Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Frank Benson studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School under Otto Grundmann (1844 1890). There he befriended Edmund Tarbell (1862- 1938), who was also destined to become one of the most important American Impressionists. After a period of study at the Academie Julian in Paris with Gustave Boulanger (1824-1888) and Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1912), Benson settled in Boston, where he taught at the Boston Museum School from 1889 until 1917. He was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1897, and a full academician in 1905. Noted for his plein-air landscapes, Benson is best remembered as one of the Ten American Painters, a group of Impressionists with whom he exhibited between 1898 and 1919. He also exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Art Club, the Cleveland Art Association, the Boston Art Club, and many other organizations. Benson began etching in 1912 and became a master of the medium. After 1921 he increasingly turned his attention to watercolor.

Biography courtesy of Schwarz Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/schwarzphila

Frank Weston Benson, born in 1862, was one of the first American Impressionists as well as an etcher and teacher. He studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and at Academie Julian. His plein-air paintings are best known for female figures on hilltops, which he began in 1903. He stayed at the BMFA to teach and became a member of the "Ten American Painters". He exhibited with "The Ten" 41 times between 1898-1919. After 1912, Benson began to paint more wildlife and also developed his etching and watercolor work. "Portrait in White" (1889) is a study of his wife on their first anniversary and is often compared to James Whistler's style of "art for art's sake". He pays special attention to the blue-white of his wife's dress and the yellow-white of the chair she poses in. Benson also completed murals in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. before his death in 1951.

Biography courtesy of The Caldwell Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/caldwell

Raised in privileged circumstances in Salem, Massachusetts, Frank Benson began his formal training in 1880 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, honing his artistic skills alongside Edmund Tarbell, who would become his lifelong colleague and friend. He continued his training in 1883 at the Academie Julien in Paris. While in Europe, Benson also painted at the artist's colony of Concarneau in Brittany and traveled with Tarbell through Germany, Italy, and England. On his return to America in 1885, he opened a studio in Salem and worked as a portrait painter. The following year he began his long and influential career as a teacher, first at the Portland Society of Arts in Maine, and then at the Boston Museum School, where he and Tarbell taught jointly from 1889 until 1913. During their twenty-four year tenure, the two painters often exhibited together and were closely associated in the critical press as the leaders of the Boston school.

Benson's oil paintings of the 1890s, chiefly women in atmospheric interiors, reveal an interest in decorative design, especially evident in a mural cycle for the Library of Congress, completed in 1896. In 1898, he became a founding member of the Ten American Painters and turned his attention to outdoor subjects. After 1901, when he purchased a summer home on the Maine island of North Haven, Benson developed a mature impressionist style, frequently depicting his wife and children in dazzling sunlight. The paintings of the female members of the family, often dressed in white and silhouetted against a summer landscape, were lauded as ideals of American young womanhood. In the mid-teens Benson turned to sporting scenes, especially salmon fishing and duck hunting, painting them in oil and watercolor. After 1912, he also worked as a printmaker. Benson was one of the most exhibited and most honored painters of his generation, winning almost every significant award of the day in all the mediums in which he worked, a rare achievement for an artist. At the time of his death, he was represented in every major art museum in the country and in many important private collections.

In 1921, while preparing for his annual fishing trip to northern Canada, Benson packed a pad of watercolor paper and a tin of paints. Captivated by the immediacy of the medium, he recorded everything in sight-the salmon, fishermen, canoes, and campsite. Back in Salem, the watercolors continued. He painted flowers from the family garden, his daughters in sunlight, the woods, pond, and autumn colors. When a small collection hung at the Guild of Boston Artists that autumn, William Howe Downs, the dean of the Boston art critics, compared them to Sargent and particularly Homer, noting that "the swift, sure touch with which Benson suggests rather than describes these solitudes of northern woods is very much like Homer's" (Downs, quoted in Berry-Hill, p. 103).

Dog River, Alabama illustrates Benson's mastery of the medium, as well as the effective use of the white of the watercolor paper itself. The river-located off the Gulf of Mexico on Mobile Bay-was one of the artist's favorite fishing spots, and he painted the motif a number of times. Benson utilized a variety of effects when creating his works on paper. Sometimes he used the medium very precisely, as a form of colored drawing. On other occasions he worked in broad washes, letting intensely saturated pigments flow freely across the paper, as in this fine example, where his focus was on the light, hue and atmosphere of the place, rather than its scenic value.
NRS

Sources:
The Art of Frank W. Benson: American Impressionist. Exh. Cat., The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., 2000.

Frank W. Benson: A Retrospective. Exh. Cat., Barry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1989.

Biography courtesy of The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/charleston