Dawson Dawson-Watson: From Giverny to San Antonio, An Impressionist’s Journey

Dawson Dawson-Watson

Grand Prize, Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibition, 1927

by Jeffrey Morseburg

The British artist Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939) became famous for being the recipient of one of the grandest prizes in American Art, a $5,000 award for winning the first annual Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibition in 1927. While Dawson-Watson is known primarily today for the works that he did in Texas during the 1920s and 1930s, he was a well-traveled painter and teacher who played an important role in the development of the colony of Impressionists in Giverny, the Arts & Crafts movement in Boston, the art colony in Woodstock, New York, the Washington University School of Fine Art in St. Louis and finally, the art scene in San Antonio. He was a versatile artist who not only worked in oils and watercolors, but painted murals, designed furniture and crafted picture frames.

Childhood in the Dawson-Watson Home

Dawson Dawson-Watson was born in St. John’s, Marylebone, St.Pancras, Middlesex on July 21,1864. He came from such an impossibly artistic background that it seemed almost inevitable that he would become an artist. His grandfather,Dawson Watson, was an amateur painter in Yorkshire and his father, John Dawson-Watson (1832-1892), was a talented British illustrator and fine artist. He illustrated Arabian Nights, Pilgrim’s Progress and Robison Crusoe, and contributed to the artistic magazine The Graphic as well as London Society and Good Words. The father was an academically trained artist who had studied in Manchester and at the Royal Academy. He painted in a romantic, Pre-Raphaelite-tinged style and his life’s work was a series of Shakespearean murals at the Castle Hotel in Conway, North Wales. Dawson Dawson-Watson’s uncle was the painter Thomas J. Watson (1847-1912), and his aunt Frances Watson (1841-1921) married her brother’s friend, the famous painter Myles Byrket Foster (1825-1899)

Dawson-Watson grew up in St. John’s Wood, a fashionable suburb north of London with airy villa-style housing, which was then in the County of Middlesex, but eventually became absorbed by the growing metropolis. Dawson Watson’s mother was his father’s cousin, Jane Dawson Edmondsen. They were married in 1858, and he was the second of their five children, growing up surrounded by artists, writers and designers. His father’s circle included William Morris, the father of the English Arts & Crafts movement, the late Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne Jones (1833-1898), and Ford Maddox Brown (1821-1898), the painter of moral allegories. Dawson-Watson was a child prodigy who drew and painted prolifically during his boyhood, aided eventually by his first tutor, the American expatriate painter Mark Fisher (1841-1923). His first painting was accepted by the Royal Academy at the age of sixteen. After the Watson family moved from England to Wales in the 1880s, Henry Boddington (1813-1886), a wealthy Manchester brewer, took an interest in Dawson-Watson and sponsored his studies in Paris, then the artistic capital of the world. In the years after the American Civil War, artists from all over Europe and the United States flocked to Paris to study at the official state-sponsored school, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, or one of the many private academies where famous artist’s critiqued their students or “eleves” work and helped them to gain entrée into the Salons and other important exhibitions.

An Art Education in Belle Epoque Paris

It was Dawson-Watson’s studies in Paris from 1886 to 1888 that made him the painter he would be and gave him the academic background that later made him an effective teacher. In the late 19th century, the teaching ateliers of Paris were usually headed by a prominent painter who was asked by a group of student’s to critique their work. During the autumn, winter and spring months, the aspiring artists labored in crowded, sooty ateliers, with dozens of students at their easels all gathered around a nude model on a posing platform. The younger, less experienced students learned through observation and by suggestions made by the older, more seasoned painters. Periodically, the master painter – who lent his name and prestige to the atelier – would come from his fashionable studio and spend time critiquing his student’s work. Because the students were young men in their late teens and early twenties, there was a considerable amount of hazing that went on. And while rivalries did develop in the ateliers, most artists forged life-long friendships among the penniless art students who shared drafty rooms in the student quarter.

