Boston studio, but a fire destroyed much of his earlier work, contributing to his relative obscurity today. His late work was well received, however, and garnered many prizes, including a silver medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. That year, the Guild of Boston Artists honored Wendel with a solo exhibition of his works. The artist was active until 1917, when illness greatly curtailed his output.