Edwin Austin Abbey
Edwin Austin Abbey
American, 1852 – 1911
Once considered to be not only“ the greatest English-speaking illustrator, but [ also ] the greatest living illustrator” by the artist and writer Joseph Pennell, Edwin Austin Abbey is equally well-known for his murals and paintings such as The Coronation of Edward VII— one of his most important works( Lucas, 224). Born in Philadelphia, Abbey took drawing lessons from Isaac Williams as a teenager. By 1869 he was working for the engravers Van Ingen & Snyder while taking evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts( PAFA). Two years later, he moved to New York to join the staff at Harper & Brothers. In 1878, he traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon to do a series of illustrations for an article and for the book Selections from the Poetry of Robert Herrick. Struck by the country’ s rich history, he made England his new home while continuing to illustrate many successful publications for Harper’ s including She Stoops to Conquer( 1887) and The Comedies of Shakespeare( 1896).
In 1890, Abbey married Mary Gertrude Mead, sister of William Rutherford Mead— a partner in the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White. Also in 1890, the Boston Public Library commissioned Abbey to paint a series of murals, which he titled Quest of the Holy Grail. Around 1908, Abbey began a commission for the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg. He completed several lunettes and allegorical medallions for the dome as well as several monumental works titled The Apotheosis of Pennsylvania, Penn’ s Treaty, The Hours, The Camp of the American Army at Valley Forge, and the Reading of the Declaration of Independence. Due to Abbey’ s failing health, the latter was completed by his studio assistant Ernest Board and John Singer Sargent. Of Abbey’ s long career, Tile Club member F. Hopkinson Smith said:“ Abbey, in his art really has done what Wagner has done in music, Tennyson and the poets in verse. He has taken the old, retouched it, and made it new, giving us something infinitely better than the thing he found”( Lucas, 226).
John Singer Sargent( American, b. Italy, 1856 – 1925), Portrait of Edwin Austin Abbey, ca. 1889, black chalk / charcoal on paper, 14 x 10 1 / 16 in., Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, 1937.4157
REFERENCES:
Dearinger, David Bernard, ed. Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design. Volume 1, 1826 – 1925. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2004.“ Edwin Austin Abbey.” The Outlook 98, no. 15( August 12,
1911): 810. Foster, Kathleen A, and Michael Quick. Edwin Austin Abbey( 1852 – 1911). New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1973.
Irwin, Grace. Trail-Blazers of American Art. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930.
Lucas, E. V. Edwin Austin Abbey, Royal Academician: The Record of His Life and Work. Vol. 1, 1852 – 1893 and Vol. 2, 1894 – 1911. New York: Charles Scribner’ s Sons, 1921. Mather Jr., Frank Jewett. Estimates in Art. Series II. Sixteen
Essays on American Painters of the Nineteenth Century.
48 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting