Background

Robert William Vonnoh was born on September 17, 1858 at Hartford, Connecticut. He was the son of William and Frederika (Haug) Vonnoh.

Education

The family moved in Robert's boyhood to Boston, where he attended the public schools. At the age of fourteen, admiring another boy's drawings, he decided to be an artist, and his mother permitted him to enter a lithographer's shop. In 1877, he entered the recently established Massachusetts Normal Art School (later the Massachusetts School of Art), from which he was graduated in 1879.

Meanwhile he taught in the Boston Free Evening Drawing School in Roxbury and at Thayer Academy, South Braintree. With money he had saved he went to Paris in 1881, and became a pupil of Boulanger and Lefebvre at the Academie Julian, but an unfortunate investment of his fund brought him home after two years. Four years of study at Paris followed.

In 1891, Vonnoh took an instructorship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, which he held through 1894.

Career

During 1883-85, Vonnoh was principal of the East Boston Evening Drawing School; during 1884-85, he taught at the Cowles Art School, and in 1886-87, at the school of drawing and painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. During his professional career, he painted upwards of 500 portraits, many of them of great distinction.

Many of his pupils, among them W. J. Glackens and Maxfield Parrish, became well-known artists. He later returned to the Pennsylvania Academy for two more years as instructor (1918 - 20). One of his latest works, painted con amore at the request of the alumni association, was the likeness of Walter Smith, English-born founder of the Normal Art School.

At the presentation of this work, during the semi-centennial celebration of the school in December 1925, the artist gave personal reminiscences of his days as an art student in Boston.

Vonnoh's last years were spent at Gruz-sur-Loing, France; he died on December 28, 1933 at Nice from a heart attack.

Achievements

• Robert Vonnoh has been listed as a notable painter by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

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  • An Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Robert Vonnoh and Bessie Potter Vonnoh and of Paintings by Ernest Lawson and W. Murray Smith of London, E

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Grez days: Robert Vonnoh in France

    (Catalog of 30 paintings exhibited. Exhibition of Impressi...)

  • book

Views

Vonnoh's point of view as a creative painter was succinctly set forth in his article, "The Relation of Art to Existence". Pleading vigorously for vocational training, this amounted to a well-written diatribe against the forms of literary education prevalent in colleges and schools.

Quotations: "It is not so important to know how to read and write if one must know it at the expense of genuinely productive work. Literary education teaches children how to tell others to do things that they themselves cannot do".

Personality

Vonnoh himself was a man of great personal charm and cultivation, with marked linguistic ability. He maintained studios at New York and Los Angeles, and he was one of the founders of the summer art colony at Lyme, Connecticut. Robert Vonnoh and his second wife had the distinction of being the only man and wife who were members of the National Academy of Design.

Vonnoh's portraits were strong and serious, never daring or experimental. He painted many landscapes, some of them of great charm. Always interested in problems of craftsmanship, he made his own frames, which were thoroughly consistent with the tonality of his pictures. Failing eyesight from 1925 onward brought to a rather somber close a career that had been remarkably productive and fortunate.

Connections

Vonnoh married, July 7, 1886, Grace D. Farrell. His second marriage, September 17, 1899, was to Bessie O. Potter, American sculptor.

Father:

William Vonnoh

Mother:

Frederika (Haug) Vonnoh

Wife:

Bessie Potter Vonnoh

August 17, 1872 – March 8, 1955

Was an American sculptor best known for her small bronzes, mostly of domestic scenes, and for her garden fountains.

Wife:

Grace D. Farrell