Charles Dahlgreen (1864–1955)
Charles W. Dahlgreen. Undated photograph in Charles W. Dahlgreen papers, 1886-1957, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 3954, frame 908.
Landscape painter Charles Dahlgreen was born in Chicago to a German immigrant textile dyer and worked as a youth painting signs and banners. In 1886, he traveled to Dusseldorf for two years of academic art study. Returning to Chicago a newly married man, he set aside his artistic aspirations to launch a successful career as a manufacturer of painted and embroidered signs and flags, interrupted by a brief and fruitless search for gold in the Klondike region of Alaska. In 1904, Dahlgreen revived his artistic ambitions, studying first at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (founded in 1902) and then at the Art Institute of Chicago. His instructors included prominent figure and portrait painters, notably Frederick W. Freer. He also pursued landscape painting in summer classes conducted by John C. Johansen and Charles Francis Browne, and he studied the technique of etching. Beginning in 1906, Dahlgreen’s landscape paintings and prints were included in the Art Institute’s annual exhibitions, which would feature his work for almost four decades.
Following graduation from the Art Institute, Dahlgreen returned to Europe to study and copy paintings of the old masters in museums in Belgium, England, France, Holland, and Italy, an experience he later cited as fundamental to his artistic development. He exhibited in the prestigious Paris Salons of 1910 and in 1912, returning that year to Chicago. In 1915, Dahlgreen’s career took a momentous turn with his first visit to Brown County, Indiana, site of a burgeoning colony of impressionist painters. In the region’s soft, hazy light and hilly topography he found a compelling subject and his distinctive artistic voice: his Brown County paintings would win critical and popular favor. Dahlgreen also worked in Florida, the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri, and Yosemite Valley in California, among other locales. In the 1930s, he stayed several times in Taos, New Mexico, joining a diverse community of artists that included several with strong ties to Chicago. Dahlgreen exhibited widely, including in the Carnegie International and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts annual exhibitions, but he remained closely affiliated with hometown institutions, including those in suburban Oak Park, where he settled in 1920.
Although identified with the conservative painters of Chicago, Dahlgreen was open-minded enough to consider other approaches to artmaking. He once copied an abstract work by pioneering Russian modernist Vassily Kandinsky, and he even made his own modernist painting, a still life that won a prize at the Art Institute in 1934. Although he painted until nearly the end of his life, Dahlgreen was better known as a printmaker, creating popular, accessible images of subjects ranging from western mountains and midwestern farmlands to the contemporary cityscape and Chicago’s Century of Progress exposition of 1933. A few years before his death at age ninety, Dahlgreen gave one hundred etched plates to the Smithsonian Institution, which published a special edition of his prints; the proceeds from its sale supported significant acquisitions for the national print collection.
Charles Dahlgreen, Rendezvous, circa 1932
Oil on canvas, 48 by 42 inches
Charles Dahlgreen painted Rendezvous during one of several working visits he made to Taos, New Mexico, where a community of artists, many with ties to Chicago, had been creating images of the region’s native inhabitants and distinctive landscape since the 1910s. This painting emphasizes the striking gold foliage of cottonwood trees, which screen the mountainous landscape in the distance. In the middle ground, near a meandering stream, two Indians—a white-draped mounted man and a woman cloaked in black over a bright-red skirt—provide a focal point for the composition. Playing off the golden tones of the sun-drenched scene are the cool shadows cast by the trees in the foreground. Here, as in the work of many conservative painters of the interwar period, such hallmarks of impressionist technique combine with pictorial conventions of representation—notably a marked illusion of spatial depth, reinforced in Rendezvous by the receding stream that leads the eye deep into the scene.
The genesis of Rendezvous is abundantly documented. On his first trip to Taos, in 1931, Dahlgreen painted a large cottonwood in the glowing tones of autumn, which earned the Ball Purchase Prize of $1200 at the Hoosier Salon the following year. Inspired to paint more such scenes, he returned to Taos in 1932. As the artist recalled in his unpublished reminiscences:
I had sold my old Cottonwood and got a commission to paint another one something like the Cottonwood. When I got to Taos I engaged the same two Indians but this time including a horse. I had already formed a picture in my mind, of just what I was going to paint. Not to have a duplicate of the first picture I had to find a composition from a different angle. I found that the tree was not quite as colorful as it was the year previous, yet it made a beautiful setting for my picture. I finally got the horse in place with the Indian on its back, and his squaw standing by the side of the horse. After I had it finished, I must have a title to the picture. . . . It reminded him [sic] of a rendezvous and so it was called Rendezvous.i
Dahlgreen went on to make three more related works—The Proposal, Homeward Bound, and Reminiscence—which he exhibited with The Old Cottonwood as a series of four; an additional related painting, Refreshment (circa1931–35; Powell and Barbara Bridges Collection) probably also dates to around the same time. Dahlgreen insisted on the importance of painting landscapes outdoors on site, and he worked from a truck converted to serve as a mobile studio. Yet a surviving photograph of his male model for The Proposal, likely taken by the artist, suggests that he may have worked on his paintings, including Rendezvous, at least partly indoors.
iCharles W. Dahlgreen, MS Autobiography, p. 241, in Charles Dahlgreen Papers, Archives of American Art, microfilm reel 3954, frame 302.