In Paris, some art students matriculated under a single prominent artist for a number of years, while others moved from teacher to teacher, in attempt to find one that suited them or who could round out their knowledge. Dawson-Watson worked under the fashionable portrait painter Carolus-Duran (1837-1917), who had been John Singer Sargent’s (1856-1925) teacher and mentor; a history painter named Leon Glaize (1842-1932); the painter, printmaker and illustrator Luc-Oliver Merson (1946-1920); Raphael Colin (1850-1916), who was known for his romantic nudes; and the military painter Aime Morot (1850-1913), whose reputation rested on his epic battle scenes. Students were elevated from one course of study to another based on mastery, rather than an artificial schedule. Some artists would master the academic rendering of the nude figure and be prompted by their master to painting, more rapidly than others, for example. Other than the official state sponsored academy, in most of the private schools there was not a point at which the student graduated and officially ended his studies. Each artist simply ceased studying and began to try to establish himself as a professional artist when he and his mentor felt he was ready, usually when his work was accepted into the annual salon or his paintings began to find buyers.

A British Impressionist in the Art Colony of Giverny

During his studies in Paris Dawson-Watson came to know the American painter John Leslie Breck (1860-1899), who frequented the same Montparnasse café in which his teacher Raphael Collin and many of the artists gathered to eat and drink. In June of 1888, the Boston painter visited Dawson-Watson’s lodgings in Paris and suggested that the English painter spend the summer months painting in the little village of Giverny, which was west of the French capital, in the Valley of the Seine. Since Dawson-Watson hadn’t made any plans yet, he said that, “I should just as soon go there as any other place.” Breck’s suggestion led him to become one of the first colonists in Giverny, and instead of a summer, he and his wife would remain in Giverny almost five years. The artistic residents of the little art colony there are important to art history because they helped spread the Impressionist influence far and wide as they exhibited their works in their home countries and went on to teach themselves.

The actual founding of the art colony in Giverny probably dates to the spring of 1887, but there are different accounts as to how the first small group of American painters discovered the little farming village, one of which was related by Dawson-Watson many years later. In one story, given by Edward Breck, John Leslie Breck’s brother, the village was discovered by the American painters Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858-1925) and Louis Ritter (1852-1896), who were hiking in the Valley of the Seine, looking for a place to spend the summer. Even though the village was very small and didn’t have any accommodations save a café, Metcalf, who was from the Boston area, and Ritter, who was one of the “Duveneck Boys” from Cincinnati, contacted their fellow American artists, Theodore Robinson (1852-1896) and Theodore Wendel (1859-1932), and the Canadian Blair Bruce (1859-1906), and suggested that they come down, because they found the village and surrounding hills beautiful. The most interesting thing about Breck’s account was that he claimed that the Americans were not drawn there by the presence of the French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1896), the village’s only famous inhabitant.

Now, while Dawson-Watson did not settle in Giverny until the following year, he later told another version of the origins of the little colony that was related to him by John Leslie Breck. According to Dawson-Watson’s account: “In the spring of ’87 he, (John Leslie Breck), Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, Blair-Bruce, Theo. Wendel, and a chap called Taylor (Henry Fitch Taylor, 1853-1925), whose Christian name I cannot recall, were talking over some places to go for the summer. Pont Aven, Etreatat, Ecoigu, all the many places to which students went. Were talked over and discarded. Then Breck had an idea. He said, ‘fellows, lets go over the Gare St. Lazare and look over the time distances, and the places to decide.’” According to Dawson-Watson, the little band of painters originally set out for Pont de l’Arche, which required a change of trains in Vernon, a larger village adjacent to Giverny. Then, when they saw the countryside just before the stop at Vernon, they decided they would retrace their route if they were not as attracted to Pont de l’Arche. According to Dawson-Watson: “What had intrigued Metcalf so much was the little village of white houses and a Norman church at the foot of a fairly high plateau, seen through the poplars bordering the Seine and across perfectly flat fields. They arrived in Vernon a few minutes later and learned the place they had seen was Giverny.”

During Dawson-Watson’s time in Giverny, he only returned to England once, when he spent a number of months in Wales, where his family was living and his father was working on his Shakespeare murals. Unfortunately, he ran short of funds and his friend Theodore Butler had to wire him money so that he could return to Giverny to participate in Butler’s wedding to Suzanne Hoschede, who was now Monet’s step-daughter thanks to the French painter’s recent marriage to Suzanne’s mother, Alice Hoschede. By 1893, after five years in Giverny, Dawson Dawson-Watson was a fully formed painter. He and his wife were ready to move on, and so when the American expatiate painter James Carroll Beckwith suggested that they relocate to the United States, they packed up and left, arriving in New York with only twenty-five dollars to their name.

After landing in New York, Dawson-Watson and his wife remained only long enough to sell enough paintings to travel north to Boston. Their stay in Boston was probably brief, but it allowed them to renew the friendships they had forged in Paris and Giverny, where so many of the residents had been Bostonians. Of all the places he was destined to live, it was only in Boston that Dawson-Watson would find the same type of artistic and literary milieu that he had experienced growing up in London.

In 1893 Dawson-Watson accepted a teaching position with the Hartford Art Society in Hartford, Connecticut. Because of his experience in the ateliers of Paris, he had the skills and knowledge to pass on the same type of Beaux-Arts instruction that he had received, and thus was a good candidate for an art school position. Because the painters who had been in Hartford before him worked in darker tonalities, it was clearly not Dawson-Watson’s knowledge of French Impressionism that the Art Society was seeking. In Hartford they seemed to still look at Impressionism as quite avant-garde, if we are to judge from this quote:

       Mr. Dawson-Watson, whether one fully agrees with his manner of painting or not, is a most successful teacher, well instructed in the best schools of England and France, and having a thorough knowledge of technique, he believes in making his pupils work out their own manner and methods. He aims to develop each pupil’s individuality, instead of making copyists. At the same time, he is very particular as to accuracy in drawing, and is himself a forcible draughtsman. The improvement of the pupils under him has been very marked, and the work done compares favorably with that of other schools.

The three years he spent in Hartford gave Dawson-Watson a start in what would be a long and successful teaching career and enabled him and his wife to start a family. Both of their two children were born in Connecticut, Edward Dawson-Watson in 1893 and Hilda Dawson-Watson in 1895.

During his time away from a busy instructional schedule, Dawson-Watson painted out of doors as he had done in France. Few landscape works from his years in Hartford have been discovered but he apparently worked extensively on the Connecticut coast. While Dawson-Watson was in Hartford, he maintained relationships with fellow artists and artisans to the south and participated in the artistic life of Boston, especially during the summer months, when his schedule was free of teaching. In 1894 he exhibited his works at Chase’s Gallery in Boston with those of Frank Benson (1858-1939), Joseph De Camp (1858-1923) and his Giverny friends Lila Cabot Perry and Philip Leslie Hale. In 1895, he sent some his paintings west to an exhibition at the Cosmopolitan Club in Chicago, which were looked on favorably in the pages of The Critic.

Quebec

On June 9 1901, the Dawson-Watson family once again set foot on American soil, but this time in the Canadian Province of Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River. Dawson-Watson had set out for Canada instead of moving back to the United States because he had heard there was an opening for an instructor at an art school there, but when he arrived there was no offer of employment.

Without teaching as a steady means of support, Dawson-Watson had to make a living by selling his works, and so set out to establish his artistic reputation in yet another new city. Working from the heights above the St. Lawrence River, he painted high-key summer landscapes of the river and headlands that were infused by sunlight. In the winter he painted colder, more dramatic scenes of the river choked with ice and the headlands cloaked in snow. During his three-year stay in Quebec he gained enough of a reputation as an artist to be featured in the Quebec Sketch Book (a series of short essays on the Province taken from different journals that was published in 1907), which enthused about his work:

      Dawson-Watson who is well-known in Quebec, where for several years he plied his art both in landscape and portraiture, has recently accepted an important appointment as one of the principal instructors in the great school of painting and handicrafts in St. Louis. Mr. Watson left Quebec with regret and regretted. His more recent Canadian pictures have found permanent resting places here, as well as many previously disposed of.

