James William Pattison (1844–1915)
James William Pattison was born in Boston, the son of the principal of Oread Institute, a women’s college in Worcester, Massachusetts. He enlisted in the Union Army late in the Civil War and published sketches of the conflict in Harper’s Weekly. At war’s end, he began studying art privately in St. Louis, where he married his first wife. By 1866, he was in New York, taking instruction in landscape painting from either Sanford or R. Swain Gifford, the brothers William and James M. Hart, and George Inness. After five years as an art instructor at Washington University in St. Louis, Pattison went to Dusseldorf for further training. In 1876, the widowed Pattison married fellow artist Helen Searle. The couple lived in Paris, where he was represented in the Salon exhibitions of 1879, 1880, and 1881.
After two years’ residence in New York, where Pattison exhibited at the National Academy of Design and the American Water Color Society, he became director of the School of Fine Arts in Jacksonville, Illinois. Widowed once more, Pattison moved to Chicago in 1896 to take up a lecturing position at the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition, he taught art at Rockford College, in Rockford, Illinois, and he was active in the Municipal Art League and other local organizations. Pattison lived in the Tree Studios building on Chicago’s Near North Side until 1906, when he moved with his third wife, whom he married the year before, to suburban Park Ridge. His neighbors there included painter Walter Marshall Clute, who in 1906 published a profile of Pattison in the Chicago-based journal The Sketch Book. In 1907, the Municipal Art League acquired his best-known painting, Tranquility (circa 1906; Union League Club of Chicago). Pattison found subjects for landscape and marine paintings in France and in coastal New England, where he often summered, and he made romantic nighttime views of New York City seen from the water. He also specialized in studies of animals, particularly sheep. In addition to oils, Pattison worked in watercolors and he also made etchings. Until 1910 he exhibited his art nationally and with such local organizations as the Society of Western Artists and the Chicago Society of Artists, of which he was a longtime officer.
Pattison was equally prominent as a writer on art, beginning in 1886 with his serial “Pattison’s Art Talks” in the Jacksonville Journal and the Chicago Journal. He contributed to Arts for America (later The Arts), the journal of the Chicago-based Central Art Association, and wrote criticism for local newspapers and national magazines. He also published several books on painters from the Renaissance to modern times, in addition to editing the journal The Fine Arts in 1910. Pattison retired to Ashville, North Carolina, and died there at the age of seventy.
James William Pattison, Landscape with Stream, undated
Oil on canvas, 9 by 14 inches
James William Pattison’s sketchlike painting pictures a quiet marshy pasture with grazing cows viewed from a shallow stream that dominates the foreground. A cluster of trees interrupts the vista and relieves the glare of diffused sunlight, which blurs the ridge of trees on the horizon. Probably made on site, this small work is a study in light effects. It features a blend of techniques. The artist used soft brown underpainting to render the fuzzy outlines of the tree trunks and the streambed visible in the foreground through the clear water. Dense whites capture the sky’s reflection in the stream and in pools of standing water across the field; in the foreground, Pattison scratched delicate horizontal lines through the whites to evoke the stream’s slightly rippled surface, dotted in the foreground with lily pads rendered with quick touches of vivid green. In the upper corners of the painting, bright sky seen through moisture-laden atmosphere is a vibrating patchwork of pale green and pink brush strokes.
The unidentified locale pictured here might be any number of places Pattison visited in the United States and abroad, but it most closely recalls the tidal marshes north of his native Boston. The artist returned regularly to Massachusetts to sail and to paint. While both the painting’s original title and its date are unknown, it is likely a relatively late work. It shares with Pattison’s best-known painting, Tranquility (circa 1906; Union League Club of Chicago), the distinctive use of visible underpainting and the scraping through of the top layer. Both images feature not only the domestic animals Pattison frequently depicted but also attention to natural light effects and what critic Lena McCauley described as a “decorative” sensibility, achieved partly through a variety of paint layers and application techniques. With its high horizon and the cropping of the tops of the prominent trees in the middle ground, this work also strikes a conspicuously modern note, notwithstanding its conventional pastoral subject.[i]
[i] L. M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, April 8, 1911.