Fleischer Museum Exhibitions
The Daywood Collection
Huntington Museum of Art
The following has been extracted from the brochure used during the exhibition.
Frank Weston Benson, The Watcher, oil
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The Daywood Collection was the gift of Ruth Woods Dayton to the Huntington Museum of Art in 1966. Assembled by her husband, Arthur S. Dayton, and Mrs. Dayton, this rich group of paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and glass reveals the Daytons' emotional and intellectual response to art. This national tour has a two-fold importance. It will allow for the first time a large selection of paintings drawn from the collection to be shown to a wider audience beyond our region and scholars of American art will have the opportunity to study works which have otherwise been largely inaccessible. This is largely due to the specific gift agreement which determines that the collection will be on view in the Museum at least six months of each year. The exhibition schedule, divided into two parts, will allow the tour while honoring the trust.
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Robert Henri, Kathleen, oil
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A native of Philippi, West Virginia, Arthur Spencer Dayton (1887-1948) followed the family tradition of a career in law. He graduated from Yale University with a Master's Degree and took his LL.B. from West Virginia University. During his career as a lawyer in Charleston, West Virginia, he distinguished himself through his writings for the legal profession and as a leader in the state's Republican Party. Always a serious student of the arts, Arthur Dayton began as opportunity came his way, to purchase the best he could afford. He pursued the finest literary works -- rare folios, early English chronicles and first editions -- as well as his quest for artworks. He organized the first Charleston Art Association (later Allied Artists of West Virginia), and frequently gave talks on cultural topics to students, laymen and professionals. He was a forceful and persuasive speaker, and by those who knew him best, this was said of him, "Arthur really loved books and art."
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The Daytons loved art for the pure joy of it, and for its emotional impact. It was interwoven into their lives, and they recognized its power to influence. Purchasing works of art as they could afford, the Daytons attempted to secure the best works available of artists they wished to include in their growing collection. They dealt with pretigious New York galleries and bought at renowned museum exhibitions, such as the Carnegie International. Many of the works were bought directly from the artists and some works were later accepted as gifts. Arthur Dayton maintained a notebook on the correspondence and provenance of most of the works which is now in the archives of the Huntington Museum of Art's reference library. The Collection is chiefly representational of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American art, but there are also important European works. According to Robert McIntyre, director of McBeth Gallery in New York City, delivering a eulogy to Arthur Dayton in 1951, "this personal approach to collecting was perhaps why the 'radical' art then current held so little appeal to him, because it was not in harmony with his own philosophy of art and life." The Daytons viewed the new art as being too tentative, too experimental, and filled with a philosophy of despair at a time when art's uplifting influence was needed.
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J.Alden Weir, June, Connecticut,oil |
Ruth Dayton (1894-1978), also of Philippi, graduated in Lewisburg in historic Greenbrier County from what would later become Greenbrier College. Sharing a love of literature and the arts with her husband, she supported a variety of cultural progarms in the state. A local historian, she wrote several books and articles about the history of West Virginia's pioneers and their homes. Upon the death of her husband in 1948, she moved to Lewisburg and established in 1951 the Daywood Gallery as a memorial. She placed all the works on display in the private residence-turned gallery and published an initial catalogue of the works they had collected. In 1964, a second catalogue was published which now revealed an entirely different situation because, happily, the collection had not remained static, but had steadily increased in stature and substance.
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For example, a special fund was developed solely for the purchase of works by "The Eight," a group of American painters who are recognized as one of the twentieth century's first major art groups. This important American school is represented in this exhibition by paintings by Arthur B. Davies, Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan and Ernest Lawson. They responded to the life of the modern urban setting and were also known as the "Ashcan School," a nickname that described the earthy subjects which they favored. By the time the Dayton gift was made to the Huntington Museum of Art the "Daywood" collection had grown to approximately eighty paintings, 160 drawings and prints, ten bronzes and ninety-three pieces of cut glass.
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This selected exhibition concentrates on American paintings made in the second half of the nineteenth century by such notable landscape artists as George Inness, Homer Dodge Martin and Alexander Wyant, as well as later landscape painters of the early twentieth century, represented by Charles H. Davis, Henry Ward Ranger and Edward Redfield. The Daytons were also intrigued by figure painters as evidenced in their purchases of works by Frank Benson, Charles Hawthorne and Gari Melchers. Although somewhat late for collecting romantic paintings of the American West, they did select representative works by Eanger Irving Couse and William Robinson Leigh.
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It must always be remembered that the Daytons lived in an area which was not typical of large metropolitan centers, such as New York or Washington, D.C. Aside from such works by artists like John Folinsbee, they essentially ignored the lifestyle to be found in their visits to bustling cities. The predominant theme which Arthur Dayton championed was an art which was intended to transform the twentieth century world back to the pastoral environment of a simpler time. Whether one is transported to the winter stillness of the country in the works by William Bauer and Jay Hall Conway, or confronts the power of the ocean's shore in the works of Emil Carlson, Paul Dougherty and William Ritschel, their paintings reflected their interests and philosophy of life. Today, American Impressionists are enjoying a renewed interest in their work, and scholarship is being conducted on artists long ignored in favor of their more prominent colleagues championed by the modernist collectors, galleries and museums for the Huntington Museum of Art, it is our chance to share a great visual resource and provide a forum for the reconsideration of a painting movement which spoke of pastoral ideals and a comforting nature which could be enjoyed by everyone. |
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