Hôtel Baudy Giverny
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Portrait of Robert William Vonnoh
Photograph of Robert Vonnoh beneath a rose arbour with the sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh, his second wife.

Painter and teacher · American

Giverny painter

Robert William Vonnoh

American painter and teacher, whose great poppy field of 1888 is associated with Giverny.

  • Dates1858 — 1933
  • NationalityAmerican
  • DisciplinePainter and teacher
  • Place of birthHartford, Connecticut, United States

Biography

Trained at the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston and then at the Académie Julian in Paris under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre, Robert Vonnoh returned to France in 1887 with his first wife, the artist Grace Farwell. He later taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, among the teachers who brought bright plein-air painting into American training. His second marriage was to the sculptor Bessie Potter, and he worked at Old Lyme, Connecticut, one of the homes of American Impressionism.

Giverny

The Musée d’Art Américain Giverny counts him among the village’s painters and shows his painting “Poppies in France”, dated 1888. Other accounts attach his French stay of 1887 to the Grez-sur-Loing colony: the two accounts do not agree.

Principal works

Poppies oil on canvas, 1888. A poppy field painted in France; the artist returned to the motif in 1890 with In Flanders Field — Where Soldiers Sleep and Poppies Grow (Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, no. 919-O-114). A canvas of this title — 33 × 46 cm, James E. Roberts Fund — is held by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which gives it as painted the summer Vonnoh discovered Impressionism at Grez. Its record gives neither date nor accession number, and Vonnoh returned to the poppy motif more than once: the identification with ours remains to be confirmed.
Companion of the Studio oil on canvas, 1888, 130.2 × 92.1 cm. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, no. 1891.14 (Joseph E. Temple Fund).
Self-Portrait oil on canvas, 1901, 61 × 45.9 cm. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, no. 1911.5 (Henry D. Gilpin Fund).

Key points

  • 1858Born — Hartford, Connecticut, United States
  • Giverny1888, attested by the work
  • 1933Died

Sources

Around them

Related artists

Portrait of Theodore Earl Butler Discover Theodore Earl Butler 1861 — 1936 American · Painter A lodger at the Hôtel Baudy in 1888, he became Monet’s son-in-law and the only member of the colony to die in Giverny.

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