Charles Webster Hawthorne

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Charles Webster Hawthorne (January 8, 1872 – November 29, 1930) was an American portrait and genre painter and a noted teacher who founded the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899.

He was born in Maine, started as an office-boy in a stained-glass factory in New York, studied at night school and with Henry Siddons Mowbray and William Merritt Chase, and abroad in both Holland and Italy.

When he was eighteen, Hawthorne went to New York and studied painting at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. Among his teachers were Frank Vincent DuMond and George de Forest Brush. But Hawthorne declared that the most dominant influence in his career was William Merritt Chase, with whom he worked as both a pupil and assistant. Both men were naturally talented teachers and figurative painters who were drawn to rich color and the lusciousness of oil paint as a medium. Chase passed on a Munich tradition of tone values and tone painting, and Hawthorne learned all he could. ^[1]

His winters were spent in Paris and New York City, his summers at Provincetown, Massachusetts, the site of his school.

By 1916 the historic fishing village of Provincetown had become the largest art colony in the world luring such artists as George Ault, Gifford Beal, Reynolds Beal, Henry Demuth, Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Ellen Ravenscroft, Ben Shahn, Agnes Weinrich, and William Zorach to its shores. According to historian Ronald A. Kuchta, "Provincetown is the origin of many famous paintings in the history of the twentieth-century American art, not only the place where they were painted, but where they were first exhibited, discussed and sold." The Cape Cod School of Art was the first outdoor summer school for figure painting and grew into one of the nation's leading art schools. Under thirty years of Hawthorne's guidance, the school attracted some of the most talented art instructors and students in the country including John Noble, Richard Miller, and Max Bohm. At his school, Hawthorne gave weekly criticisms and instructive talks, guiding his pupils and setting up ideals but never imposing his own technique or method.^[2]

Among his works:

"The Trousseau", Metropolitan Museum of Art
"Mother and Child", Syracuse, New York Museum
"Net Mender", Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
"Venetian Girl", Worcester Art Museum
"The Family", Buffalo Fine Arts Academy
"Crew of the Philomena Manta",1915, Provincetown Art Collection
"Fish Cleaners", Provincetown Art Collection
"Untitled (Study of girl in white)", 1927, Provincetown Art Collection
"Girl in Yellow Scarf", 1904, Butler Institute of American Art

His class studio in Provincetown on Miller Hiller Road (currently known as the Hawthorne School of Art) was added August 21, 1978 to the National Register of Historic Places.