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  • Harmony in Grey

  • n.d.
  • Eliot Candee Clark (American 1883-1980)
  • Oil on academy board
  • 40.5 x 50.8 cm., 16 x 20" sight
  • Lent Courtesy of Dan and Ruth Lee through the Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts

Essay by Daniel Lee, Professor of Religion and Marion Taft Cannon Chair in the Humanities

Favorite paintings are like old friends-it's good to see them again and again. One of my favorite paintings is Harmony in Grey (circa 1912) by Eliot Candee Clark (1883-1980). Depicting an autumn landscape in the gray light of evening, it captures the eye as the viewer visually walks through the various layers of the painting. In the foreground is a stream with slender trees along its banks. The trees have lost most of their leaves. Across the stream is a field with two cows grazing near a small white house with a brown roof. I don't know who lives there. The house does appear to be inhabited. If you look carefully, you can see a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney. In the distance are tree-covered hills, with many of the trees wearing their autumn colors.

An American impressionist influenced by the work of James McNeill Whistler and John Henry Twachtman (who was a family friend), Clark excelled in the use of chromatic grays, achieved by mixing together complementary colors. The son of landscape painter Walter Clark and Jennifer Woodruff Clark, who was a student of psychic phenomena, Clark was a precocious artist who by the age of thirteen exhibited with the National Academy of Design and the New York Watercolor Club. In 1897, he studied with Twachtman at the Art Students League in New York City, which was his only formal training. In 1904, Clark left for Europe, where he spent two years painting and traveling. He was not yet thirty when he won the first of many national awards for his artwork. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson purchased one of his paintings. Clark served as president of the American Watercolor Society from 1920 to 1923, as president of Allied Artists of America from 1948 to 1952, as an ex officio trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and as president of the National Academy of Design from 1956 to 1959. After living in New York and Connecticut for nearly fifty years, he moved to Virginia in 1933, where he continued to paint landscapes until shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of 97.