Pierre Menard Gallery

Scenes from Vagabondia:

Thomas Buford Meteyard & Dawson Dawson-Watson,

Giverny to Scituate, 1890-1910

And
Dawson Dawson-Watson. The Later Work.

Pierre Menard Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition of paintings by Thomas Buford Meteyard (1865-1928) and Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939). The core of the exhibition is work made during the artists’ sojourn as charter members of the American Impressionist colony in Giverny and then in Scituate, Massachusetts after their return from France. A collateral exhibition in our lower gallery represents the work of Dawson Dawson-Watson from 1911 until his death in 1939. The show will run from the 16th of April until the 24th of May, with an opening reception on Thursday April 16th from 6-9 pm. Refreshments will be served.

Thomas Meteyard and Dawson Dawson-Watson are artists of a deft brush and serious purpose, “amateurs in a sense all but lost today,” as William Corbett remarks in his catalogue essay, practitioners of art as a way of life, accumulating its wisdom gradually over the course of a lifetime. Subsequent to Dawson-Watson’s crucial discovery of the work of Monet and the founding of the American colony at Giverny, the pair did work in a late Impressionist manner, later combining formal elements of the Aesthetic movement and the Nabis group, with which Meteyard had been associated, in delineating a distinctly American incarnation of Art Nouveau/Arts and Crafts in their small colony in Scituate. Like vast numbers of others working along a more traditional aesthetic trajectory, their work was, until quite recently, a casualty of the tidal wave of modernism, a fashion that for a time swept away the very memory of many a devout and accomplished acolyte of art. It is time for a new look. Theirs is a patient and nourishing practice, a contemplative engagement with the world, cultivating refinements of tone and beauty that would be exploded by the advent of world war, the fragmentation of culture, the loss of the center upon which their gaze had been fixed, the rush of the future in all its grim and mutable futility, its advertising, automobiles and telephones, but which continue to speak to verities that have proven all the more tenacious in the wake of their brief suppression in art.

In their land- and city-scapes, cathedrals, nocturnes, salt marshes, portraits and genre scenes, Meteyard and Dawson-Watson depict the sinews of nature and something of the essence of human life over most of its historical course. Theirs was a world “that could be enriched by art, a quieter world than ours, one that, like all worlds, comes down to us in fragments, what some have cared to save for their own enrichment.” “ In Meteyard’s postcard-size watercolors of European cities at dusk you can see an echo of Henry James, friend of the Meteyards, in his loving nostalgia for the old world of Europe, even then fleeting before “progress.” They remind us that when World War I came some looked back on the late 19th and early 20th century as twilight.” (Corbett) For a long time it was only antiquarians and aesthetes, lone preservers of culture, who found in the work of such artists the thread of a lost track of civilization and cherished it. Now that the aesthetic malaise has become so general, we find them speaking to us again.

Since Meteyard and Dawson-Watson were initiates and devotees of the book arts, both having created classic designs for Copeland and Day, much of the work also takes place on the intimate register of the book, in scale and simplicity. The present exhibition will include numerous examples of book and graphic work in supplement to the paintings and watercolors, including rare printed work relating to their legendary arts periodical the Courrier Innocent.

It has been 100 years since the work of Dawson-Watson and Meteyard has been seen in any significant way in Boston. Meteyard was the subject of an ambitious retrospective exhibition at the Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, in 1989, and was also the subject of a significant exhibition at the Musée d’art américain, Giverny, in 2004. Dawson-Watson is still essentially unknown here; in the meantime, to date, virtually nothing by either artist has found its way into the public or institutional collections of Massachusetts, where much of it was created.

Meteyard is very much a Massachusetts artist, graduate of Phillips, Andover and Harvard, close associate of the poets Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman, as well as Imogen Guiney, Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Goodhue. He was a founding member of two of the most influential Boston aesthetic groups of the end of late 19th Century, the Pewter Mugs and the Visionists. His work appeared in important exhibitions in his lifetime, including the second and third Le Barc de Boutteville exhibitions of the Nabis group (which included Bonnard, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and Gaugin) as well as the juried show at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Dawson-Watson was highly respected and successful artist throughout his life, holding numerous academic posts. Son of John Dawson-Watson, the noted English pre-Raphaelite artist and graphic illustrator whose work was a fixture of the Victorian magazines, Dawson-Watson grew up surrounded by many of the brightest artists, writers, poets and stage actors of the day. Such notables as Ford Maddox Brown, Alma Tadema, George Inness, Edward Bourne-Jones and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, as well as Alfred Lord Tennyson were frequent house-guests. He is now, perhaps, best known for his later depictions of Texas and the American West, but his Impressionist work, as evidenced by several of the larger more ambitious canvases in the present exhibition, is of a masterful quality. Lyndon Johnson famously kept one of his Texas paintings hanging in the Oval Office during his presidency.

Only a small portion of the work included in the present exhibition was ever shown during the artists’ lifetimes. We are extremely grateful to the estates of Thomas Meteyard and Dawson Dawson-Watson for the opportunity to bring it to public view here in Massachusetts. It will be the pleasure of the Pierre Menard Gallery to welcome, at the opening, Meteyard's three grandchildren, as well as members of the Dawson-Watson family.

A fully illustrated catalogue has been prepared to accompany the exhibition, with essays by William Corbett, Thomas G. Boss, Nicholas Kilmer and David Noonan, Jr. and Shannon Aaron, great great grandson of Dawson Dawson-Watson.