Hugh Breckenridge
American, 1870 - 1937
Throughout his lengthy career, Breckenridge progressed artistically from impressionist to 'abstracted' to wholly non-representational styles of landscape, still life, figure studies, compositions and portraits. Many works from each phase and category were regularly displayed publicly not only in Philadelphia, but also in legions of other regional, national, and international exhibitions. As a result, Breckenridge corralled volumes of admiring reviews and a host of important awards and medals.
Breckenridge was also a member of several pivotal art organizations and exhibition juries. In addition, for decades he was an esteemed art teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy, the Darby [Pa.] School of Painting [with Thomas Anshutz], and the Breckenridge School of Art [by himself] at Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Over the years his associates [some of whom were his former pupils] included Thomas Anshutz, Arthur B. Carles, William Merritt Chase, Charles Demuth, Charles Grafly, Robert Henri, John Marin, Walter Elmer Schofield, John Sloan and many other leading lights of Philadelphia and East Coast art. His students, who almost without exception adored their master, altogether must have numbered in the thousands. Without doubt Breckenridge was a widely known and respected member of this country's artistic community during most of his active life.
Yet Breckenridge has received little attention from art historians, despite the increased popular interest in American art in recent years. It is true that his posthumous anonymity has been partially alleviated by a retrospective show of his work in Dallas in 1967, and more recently by a display of 'Pennsylvania Academy Moderns' in 1975, and by two important Bicentennial exhibitions in Philadelphia, which included examples from that of a dozen years ago; he is forgotten. His once stellar reputation has suffered, in Anne d'Harnoncourt's apt phrase, 'a virtual eclipse'.
The adult Breckenridge recalled that as a Leesburg youngster he was 'always drawing at school, like most boys,' but by age fifteen he founded himself able to think of nothing but drawing and painting - much to the detriment of his school work. How did this distracted youth become some thirty years later, a jewel in Philadelphia's cultural crown, and a frequently featured 'performer' in the city's newspapers? [e.g.., 'Master of Color and Draftsmanship', 1922]. Certainly the key was his enrollment, through the urging of his teacher in Leesburg, Paul Laughlin, as a student in the Pennsylvania Academy in the Fall of 1887. This modes event was the beginning of an association that was to endure for half a century.
. . . Ultimately, however, Breckenridge remained loyal to more contemplative and traditional subject matter. His later works were often floral still lifes, or depictions of the Gloucester harbor in Massachusetts, which was only an open door or window away from his waterfront studio. Gloucester was the location of many of Breckenridge's most treasured associations, especially those connected with his art school. 'Gloucester has everything the artist wants except mountains,' he told an interviewer in 1926, and obviously his opinion changed little over the last decade of his life.
His paintings of the harbor were usually based upon his own photographs of the subject, but in most cases the representational aspects were secondary to the breadth of form of the sails, hulls, clouds and water, and, of course, to the luxuriant colors that can be found in "Red Sails" of 1925, for example. His pictures of Gloucester are nostalgic, vibrant, and shimmering outdoor still lifes.
Although in these works one may discern influences from Cezanne, Derian and Feininger, among others, the ultimate sources for Breckenridge's harbor scenes are Monet's views of Holland, Argenteuil and La Grenouilliere. Thus, at the end of his career, he returned to his own artistic beginnings in impressionism.
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