John F. Stacey (1859–1941)
John F. Stacey, from a photograph reproduced in Frances Cheney Bennett, History of Music and Art in Illinois (1904).
John Franklin Stacey was born in Biddeford, Maine, and received a practical art training at the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston. He served as supervisor of drawing instruction in public schools in western Massachusetts for two years and then traveled to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian under prominent figure painters Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. On his return to the United States three years later, he became director of the Kansas City Art Association and School of Design. One of his pupils was Anna Lee Dey, whom he married in 1891. The couple moved to Chicago, where Stacey was an instructor in applied draftsmanship at R. T. Crane Manual High School. In 1894 he began a nearly four-decades-long career as a prolific exhibitor in the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual exhibitions.
Neither his academic art education and nor his work as a teacher of applied draftsmanship prepared Stacey to make landscapes, yet from the start that was the exclusive focus of his work as a painter. Early in his career he found subjects on excursions in Wisconsin and Michigan and visits to his native New England, particularly coastal Connecticut and Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Later, he also painted settings in Quebec, Belgium, France, Spain, California, Washington State, and the Catskill Mountains of New York. As early as 1900, with the Staceys’ visit to the art colony in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, he adopted impressionist methods ofpainting outdoorsand ofapplying pigment in distinct, separated brushstrokes. In his choice of pleasing rural settings and his traditional approach to composition, Stacey was a conservative painter who enjoyed the favor of Chicago’s art public and mainstream reviewers, but he never achieved quite the renown of his wife.
The Staceys shared a studio-residence in the Tree Studios building on Chicago’s Near North Side. Exhibiting nationally, John Stacey won several prestigious prizes, including three at the Art Institute and bronze medals at major expositions in St. Louis in 1904 and Buenos Aires in 1910. He served as president of the Chicago Society of Artists and later as vice-president of the Association of Chicago Painters and Sculptors, a conservative group. The Staceys first visited California in 1915. When they retired to Pasadena in 1937, four years before John’s death, Chicago Tribune critic Eleanor Jewett observed that the Cliff Dwellers club, of which he was a longtime member, would “miss Mr. Stacey with his robust arguments against modernism and his genial smile for everything else in the world.”[i]
[i] Eleanor Jewett, “Chicago Loses Two Painters to California,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 12, 1937.
John F. Stacey, Gloucester, dated [19]09
Oil on canvas, 16 by 24 inches
![John F. Stacey, Gloucester, dated [19]09](http://schwartzcollection.com/sites/default/files/styles/artwork_zoom/public/artwork/IMG_0256.jpg)
This work by John F. Stacey, the original title of which is unknown, pictures the fishing harbor at Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the benign glow of early light. The dark tones of nearby dockside buildings and their broken reflections in the water are set against the muted forms of buildings on the far shoreline; these are rendered by discrete patches of varied soft pastel tints. A short, sloping pier extending over the water links middle ground and distance. A church steeple and the scattered masts of a few moored fishing vessels underscore the delicate play of vertical and horizontal forms, seen also in the wharf pilings and in the clapboard surfaces of the buildings in the middle distance. Anglers fishing from the landing provide the only hint of animate life in the quiet scene.
Beginning in 1905, John Stacey and his wife, fellow painter Anna L. Stacey, spent several productive summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a popular destination for both tourists and artists. Having recently adopted the impressionist method of painting out-of-doors, Stacey probably painted this work from the vantage point of a nearby wharf. Here and in The Pier, Gloucester, the remote view from across the water through hazy light barely suggests the harbor’s typical bustling activity. The weathered dockside fishing shacks evoke a tourist’s idyllic image of the town without revealing the more prosaic realities of its fishing industry.
John F. Stacey, The Pier, Gloucester, undated
Oil on canvas, 16 by 20 inches
The Pier, Gloucester by John F. Stacey presents a view directly across the harbor at Gloucester, Massachusetts, along the length of a narrow wooden jetty leading to a passenger ferry. Its funnel smoking, the boat seems about to depart, leaving a few scattered figures on the pier. The relatively strong color of the jetty contrasts with the muted tones of the buildings across the water, reduced in the hazy distance to a patchwork of harmonious pastels. There, the slender verticals of the masts of moored vessels are a faint reminder of Gloucester’s workaday character as a fishing port. On the pier and the ferry, the brightly colored clothing of some of the figures suggests the town’s popularity as a summer tourist destination.
Gloucester was also a well-established artists’ haunt. Just after the turn of the century, it attracted a group of landscape painters practicing the kind of modified impressionism Stacey had recently adopted. He and his wife, figure painter Anna L. Stacey, initially visited Gloucester around 1905. He showed his first painting of a Gloucester subject in the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual exhibition for Chicago artists in 1906. The following year, the Staceys spent “an industrious summer” painting on Cape Ann. In Gloucester, “Mr. Stacey has built a ‘summer shack’ on a point overlooking the sea,” according to Chicago newspaper accounts.[i] They returned for several more summers before 1913. Among the many works Stacey painted there is the similar Gloucester, which pictures a fishing pier in the harbor.
The original title of this work is unknown. In the 1909 Chicago artists’ annual at the Art Institute, Stacey exhibited a painting titled The Little Giant Landing, East Gloucester, and in the following year’s show, one of his eight exhibited works was The Ferry Landing—Rockyneck. The Little Giant was a pilot boat that ferried passengers from Gloucester town across to Rocky Neck, a peninsula near East Gloucester where several artists lived. Thus, either title could designate this painting, now known as The Pier, Gloucester.
[i] “Art,” Chicago Evening Post, Oct. 5, 1907; “Chicago Women and Their Studios,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 4, 1909.