J. Jeffrey Grant (1883-1960)
J. Jeffrey Grant, from a photograph reproduced in Chicago Tribune, Aug. 11, 1957.
Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, James Jeffrey Grant was the son of an artist. He began painting at an early age and studied in his native city at the Gray School of Art, on a national scholarship. The Aberdeen Art Gallery exhibited one of his paintings when he was only seventeen years old. Grant moved to Canada in 1904 and worked as an engraver and sign painter. Three years later, he arrived in Chicago, where he pursued further studies at the Art Institute and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Until 1920, Grant supported himself as an engraver while continuing to paint. In 1908 he joined the Palette and Chisel Club, and he won a gold medal at its 1917 annual exhibition. In 1913 Grant made his debut in the Art Institute’s annual exhibitions for American artists and for Chicago-area artists; he was represented in one or both of those shows every year but one through 1949.
Early on, Grant established himself as a painter of marines and of females nudes “of a rather tepid type of female beauty,” according to Chicago Tribune critic Eleanor Jewett.[i] In the mid-1920s, however, his work gained new strength as he explored a wider variety of genres, including rural and urban landscape, still life, and portraiture. These shifts may reflect the impact of two return visits to Europe. In 1924, Grant painted in Scotland and France, particularly around Paris and in Brittany, and in 1926–27, he studied with painter and teacher Moritz Heymann in Munich. In 1929, Grant discovered his favorite site for painting: the picturesque fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. He found additional subjects in nearby Rockport and in Charleston, South Carolina; rural Illinois; and Chicago, among other locales.
Grant received a solo exhibition at the Art Institute in 1927. During the following decade, he was among the most successful painters in Chicago, winning several prizes in exhibitions at venues such as the Art Institute and the Chicago Galleries Association. Beyond Chicago, he participated in exhibitions at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among others. His works were featured in a string of small group and solo shows, including two more at the Art Institute, and were widely praised and reproduced. “He speaks a strong, universal language, sure of being understood and appreciated by the public,” was a typical assessment.[ii] Grant combined a decorative use of color and patterned brushwork with accessible everyday subject matter. He was active in such conservative artists’ organizations as the Association of Chicago Painters and Sculptors and the Palette and Chisel Club, serving several terms as president of the latter. Grant continued painting and exhibiting his work until the year before his death at age seventy-seven.
[i]Eleanor Jewett, "Grant and Grigware Win Highest Praise," Chicago Tribune, Aug. 21, 1927.
[ii]“J. Jeffrey Grant One-Man Show Has Appeal for Many,” Rockford Star, Aug. 7, 1927.
J. Jeffery Grant, Harvest Time, Barney’s Orchard, undated
Oil on canvas, 18 ⅛ by 24 ⅛ inches
J. Jeffrey Grant’s late-summer harvest scene presents a field of golden grain in a pastoral setting. In the distance, trees shelter a cluster of farm buildings, all silhouetted against a tranquil sky. Grant emphasizes agrarian fulfillment by depicting the fleeting moment between the labor of harvest and the waning of ripe summer. The seemingly straightforward representation is carefully composed, with the bulk of the nearest haystack, at lower left, balanced with the large tree just to the right of center. There, the red-and-white structures form the composition’s focal point, setting off the green and gold tones of the landscape.
Such images of local natural bounty won considerable favor with Chicago’s largely conservative art public in the interwar years. As modernist art challenged artistic convention, particularly in the wake of the Armory Show of 1913, aesthetically pleasing and morally uplifting representations of the rural landscape became vehicles for embattled standards of art. A number of Chicago landscape artists painted fields dotted with grain stacks—emblems of the rewards of productive work as well as regional identity. The subject also recalled impressionist pioneer Claude Monet, whose works were much prized by Chicago collectors; in 1922, his Stacks of Wheat (Sunset, Snow Effect) (1890/91) was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago with the Potter Palmer collection of paintings.
The origin of the title of Grant’s painting is unknown and no orchard is visible in the image, but the setting probably is rural Illinois. In 1938, the artist exhibited a work titled Harvest Time at the Palette and Chisel Club, and in 1944 some of his “Illinois farm country paintings” were included in a two-person exhibition he shared with Charles Biesel at the Art Institute.[i] By the 1930s, Grant favored nearly square formats, high horizons, and decorative patterned brushwork that flattens forms for a subtly abstract effect. Harvest Time, Barney’s Orchard, in contrast, appears to date to an earlier period, likely the early 1920s. The somewhat stylized treatment of the trees, blurred outlines of forms against the sky, and interweaving of distinct strokes of bright color in the stubbly foreground are consistent with the modified impressionism that developed among Chicago’s conservative landscape painters during and just after World War I.
[i] “Exhibit of 2 Chicagoans’ Paintings Opens Thursday,”Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1944.