Edgar Rupprecht (1889–1954)
Isobel Steele MacKinnon, Edgar Rupprecht, circa 1927, charcoal on paper, 21.75 by 18.5 inches. Courtesy Corbett vs Dempsey Gallery, Chicago.
Edgar Arthur Rupprecht was born in Zanesville, Ohio, and raised in Chicago. He began studying at the Art Institute in 1906, attending intermittently until 1919. There and at the Summer School of Painting in Saugatuck, Michigan, he worked under Frederick Fursman, with whom he formed a close relationship. Rupprecht’s Saugatuck classmates included Arthur K. Houlberg and, in 1920, artist Isobel Steele MacKinnon, whom Rupprecht married in 1921. For the next four years, the couple lived in a studio-residence in the Tree Studios building on the Near North Side and spent summers teaching at Saugatuck. Rupprecht painted commissioned portraits and did illustration and cartoon work, at one point assisting Richard Felton Outcault with his Buster Brown comic strip.
Rupprecht first exhibited in the Art Institute’s Chicago and Vicinity annual exhibition in 1916; seven years later, his painting The Diving Board was awarded the show’s Marshall F. Holmes Prize. His best-known painting, The Summer Visitor (circa 1924; Union League Club of Chicago), earned the prestigious Municipal Art League Purchase Prize in 1925. Rupprecht’s reputation was at its height in 1925, when he and MacKinnon left Chicago for Munich. Supported by her family fortune, the two studied under modernist painter Hans Hofmann at his Schulefür Bildenes Kunst (School for Modern Art). They traveled with Hofmann and assisted with instruction at his summer schools in Capri and Saint-Tropez. In 1929, the couple took up residence near Paris, where Edgar exhibited. Although they had intended to stay in Paris indefinitely, dire financial circumstances forced the Rupprechts to return to the United States in 1932 with their infant daughter.
Edgar Rupprecht, Study for The Diving Board, circa 1922
Oil on canvas, 23½ by 19½ inches
Edgar Rupprecht painted this study in preparation for one of the most important works of his early career, The Diving Board (location unknown), of about 1922. It pictures a scene of casual interaction between a young woman in a rowboat and a swimmer seated on a diving-board. The swimmer’s back is to the viewer, who looks down from the position of a bystander on the dock just glimpsed at lower right. In the finished painting, details of the setting are clearly rendered: the smiling expression of the girl in the boat as she looks toward her companion makes the figures’ implied interaction the focus of the image. In this study, however, her facial features are barely indicated; forms are simplified to broad strokes and strong color contrasts, with the sharply tipped-up perspective enhancing the effect of an abstract composition. The background is a lively pattern of fluid light-blue lines applied over a thin gray wash, capturing the water’s shifting play of broken surface reflections against murky depths. The quickly painted study was no doubt made on the spot to capture the essentials of color and form. Compositionally, it differs little from the finished painting, which is known only from a black-and-white photograph.
The Diving Board was shown in the Art Institute’s 1923 Chicago and Vicinity exhibition, where it was awarded the Marshall F. Holmes Prize of one hundred dollars for a work in “color design.” It was one of two paintings cited by the reviewer for The Catholic World as “happy subjects, happily treated and quite deserving of their awarded prizes.”[i] The Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World reproduced the painting in 1925 and again in 1927, the latter when it was part of an exhibition organized by the Commission for the Encouragement of Local Art and presented on Municipal Pier (now Navy Pier), on Chicago’s lakefront.
Rupprecht painted The Diving Board in rural Saugatuck, on the Michigan shore of Lake Michigan. There, along with Arthur K. Houlberg, he attended the Summer School for Painting early in his artistic education. Rupprecht soon became an assistant to its principal teacher, Frederick Fursman, and eventually a leading faculty member at Saugatuck and at the Art Institute, with which the summer school was affiliated. Later called Ox-Bow, the school was located between the Kalamazoo River and a lagoon near the Lake Michigan shore, offering abundant opportunities for summertime recreation as well as outdoor painting. Rupprecht made at least one other image that celebrates the leisurely vacation atmosphere of Saugatuck, the related painting The Summer Visitor (Union League Club of Chicago), painted a year or two after The Diving Board.
[i] Alice G. Hayde, “Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity,” The Catholic World, Feb. 1923, in AIC Scrapbooks, v. 44, p. 159.