In Quebec that Dawson-Watson became friends with the well-known American painter Lovell Birge Harrison (1854-1929) who enjoyed painting there. Harrison invited the English painter to become part of an exciting new venture, an Arts & Crafts community that was being formed in the New York countryside.

Dawson-Watson and the Byrdcliffe Art Colony

The Catskill Mountain hamlet of Woodstock, New York will always be associated with the epic rock festival that was staged there in 1969, but its identity as an icon of the counter culture actually dates back more than a century. The famous Woodstock Art Colony began as Byrdcliffe, a utopian Arts & Crafts community that was founded in 1903 by Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead (1854-1929) and his wife, the American painter June Byrd McCall Whitehead (1861-1955). He was a student and acolyte of the art historian John Ruskin, a proponent of the philosophy of the designer William Morris and he and his wife moved to America with the goal of starting an Arts & Crafts colony. At he urging of the artist Bolton Brown (1864-1936) and the writer Hervey White (1866-1954), the Whiteheads began their colony, known as Byrdecliffe, in Woodstock, New York, a pretty little village that is nestled between the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains.

Because of his versatility, Dawson-Watson was invited to work and teach at Byrdcliffe. Not only was he trained in the French academic tradition; he also was an Impressionist landscape painter of some repute and an experienced carver, gilder and woodworker. Moreover he also had a background in textile design. Dawson-Watson was an artist as well as an artisan and he soon became not only an instructor for the Byrdcliffe Summer School but also a collaborator in the furniture making scheme that Whitehead had planned. While the furniture operation quickly failed, Dawson-Watson created some beautiful gothic-inspired pieces with Art Nouveau influenced decoration that are highly sought after by collectors. The utopian goals of Byrdcliffe never meshed with reality and so the community was a short but interesting chapter in Dawson-Watson’s long career. Looking for another opportunity, he accepted the offer of a position at the Washington University School of Fine Arts in St. Louis, a place where he would finally be able to root and raise his family.

Teaching at Washington University in St. Louis

In 1904 when Dawson Dawson-Watson accepted a position with the Washington University School of Fine Art, the city was in the midst of the world’s fair, the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which was held to celebrate the centennial of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. Along with Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924) and Herman Dudley Murphy, Dawson-Watson was one of the Boston painters who was involved in the Arts & Crafts frame movement and their hand-carved and gilded frames were on display at the fair.

With the experience he had gained during his three years teaching in Hartford, Dawson-Watson joined the faculty of the School of Fine Arts, which was under the direction of Halsey C. Ives (1847-1911). Initially, he taught “Painting from the Head” and “Painting from Still-Life” and then “Portrait Painting” and “Sketching from Nature” in where he was able to put his Impressionist-influenced technique to use. By the time his fellow instructor, Edmund H. Wuerpel, took over the direction of the school, he had also began to put his background in decorative arts to work and was teaching wood carving.

During his years in St. Louis, Dawson-Watson also exhibited his work extensively, both in Missouri as well as throughout the Midwest. He through himself into the artistic life of the region and served as an officer of the St. Louis Artist’s Guild and exhibited and served as an officer of the Society of Western Artists, an organization of Midwestern painters, based in Indianapolis. His work was featured in a special solo exhibition in the galleries in Washington University in 1907 at again at the City Art Museum in 1912. Dawson-Watson’s Impressionist style was singled out for praise in the pages of the International Studio and the American Magazine of Art. At the same time, he maintained his relationships in Boston, serving as the first President of the Society of Arts & Crafts in 1905, organizing exhibitions and showing his own paintings and hand-crafted picture frames.

