The Light Lies Softly:
The Impressionist Art of Clark Greenwood Voorhees (1871-1933)

Hawthorne Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition celebrating the work of Clark Greenwood Voorhees (1871-1933), a founder of the Old Lyme Art Colony and a talented landscapist who melded Tonalism with Impressionism to extraordinary effect. The Light Lies Softly: the Impressionist Art of Clark Greenwood Voorhees, to be on view from December 15, 2009 through February 27, 2010, will be the first significant showing of the artist’s work in three decades. In addition, Hawthorne's exhibition will be the very first gallery to showcase a wide selection of Voorhees’s large-scale oils.

Voorhees, the son of a stockbroker, was born on May 29, 1871, in New York City. He was originally drawn to the sciences, earning a B.A. in Chemistry from Yale and an M.A. in the same subject from Columbia. Increasingly unfulfilled by laboratory work, Voorhees, who had always been dedicated to observation and study of the natural world, devoted more and more of his time to sketching out-of-doors. While still at Columbia, he enrolled in classes at the Art Students League; a few years later, in 1897, he moved to Paris in order to study art at the famed Académie Julian under J.P. Laurens and Benjamin Constant.

An avid cyclist, Voorhees first visited and fell in love with Old Lyme, Connecticut while on a bicycle trip in 1893. He returned several times throughout the 1890s and, in 1896, became the very first of the Old Lyme artists to stay at the now-famous Florence Griswold House, which was soon to become the center of the Old Lyme colony’s artistic life. By the turn of the century, many other artists had followed in Voorhees’s footsteps, setting up studios in Old Lyme and soon forming what American Art scholar William Gerdts has called "the most famous Impressionist-oriented art colony in America."

Voorhees achieved considerable recognition during his lifetime, exhibiting regularly along with the other members of the Old Lyme Art Colony as well as at exhibitions held by the National Academy of Design, the Society of American Artists, the American Watercolor Society, the Carnegie Institute, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He was also the recipient of several honors, including a bronze medal at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. Yet Voorhees’ relative lack of interest in self-promotion, along with his descendants’ determination to hold onto so many of his best paintings, has meant that his work has not always received the attention it deserves. The Light Lies Softly aims to remedy this situation by revealing the beauty of Voorhees’s distinctive brand of Impressionism, one that was tempered by a lasting allegiance to the tenets of Tonalism.

The Light Lies Softly will feature approximately thirty of Voorhees’s paintings, the majority of which will also be offered for sale. Many of these works depict Old Lyme subjects; they are thus reflections of the artist’s lifelong appreciation for the beauty and charm of the Southeastern Connecticut shore. Chadwick House, Old Lyme (Fig. 1), which centers upon the elegant, c. 1830 Greek Revival home of one of Voorhees’s colleagues, presents a quintessentially New England picture while also displaying Voorhees’s tremendous way with color. Voorhees was also quite fond of painting in Newport, Rhode Island, and The Cliff Walk, Newport, R.I. (Fig. 2), which depicts his own wife and children picnicking near the shore’s edge, is another feast for the eyes—the golden-yellow grass, the vividly-blue water, and the dash of red provided by a child’s hat come together in a dazzling re-creation of gentle seaside gaiety.

While, as Chadwick House, Old Lyme and The Cliff Walk, Newport, R.I., demonstrate, Voorhees reveled in the bright hues of daylight, he also became well-known for his painterly soliloquies on moonlight. Winter Moonrise (Fig. 3), which, in contrast to the two works previously discussed, exhibits a more Tonalist (rather than Impressionist) approach to coloration, is almost certainly the painting described in a 1908 New York Times review as follows: “The picture is so large, so simple, and quiet that at first glance it has a look of emptiness, but its dignity and spaciousness grow upon one with every moment of attention given to it.” Voorhees exercised his talents upon subject matter outside of his beloved New England, as well, spending most of his winters painting in Bermuda, and images like Portrait of a House, Bermuda (Fig. 4) bask in the warm glow of the island’s tropical sunshine.

Clark Greenwood Voorhees’s fine coloration and lively brushwork infused every prospect he painted—whether in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Bermuda, or elsewhere—with beauty and energy. Hawthorne hopes that those who visit The Light Lies Softly: the Impressionist Art of Clark Greenwood Voorhees will come away with a renewed appreciation both for Voorhees’s oeuvre in particular and for American Impressionism in general.