Charles Sydney Hopkinson
(July 27 1869 - October 16 1962) was an
American
portrait
painter and landscape watercolorist. He maintained a studio
in the Fenway
Studios
building in Boston
from 1906 to
1962. He painted over 800 portraits in a direct style with a
palette gradually lightening through his career. Many of his
paintings were commissioned by U. S.
East Coast
institutions, especially Harvard University
, where he acted as house portraitist. Among
his sitters were
Oliver
Wendell Holmes,
Calvin Coolidge,
and
John Masefield.
Early life
Born in
Cambridge,
Massachusetts
, he graduated the Hopkinson School started by his
father. He began to draw for the Harvard Lampoon
upon his entrance to Harvard in 1888, and in
1891, he moved to New
York
to study at the Art Students' League where he
worked with John Henry
Twachtman and H.
Siddons Mowbray.
Hopkinson
studied at the Académie Julian
in Paris
with
Edmond Aman-Jean, traveled to
Brittany, and exhibited in the 1895 Paris
Salon.
Career
In the late 1890s he worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts and showed
his paintings in New York at the
Society of American Artists and
also in Boston. He was a Member of the
Boston Art Club and was involved in the
promotion of Modern Art in Boston and Cambridge.
He
returned to Europe in 1901, where he visited Spain
to study the
painting of Velázquez and
El Greco and traveled through Brittany, and
the Netherlands
to see portraits by his "heroes", Frans Hals and Rembrandt.
Hopkinson then began a lucrative career as a portrait painter in
Cambridge winning awards like the
Logan Medal of the arts (1926), and
soon his first commission being a baby portrait in 1896 of poet
E. E.
Cummings, a work that is in the
Massachusetts
Historical Society.
Adopting the colour theories of his former neighbour
Denman Ross, who had become a prominent
collector and a teacher at Harvard, Hopkinson later used the
results of Carl Cutler's experiments with a spinning disk to study
the color spectrum.
He exhibited regularly in the national annuals and at several
Boston and New York galleries. His watercolors were described as
"modern" in the press and he exhibited three oils in the 1913
Armory Show. Instead of allying himself with the local established
painters, Hopkinson showed his work with the "Boston Five", a group
of young watercolorists though he continued to paint in oil for an
elite clientele.
In 1919
the National Art Commission
selected him to paint some of the participants of the Peace
Conference at Versailles, France
.
In the mid 1920s, Hopkinson took on a young Boston painter
Pietro Pezzati as his assistant, who worked
with him at his Fenway studio.
Hopkinson would pass on his studio to Pezzati
when he died in October 1962, in Beverly, Massachusetts
.
References
External links
Wikis
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