Dawson-Watson also had a theatrical bent and he participated in musical reviews and pageants and served as designer for theatrical productions. In 1914, he was heavily involved in organizing the Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, a massive four-day twilight production with a cast of 7,500 that drew crowds of more than 100,000, which celebrated the 150th anniversary of the founding of the city. While Dawson-Watson was still living in St. Louis and raising his family there, he began spending time in San Antonio, Texas. While he had first exhibited his work in Texas in 1896, he seems to have begun spending time in the warmer climate of the Alamo city during the First World War, probably in 1914, when he left his teaching position at Washington University. In 1916, he taught briefly at the Springfield School of Art, in Indiana, where he had a solo exhibition that year.

South to San Antonio

In the fall of 1917, Dawson-Watson began teaching at the newly opened Art Guild of San Antonio, which relied on rented rooms in downtown San Antonio. The guild began with evening classes and when the demand grew, its Art Guild School was opened with the English painter as its first instructor. He threw himself into the civic life of the Texas city, speaking at women’s clubs to promote the guild and lecturing on art. For a number of years, he split his time between St. Louis and San Antonio, because he still had commitments to meet and he served as director of the St. Louis Industrial Exposition in 1919 as then as the art director for the Missouri Centennial in 1921. At the same time, he was designing stage sets and exhibiting his paintings and prints in Joplin and smaller Missouri cities, as well as in the east. He had a solo exhibition in Joplin in October of 1922.

In San Antonio, where he spent the winter months, Dawson-Watson found himself attracted to the tremendous variety of cactus that he found in the hills and draws of central Texas. Rather than paint the blue lupin, the Texas Bluebonnets that the painter Julian Onderdonk had made so famous, he preferred the humble cactus. He would often prop his canvas up against a bush and sit cross-legged while he painted the cacti in the Tfieild, often with the morning dew still on their flowers. By 1920 Dawson-Watson was already exhibiting his cactus paintings in the Midwest and East. In the early 1920s, he also began to make trips to the Grand Canyon, in Arizona he painted small studies on canvas board on location and completed larger works in his studio from the sketches.

The Davis Wildflower Competitions

According to later accounts given by the artist himself, it was in1926 while he was exhibiting his work in Boston that Dawson-Watson first learned that the eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis was going to sponsor a major art competition to encourage artists to paint the beauty of the Texas Hill Country. Apparently, his friend Rolla Taylor (1874-1970), the Texas artist, encouraged him to leave for San Antonio and enter the contest. However, according to an article in the San Antonio Light, he was already exhibiting his works at the Women’s Club of San Antonio under the auspices of the Art Guild and the Fine Art Round Table in May of 1926. So, it isn’t clear whether the artist was already painting in the Hill Country the spring before the first Davis competition, or whether he rushed down to do paint on location in preparation for the exhibition that would change his life. What is evident is that he had already dedicated himself to the portrayal of the cactus as a subject. In June of 1926, a headline in the Light over an image of Dawson-Watson with a field of cacti stated that “Texas Cactus Lures Artist.”

Organized by the Mrs. Drought and the San Antonio Artists League, the First Annual Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibition was one of the richest art contests ever held, with a $5,000 prize for the best wildflower painting done by an painter who lived outside the state, and a $1,000 prize for the best work of wildflowers by a Texas artist. Davis was a generous philanthropist who had come to appreciate Texas wildflowers while he drilled dry hole after dry hole in his attempt to make his third fortune in the oil business, the first two coming in shoes and rubber plantations. When his oil wells finally came in and he grew rich, he became very involved in cultural affairs and sponsored the art contest, which drew painters from the East, Midwest and California. The paintings were juried into the competition and as a well-known painter; Dawson-Watson headed the jury of selection which made the first cut of entries so that the final exhibition would be a manageable size.

In 1931 Dawson-Watson had a solo exhibition at the Pabst Galleries in San Antonio. According to the preview in the San Antonio Light, the show would feature “Familiar views of San Antonio, such as the patio of the Governor’s Palace, and portions of the ‘rock-ribbed shores” of Massachusetts, which have received plastic interpretation by Dawson Dawson-Watson, San Antonio artist…” The exhibition included twenty-four paintings