At the turn of the last century, Impressionism was responsible for radically changing not only what Americans were collecting but also the academic approach to how painting was taught. Some one hundred years later, it is difficult to believe that Impressionism -- Claude Monet's beautiful mixture of light and color -- would ever have been controversial.

American Impressionism at the end of the nineteenth century was led by William Merritt Chase whose summer teachings at Shinnecock and studio classes at the Arts Students League were legendary for training many of this country's finest painters. Chase was admired for the beauty of his paintings as well as his success in passing his knowledge of painting and the technique of painting onto his students.

At the height of Chase's teaching of Impressionism, Charles Webster Hawthorne arrived in New York City in 1894 at the age of 22 and enrolled in the Art Students League as a night student while working days to support his dream of becoming a painter. Hawthorne began studying under Chase in 1896 and experienced out-of-doors painting classes at Chase's summer school at Shinnecock that same year.

After a brief stint as Chase's assistant, Hawthorne traveled to Holland in 1898, where he was influenced by the tonal style of Franz Hals. That year abroad inspired Hawthorne to return to the United States and open his own school, the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which would teach Chase's en plein air style of infusing outdoor light with a wide color range. Perhaps more importantly, Hawthorne replicated Chase's enthusiasm for teaching as he passed down the traditions which Chase had passed to him. While Chase was the more cosmopolitan and gregarious of the two, both men were somewhat self-made as artists and both were drawn to color and the richness of oil paint as a medium.

Charles Hawthorne was never a New York insider, and it is rumored that Robert Henri rejected Hawthorne from The Eight. Hawthorne was content with a simple life of painting and he was devoted to a friendly style of teaching which attracted students to his school in the small fishing village of Provincetown. Students learned from Hawthorne not only how to paint but also how "to see and feel their subjects." He would often tell his pupils, "Anything under the sun is beautiful if you have the vision -- it is the seeing of the thing that makes it so."

Hawthorne's fascination at the beauty of his Cape Cod surroundings was influential in his early works, but more importantly the area increased his desire to paint the people who worked and fished in the area. The study of the figure, reflected in the harsh, brutal realistic paintings of Portuguese fishing families along the Cape, was his first love. In his figures, he was noted for the placement of the head and the gaze emanating from his subjects. Even in subjects that were not pleasing to the eye, he saw beauty and, in painting that spirit of beauty, Hawthorne excelled, and won numerous prizes including awards from the National Academy of Design, Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

In addition to his year in Holland, Hawthorne traveled to Paris and Italy during his career and was made a full member of the French Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1913. By 1916 the historic fishing village of Provincetown had become the largest art colony in the world luring such artists as George Ault, Gifford Beal, Reynolds Beal, Henry Demuth, Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Ellen Ravenscroft, Ben Shahn, Agnes Weinrich, and William Zorach to its shores. According to historian Ronald A. Kuchta, "Provincetown is the origin of many famous paintings in the history of the twentieth-century American art, not only the place where they were painted, but where they were first exhibited, discussed and sold."

The Cape Cod School of Art was the first outdoor summer school for figure painting and grew into one of the nation's leading art schools. Under thirty years of Hawthorne's guidance, the school attracted some of the most talented art instructors and students in the country including John Noble, Richard Miller, and Max Bohm. At his school, Hawthorne gave weekly criticisms and instructive talks, guiding his pupils and setting up ideals but never imposing his own technique or method. Although Hawthorne is considered more of a realist, he managed to keep Monet's style and the flame of Impressionism going into the twentieth century when others abandoned his style, and he extended Impressionism to become somewhat structural in teaching his students to "differentiate between color and tone and to re-create the illusion of light without employing the Impressionists's formula."

In reflecting on Hawthorne's career, writer Duncan Phillips said Hawthorne was regarded as "both a great teacher and a great painter." Critic Leile Mechlin said, "There are those who believe, and with reason, that Hawthorne's largest contribution to art in America was through the medium of his teaching." This grand appreciation of Hawthorne's teachings by his peers and students and his aversion to self-promotion gave him the reputation of being a painter's painter. The Hawthorne principle of teaching stimulated his school. Stephen Gilman wrote, "We came to Provincetown conceited, hoping to get a finishing course, and were literally dragged back to consider matters so elementary and so fundamental we had all forgotten the little we ever knew of them." This deliberate insistence of fundamentals was the thing that marked Charles Hawthorne as a great teacher," Gilman continued. "A lesser man would have been tempted to show off. A lesser man would have succumbed to the questions about trifling things. A lesser man would have wandered into verbal bypaths. But he was strong because of his simplicity. He was strong because he had the courage to repeat over and over again his fundamental concept of art, knowing full well that should his hearers once understand his meaning they would never be able to forget it."

Hawthorne had the enviable situation as an artist of being appreciated while he still lived by his fellow artists and by the general public. Early in his career, museums across the country collected his works including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The leader of the Provincetown, Mass, artists' colony, Charles Webster Hawthorne, was one of America's most dynamic, penetrating, and forthright painters. Many remember him as a creative, inspiring teacher.

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