The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 40

Figure 26. Elihu Vedder (American, 1836–1923), The Pleiades,
1885, oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 37 5/8 in., The Metropolitan Muse-
um of Art, gift of George A. Hearn, 1910, 10.64.13
Figure 27. Julian Alden Weir (American, 1852–1919),
Children Burying a Dead Bird, 1878, oil on canvas mounted
on fiberglass, 22 1/4 x 18 1/8 in., museum purchase, Smithsonian
American Art Museum, 1986.1
34 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting
sical revival made popular by English artists such as
Lawrence Alma-Tadema (fig. 25). Similarly, Vedder,
who had gained immeasurable celebrity from his
illustrations for Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1884), capitalized on this
success with paintings such as Pleiades, indebted to the
work of the English Pre-Raphaelite, Edward Burne-
Jones (fig. 26). Weir’s Children Burying a Dead Bird; on
the other hand, reveals his continuing alignment with
French painting in this case the naturalism of Jules
Bastien-Lepage (fig. 27). Maynard is represented by
his Portrait of a War Correspondent [Portrait of Frank
Millet], an example of portraiture in the grand manner
(fig. 28). Chase’s contribution, A Summer Afternoon in
Holland, leaning toward Impressionism, is by far the
most advanced stylistically (fig. 29).
A Book of the Tile Club also served as an elegant coda
to the club’s existence. In 1887, Millet, in a letter to
White, proposed Sargent for membership, but nothing
seems to have come of it. Also, that year D. Maitland
Armstrong bought 58 and 58½ West Tenth Street as
a home for his family and the Tile Club was without a
headquarters. The Tile Club, for all intents and purpos-
es, had ceased to exist. Today, the hi-jinks, the sobri-
quets, the summer excursions, the debates and argu-
ments, bespeak an era long past, one still remembered
through the stories about, and especially the work of,
members of the Tile Club.
Postscript
In the course of the decade (1877–87) in which the
Tile Club was active, its focus quite naturally shifted.
At the outset, its nembers chose as its ostensible pur-
pose the decoration of hand-painted tiles. No serious
effort was made, however, to promote or market their