Edwin Howland Blashfield
Brooklyn, New York, 1848 - 1936, South Dennis, Massachusetts
Although Blashfield's mother had always supported his artistic interests, his father was not persuaded to let him embark on a career as an artist until he heard that some of his drawings had been praised by the noted French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. The leading art teacher in Boston at that time was William Morris Hunt, who urged Blashfield to study with one of his pupils, Thomas Johnson. Blashfield took Hunt's advice, and by April 1866 Hunt, who had been one of the first Americans to receive artistic training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, felt that Blashfield was ready to follow in his footsteps. As Blashfield later recalled, Hunt told him to "go straight to Paris. All you learn here you'll have to unlearn" (Cortissoz, pages unnumbered). Hunt also allowed Blashfield to study with him for two months before leaving for Paris on 5 May 1867.
Blashfield had intended to study with Gérôme, but when he arrived at the artist's studio Gérôme told him that he needed further study before enrolling in the École and advised him to study in the atelier of Léon Bonnat. Blashfield remained with Bonnat until 1870, when the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War forced him to leave Paris. After traveling in Belgium, Germany, and Italy, spending eight months in Florence, Blashfield returned to the United States in 1871 and opened up a studio in New York.
He returned to France in 1874 to continue his study with Bonnat and remained there until 1880. His work had some critical success; he began to exhibit at the Paris Salon of 1876 and also exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. Not many of his early works have come to light, but one painting of this period, The Emperor Commodus Leaving the Arena at the Head of the Gladiators, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1878, is now in the Hermitage Foundation Museum in Norfolk, Virginia.
In 1881 Blashfield married Evangeline Wilbour, a writer. Although they settled in New York, the couple made frequent visits to Italy, Greece, and Egypt. They had one child, who died in infancy. Blashfield continued to exhibit allegorical and religious paintings in the Paris salons, but he also did some illustrations for books and for St. Nicholas Magazine. In 1886 he was commissioned to paint a mural for the New York residence of H. McKown Twombly, a friend from his Boston Latin School days and later president of the New York Central Railroad. This was Blashfield's first mural, and it marked the beginning of what was to become his major field of activity.
In 1892 Blashfield and a number of other artists were asked to paint murals in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building of Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The work had to be done in six weeks, and although Blashfield had little experience in this type of work his dome murals illustrating the Art of Metal Working were awarded a bronze medal. At that time there were few murals in American public buildings, but the popularity of Blashfield's work and that of the other artists who worked at the 1893 exhibition marked the beginning of an enthusiasm for mural painting that continued unabated until the 1930s. State capitols, courthouses, libraries, and private homes were decorated with classicizing allegories and recreations of historic events that were enormously popular and considered by contemporary critics to be the most significant products of American artistic genius.
Blashfield was at the center of this "American Mural Renaissance." In 1895-1896 he carried out the murals illustrating the Evolution of Civilization, a band of twelve figures symbolizing the arts and sciences that surround the dome in the main reading room of the Library of Congress. This is his most important extant work and brought him great critical acclaim. In rapid succession followed his murals The Power of the Law (1899) in the Appellate Division Courthouse in New York City; Washington Laying Down His Command at the Feet of Columbia (1902) and The Edict of Toleration of Lord Baltimore (1904) in the courthouse in Baltimore, Maryland; and Minnesota, Granary of the World (1904), Discoverers and Civilizers of the Mississippi (1904), and The Battle of Corinth, Mississippi (1912) in the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, to mention only a few of his major extant commissions. By the turn of the century Blashfield was acknowledged as one of the leading painters in the United States. In 1909 an exhibition of photographs of his work went on tour throughout the country, and his pendentive mural The Law (1910) in the Mahoning County Courthouse, Youngstown, Ohio, won him the New York Architectural League's gold medal of honor. He also designed some mosaics: St. Matthew and the Angels of the Passion in the sanctuary of the Church of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C., was executed in 1914, but the pendentive decorations The Four Evangelists were not completed until 1926.
Blashfield was active as a writer and co-wrote, with his wife, and illustrated articles in Scribner's Magazine and Century Magazine from 1887 to 1896. In 1896, with Albert A. Hopkins, the Blashfields published a four-volume edited selection of seventy of sixteenth-century Italian artist Giorgio Vasari's biographies of Renaissance artists, a book that is still useful to scholars of Italian art. They also collaborated on Italian Cities (1902), and in 1913 Edwin Blashfield published Mural Painting in America, a work of considerable importance in the history of the American mural movement.
Blashfield promoted the development of the visual arts in the United States and was admired and respected by his fellow artists. He was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1888 and served as its president from 1920 until 1926. In 1895-1896 he was the president of the Society of American Artists. In 1912 President William Howard Taft appointed him a member of the National Commission of Fine Arts, and he was president of the national Institute of Arts and Letters from 1914 until 1916. During World War I he was an associate chair of the Division of Pictorial Publicity, an organization of artists who volunteered their services to the government to create visual publicity to support the war effort. His allegorical painting Carry On was the first painting dealing with war themes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased, and it was considered by some critics as the finest American painting of the war.
Blashfield's wife died in 1918, and in 1928 he married again. He and his second wife, Grace Hall, lived at 50 Central Park West in New York. Throughout the 1920s Blashfield continued to be honored for his work and his service to the profession; in 1926 he was awarded a doctorate in fine arts from New York University, and that same year the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored him with a major retrospective exhibition. He was also at various times vice president of the American Federation of Arts, a member of the Federation of Fine Arts of New York, and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. Blashfield lectured on art at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other universities, and in 1934 he received the gold medal from the National Academy of Design for "distinguished services to the fine arts," an honor that had previously been given only to Elihu Root and Samuel F. B. Morse.
But by then Blashfield's reputation was beginning to fade, and critics were already proclaiming that his work was hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-date. He died at his summer home at South Dennis, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. After his death his reputation continued to decline, and by the 1950s his work was considered by many to epitomize the art style that the progressive American artists of the early twentieth century had overthrown. In the late twentieth century, though, as art historians and critics began to reappraise the academic art of the late nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, there was a notable revival of interest in his work, particularly his murals. His role as a major spokesman for the American mural movement is now widely recognized, as is his importance in the formation of American artistic ideals during the Age of Elegance.
Bibliography
Blashfield's correspondence, diaries, letters, notes on art, and miscellaneous papers are in the New-York Historical Society. Among the Lockman papers in the New-York Historical Society there is the text of a Blashfield interview with DeWitt McClellan Lockman in July 1927 (Archives of American Art microfilm). H. Barbara Weinberg, The American Pupils of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1984), has some information about Blashfield's student days in Paris. For Blashfield's mural paintings, see Frank J. Mather, Edwin Blashfield and Mural Painting in America (1913), and most important, Leonard N. Amico, The Mural Decorations of Edwin Howland Blashfield (1848-1936), an exhibition catalog for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. (1978), which includes an extensive bibliography and a chronological list of the artist's known murals, extant and destroyed. Royal Cortissoz, The Works of Edwin Howland Blashfield (1937), is useful primarily for the illustrations. For the murals in the Library of Congress, see Sarah J. Moore, "In Search of an American Iconography: Critical Reaction to the Murals at the Library of Congress," Winterthur Portfolio 25 (Winter 1990): 231-39. Blashfield's obituary is in the New York Times, 13 Oct. 1936, and it remains the only attempt to compile a complete list of his works.
Eric Van Schaack
Citation:
Eric Van Schaack. "Blashfield, Edwin Howland";
http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00077.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 10:39:55 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.
Person TypeIndividual
Last Updated8/7/24
Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, 1846 - 1912
Florence, 1856 - 1925, London
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1862 - 1929, Clifton Springs, New York
Dublin, 1848 - 1907, Cornish, New Hampshire
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