Art: In Turkey-Chawed Country

Paintings were scattered all over the floor, ready to be hung, that day last month when Jacqueline Kennedy unexpectedly walked into Manhattan’s Graham Galleries. With a trained eye and an eager appetite, the First Lady examined them, chose two (but left them behind for the show), went out the door and up Madison Avenue. Word traveled fast, and when the show opened, viewers thronged into the gallery. The artist: Thomas Anshutz, a nearly unknown turn-of-the-century American remembered more as a teacher of painters than as a painter himself.

Anshutz was a student of nature, drawing most of his inspiration from the workaday world. He had simple, direct ideas of truth in painting and how to go about it: “Get up an outfit for outdoor work, go out into some woe-begotten, turkey-chawed, bottle-nosed, henpecked country and set myself down, get out my materials and make as accurate a painting of what I see in front of me as I can.” Anshutz’ canvases breathe in life the way lungs take in air. In several seascapes at the gallery, young boys frolic over the beach, and the whole canvas tingles with their impatient eagerness for the water. At a calmer moment, two young school-boys—one with sleeves tightly rolled up—play out a grim game of checkers. One of the pictures that Mrs. Kennedy bought. Boys at Holly Beach, N.J., is in this vein, and to some eyes it may look like Jack, Bobby and Teddy on the Cape. The other is a watercolor of the artist’s wife; Jackie paid “less than $1,000” for each. Anshutz’ later work is mostly full-length portraits of women, pictures that effortlessly evoke the warm drawing-room atmosphere of the early 20th century. The women themselves could almost be contemporary.

Anshutz got his training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the redoubtable Thomas Eakins. He became Eakins’ assistant, and when Eakins left in 1886, Anshutz moved in as teacher. For the three years before he died in 1912, he was head of the academy.

Anshutz’ greatest strength as a teacher was his belief that in painting “any style is correct if the man is master of it.” Anshutz himself mastered several styles and mediums. Besides oils, he was at home with watercolors, pastels and crayon. He even had one brief fling with impressionism. So equipped, Anshutz could recognize important tendencies and strengths in his pupils, then draw these out and enlarge them. Four of his pupils were Robert Henri. George Luks, William Glackens and John Sloan, all destined to become city realists who dramatized the piercingly lonely everyday life of New York in the early 1900s, and all better known—until now—than courtly old Professor Anshutz.