Frank W. Benson 1862-1951

Faith Andrews Bedford writes, “In 1906, when Benson created this painting, his reputation as a leading American painter had been firmly established. A teacher at the Museum School in Boston, Benson was also much in demand as a portraitist and had been exhibiting with 'The Ten,' a group often known as the American Impressionists, for eight years. His summer paintings of his daughters on the hillsides of Maine’s North Haven Island, had gained him much praise and renown.  While The Artist's Daughters (The Dining Room) places Benson’s daughters, Eleanor and Sylvia, in an indoor setting, the effect of his years of creating sun drenched, impressionist works can clearly be seen in this canvas.

"Benson’s earliest interiors with figures had been lit by the subtle glow of lamplight or the flickering flames of an unseen fire. Beginning in 1889, he created a series of stunning compositions of young women in elegant dress, posed in richly appointed rooms. In these early works, the models were his younger sisters. Gradually, professional models began to take their place. By 1906, Benson was doing fewer of these interior works as his interests were focused mostly on his plein air paintings and his emerging forays into depicting wildfowl and men at sport.

"The Artist's Daughters (The Dining Room) appears to be a rare example of Benson’s use of bright sunshine to illuminate an interior work. Everywhere in the painting one can see the effects of the dazzling light: on the golden screen, the delicate crystal, the girls’ hair, the fabric of their dresses; there is even a bold triangle of sunlight on the wall of the studio.  Within five years Benson would be creating interiors in an entirely different mood, one reminiscent of Jan Vermeer. For nearly a decade, Benson and his Boston contemporaries seemed to be under the sway of the Dutch painter whose subdued interiors were lit by the natural light from a window – but light rarely as brilliant as this. This is a most unusual work for Benson.

"The models for this canvas are Benson’s oldest daughters Eleanor, aged 16 at the time of this painting, and her youngest sister, Sylvia, aged 8.  While Eleanor posed for her father frequently for many of his best-known plein air works, Sylvia, the youngest of Benson’s four children, was painted infrequently.  Because of the demands of school, Benson’s children are only rarely seen as models in his studio pieces. Although there are a few examples of interior works done of a single daughter, these were mostly painted on rainy days at Benson’s summer home, Wooster Farm.  There is only one other known interior of these two sisters together – The Lesson (figure 1) completed in 1911.

"The Artist's Daughters (The Dining Room) was most probably done in Benson’s studio in the St. Botolph Street Studio Building, which he occupied from 1893 to 1919.  He and Edmund Tarbell had once shared a studio together in this building. It is the writer’s opinion that, at the time of this painting, the two men occupied adjoining studios and borrowed furniture and objets d’art from each other to create their interior paintings. The door in the background of the work may well have been a door between their two ateliers.

"It is fascinating to note Benson’s use of various screens, draperies, porcelains, pewter and brass objects and furniture in his many different interiors and still lifes.  One might even observe that, while the models in his interior settings appear to be the central focus of the paintings, they might also be considered merely another lovely object in a still life. Such works as The Black Hat (Rhode Island School of Design), Reflections (Private Collection) and Girl Playing Solitaire (figure 2) illustrate well that, in the creation of these paintings, Benson was as much concerned about the presentation of a composition of various objects as he was in depicting a good likeness of his model. The fact that Benson often changed the features of his model, the color of her hair or the proportions of her figure to fit his desired composition and palette, underscores his focus on design over verisimilitude. (Photographs reveal that Benson, possibly influenced by Thayer, transformed the women in his family into an ideal: heavy  brows were thinned,  round noses were straightened, cheekbones  highlighted, mouths made smaller. As his eldest daughter, Eleanor,  once wistfully recalled, 'He always made us far more beautiful than  we were.'  Faith Andrews Bedford, Frank W. Benson: American Impressionist, New York, 1994, p. 43).  As he once said, 'Picture making has become to me merely the arrangement of design within the frame. It has nothing to do with the painting of objects of the representation of nature.' ('Advice to an Artist.' Benson papers. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts)

"The dresses that Eleanor and Sylvia wear allowed Benson to demonstrate his fondness for and mastery of the use of white against white. Built up with several layers of subtly different shades of white pigment, the gowns and the drapery of the tablecloth catch and reflect the light that streams into the room.  While Sylvia’s dress is undoubtedly her own (and closely resembles the one she wears in The Lesson) Eleanor’s gown might well be one of the costumes that Benson kept in this studio and used in a number of interiors.  It resembles a number of gowns worn by his models in other figural works.

"Benson used several of the objects in this painting in other works. The Oriental screen, so beautifully lit by the light from the unseen window seemed to be one of his favorite backdrops for he used it in a least six other paintings, several of which are in major museums such as Red and Gold (Butler Art Institute) and Girl Playing Solitaire (Worcester Art Museum), Portrait (of a Lady) (Metropolitan Museum of Art). [Other uses of this screen are: The Dining Room Table (University of Nebraska),  A Woman Reading (John Vanderpoel Gallery) and Color Study (location unknown).]   The highboy was quite probably the one seen in the shadowed background of Benson’s masterful portrait of young Gertrude Schirmer (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) daughter of the sheet music impresario, Gustave Schirmer. Likewise, the Chippendale inspired chairs were also used in a painting titled The Golden Screen (location unknown). The tall porcelain jar in the background was first seen in Benson’s 1893 interior Firelight (figure 3)(Firelight is the first of a series  of paintings in which he combined graceful women in elegant gowns  with carefully arranged objets d'art illuminated by flickering  flames or muted lamplight.  Part figure study, part still life, these lamplit and firelit scenes disappear from Benson's oeuvre in l893, when he moved to a new studio on St. Boltolph Street, which was generously illuminated by tall windows. Ibid, p. 43.)

"As Dean Lahikainen points out in his essay in the catalogue for the exhibition The Paintings of Frank W. Benson (Peabody Essex Museum, 2000) Benson’s use of these Colonial Revival elements reflected the interest in such furniture and decorative pieces during turn-of-the-century America. The china on the table, rendered in shades of blue and white, are undoubtedly meant to resemble Blue Canton, a china brought home from the Orient by Benson’s grandfather and great-grandfather, both ships’ captains. The chairs and table are typical antiques of the time, greatly admired by Benson as a result of his friendship with the Americana expert, his neighbor Henry Fitzgibbon Waters.

"Like so many of Benson’s paintings The Artist's Daughters (The Dining Room) was  probably first seen by the original owner in the room in which it was painted – Benson’s studio. The couple that first purchased this canvas  also owned a number of Benson’s other works both in oil and in watercolor. While they did loan some of their paintings to various Benson exhibitions, this unusual depiction of  the artist’s daughters in a studio setting is not known to have ever been exhibited."