Frank Weston Benson, frequently referred to as Frank W. Benson, (March 24, 1862 – November 15, 1951) was an American artist from Salem, Massachusetts, known for his Realistic portraits, American Impressionist paintings, watercolors and etchings. He began his career painting portraits of distinguished families and murals for the Library of Congress. Some of his best known paintings (Eleanor, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Summer, Rhode Island School of Design Museum) depict his daughters outdoors at Benson's summer home, Wooster Farm, on the island of North Haven, Maine. He also produced numerous oil, wash and watercolor paintings and etchings of wildfowl and landscapes.
In 1880, Benson began to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston under both Otto Grundmann and Frederic Crowninshield. In 1883 he travelled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. He enjoyed a distinguished career as an instructor and department head at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was a founding member of the Ten American Painters, American Academy of Arts and Letters and The Guild of Boston Artists.
Frank Weston Benson was born to George Wiggin Benson, a successful cotton broker, and Elisabeth Poole, from families who founded Salem, Massachusetts. Benson obtained his appreciation of the sea from his grandfather, Captain Samuel Benson. When he was 12, he was given a sailboat in which he explored the waterways and marshes and raced against his brother, John Prentiss Benson. To encourage educational activity, Benson's parents gave their children a weekly allowance to foster independent study and hobbies, such as Salem's Hamilton Hall dance classes, Lyceum lectures or equipment for photography. The brothers kept active by participating in sports, as well as fishing and hunting.
Benson's father gave him a shotgun and taught him how to hunt shore birds along the North Shore and wildfowl in the local fields and marshes. He spent nearly all of his weekends hunting or fishing in the fields, marshes and streams. To his good friend Dan Henderson, he wrote of their childhood adventures:
"We used to spend our Saturdays chasing coot and old squaws in Salem Harbor. Then, after working hard all day to get one bird, in we would assemble at Sam Shrum’s or mine and chew the rag until we were so sleepy we could not hold up our heads. What a minute account each had to give of each movement of every bird seen and every shot missed. It was almost criminal to miss an easy shot in those days, so many excuses had to be invented. One word would have served for all in my case if it had been invented then, I was generally 'rattled,' I think, when you and I went ducking."
His brother, John Prentiss Benson, was an architect and painter in his own right. Both sons may have been influenced by their mother, Elisabeth Poole Benson, who Frank once remarked, had "a little room" on the top floor of their house where she would go to paint and "forget about the rest of the world".
An avid birdwatcher and wildfowl hunter, Benson wanted to be an ornithological illustrator. At the age of 16, he painted Rail, one of his first oil paintings, after a hunting trip. He began his studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1880, and there befriended Joseph Lindon Smith, Robert Reid and Edmund Charles Tarbell. Capitalizing on what he learned, Benson held drawing classes in Salem and painted landscapes during the summer of 1882.
On Benson's 21st birthday his parents gave him a gift of $2,000 to study in Europe. He traveled to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian from 1883 to 1884 with Edmund Tarbell and Joseph Lindon Smith; Joseph Lindon Smith and Benson shared an apartment. At the Academy, Benson studied under Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, William Turner Dannat, and Gustave Boulanger. Gustave Boulanger, one of Benson's teachers at Académie Julian, said to him: "Young man, your career is in your hands... you will do very well." After his study at Académie Julian, Benson traveled to England's Royal Academy to see his painting "After the Storm" on exhibit. He also spent time in Italy, Belgium, Germany, and Brittany.
Benson was "deeply influenced" by Johannes Vermeer and Diego Velázquez, masters from the seventeenth-century. Vermeer painted few works during his lifetime, about 35-36 [universally accepted] paintings, but nearly each of them has become a masterpiece. The Dutch artist from Delft was astute in his depiction of light and "poetic quality" of his subjects.
Impressionism, particularly the work of Claude Monet, played a role in the development of Benson's own American Impressionistic style. He capitalized on Monet's color palette and brush strokes and keenly depicted "reflected light", yet maintained some detail in the composition. Per Chambers, Benson represented American people with an "ideal of grace, of dignity, of elegance."
Benson's watercolors reminded some critics of Winslow Homer's works.
Benson was not one to experiment with emerging art forms, like Cubism, Expressionism and Fauvism. As American Impressionism extended to Post-Impressionism about 1913, Benson stayed with traditional genres and his American Impressionist style. As a result, "The pretty, genteel life that Benson had depicted was criticized. Benson's reaction was to turn to nature, and birds replaced the women and children as his objects of interest." said Dean Lahikainen, curator of the Peabody Essex Museum.
In the summer of 1884 Benson painted at Concarneau, along with Willard Metcalf and Edward Simmons. While there, Benson became engaged to the daughter of friends from Salem, Massachusetts, Ellen Perry Peirson. They married in 1888 when Benson had established himself in his career and raised four children: Eleanor (born 1890), George (born 1891), Elisabeth (born 1892) and Sylvia (born 1898).
Benson became a Portland, Maine, School of Art instructor in 1886. The spring of 1889 he began teaching antique drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and in 1890 became head of the Painting department. The school's reputation grew and its enrollment tripled under the leadership of Philip Hale, Benson and Edmund C. Tarbell. Students were assessed on the basis of their skill and placed at the appropriate level (from low to high): Hale had a class for beginners, Benson concentrated on how to depict figures while Tarbell covered still lifes. Benson, a favored instructor called "Cher Maitre" ("Dear Master") by his students, taught until 1913. Among his pupils were the portraitist Marie Danforth Page and the miniaturist Bertha Coolidge.
William H. Gerdts, art historian, wrote of Benson's work in his introduction to Faith Andrews Bedford's biography of the painter: "Frank Benson painted some of the most beautiful pictures ever executed by an American artist. They are images alive with reflections of youth and optimism, projecting a way of life at once innocent and idealized and yet resonant with a sense of certain, selective realities of contemporary times." His work was also part of the art competitions at the 1932 Summer Olympics and the 1936 Summer Olympics.
Benson opened his first studio in Salem in 1886 with his friend, Phillip Little, and began painting portraits, an occupation in which Benson took seriously. He once said: "The more a painter knows about his subject, the more he studies and understands it, the more the true nature of it is perceived by whoever looks at it, even though it is extremely subtle and not easy to see or understand. A painter must search deeply into the aspects of a subject, must know and understand it thoroughly before he can represent it well."
Benson took a Boston studio in 1888 with Edmund C. Tarbell. He gained favorable attention in his first showing at the Society of American Artists in New York, with a piece that suggested the influence of academic Realism.
At the suggestion of his friend Joseph Lindon Smith, Benson spent several summers in Dublin from 1889 to 1893, where he painted with and was influenced by Abbott Thayer. By the early 1890s he began using his family as subjects. Benson later recalled it was then that he realized design was the most important component of painting. Consequently, works of the period evidence a greater interest in and command of pattern, silhouette, and abstract design.