L. O. Griffith (1875–1956)
L. O. Griffith at his etching press. Photograph reproduced in Lyn Letsinger-Miller, The Artists of Brown County (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 92
Louis Oscar Griffith was born in Greencastle, Indiana, and as a child moved with his family to Dallas. While working there as a hotel clerk, he began taking art lessons in the studio of landscapist Frank Reaugh, who became his lifelong mentor. Griffith left Dallas in 1893 to continue his studies at the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts (now the Saint Louis Art Museum), and in 1895 he moved to Chicago to work as a commercial artist while attending evening classes at the Art Institute. Hired by the Barnes-Crosby Engraving Company in Chicago in 1897, Griffith soon developed an interest in etching, in which he was largely self-taught. His work took him to New York in 1902.
On his return a year later, Griffith made his debut as a painter at the Art Institute in the sixteenth annual American art exhibition. He also joined the Palette and Chisel Club, of which he remained an active member throughout his time in Chicago. In addition, he became a charter member of the Chicago Society of Etchers, founded in 1910. In 1905, Griffith took the first of several sketching expeditions through Texas with Reaugh: honing his landscape technique, he recorded views that became the basis for numerous paintings and prints by which his name became synonymous with the depiction of Texas’s open lands. In 1907, he broadened his subject matter as he joined the first wave of Chicago artists to work in Brown County, Indiana; that year, he also worked in coastal Maine. In 1908, Griffith visited France and England, not only to paint but also to perfect his skills in the techniques of color intaglio printmaking. In 1916, he visited New Orleans.
Griffith received enthusiastic praise for his paintings in oil, pastel, and watercolor presented in solo exhibitions at Chicago’s Artists Guild in 1914 and Palette and Chisel Club in 1915 and 1920. His reputation as a printmaker was equally strong, particularly when a group of his color aquatints earned a bronze medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Griffith still supported himself with commercial work, however, making the relatively accessible Brown County a more attractive destination than Texas. With his marriage in 1920 and the birth of a son, the artist relocated with his family to Nashville, Indiana, the center of the Brown County art colony. He became active in the Hoosier Salon, an annual display for Indiana artists presented in Chicago, and won several awards in its shows between 1925 and 1949.
In 1926, the Highland Park Gallery, in a suburb of Dallas, staged an exhibition of Griffith’s oil paintings, etchings, and color aquatints. His visit to the city of his youth, now much changed, inspired Griffith to create a series of etched views of modern Dallas, and he established a winter studio there. Regarded as the city’s most important etcher, he supported his landscape painting through sales of his prints. Griffith continued exhibiting work in both media until his last decade.
L. O. Griffith, Late Afternoon on the Farm, undated
Oil on canvas, 20 by 18 inches
L. O. Griffith’s farm scene is set at day’s end, as a red-shirted figure drives cattle toward the open door of a barn adjacent to a modest country house. Hanging laundry and smoke curling from the brick chimney add further notes of peaceful domesticity. The worn wood-frame structures are set against a dark mass of trees that partly screen the sunset; the almost denuded tops of two other trees form a lacy network against the fading sky. The painting’s vertical format confines the view to the farmhouse and barn, complementing its sheltered setting and suggesting the self-sufficient isolation of rural life.
Both the date of the painting and its original title are unknown. Although the humble weather-beaten farm buildings resemble those of picturesque Brown County, Indiana, where Griffith began working in 1907, the painting differs stylistically from The River Aven, which he made before 1909, and from his mature Brown County paintings, which feature bright, expressive color broadly applied in powerful brushstrokes. This work, in contrast, is characterized by a restrained delicacy of touch and naturalistic color muted by the end-of-day setting, suggesting an earlier date. Perhaps it was inspired by a summer excursion undertaken with Chicago’s Palette and Chisel Club, which Griffith joined in 1903. That year, club members ventured as far as Canada; in 1904 they worked in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and the following year, they established a camp of their own at Fox Lake, some fifty miles northwest of Chicago.
L. O. Griffith, The River Aven, circa 1908
Oil on canvas, 18 by 24 inches
L. O. Griffith painted The River Aven in Brittany, a picturesque region in northwestern France. The rippling water of a shallow stream fills the shadowed foreground; in the distance, late-afternoon sunlight highlights the blocky form of a building beyond an open field. The complex composition layers screening shrubs and trees and strong contrasts of light and color; these are accentuated in their broken reflection on the water’s surface, interrupted by a large rock at the lower left and by the dense foliage of trees sprouting from tussocks in midstream. As in Griffith’s Late Afternoon on the Farm, an isolated stroke of red—here the skirt of a woman on the riverbank—creates a focus. Apparently one of two overlapped figures, the woman wears what may be the prominent white starched lace collar and white cap of traditional Breton dress.
Griffith’s only trip abroad took him to France and England in 1908. The Aven flows through the town of Pont-Aven, which drew French and American artists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Americans in particular were attracted to the quaint settings and way of life they found in rural and coastal villages in Holland and northern France and to the peculiar light conditions of the region. In this work, Griffith balanced the formal aspects of landscape composition with references to the specific setting, such as the figure’s distinctive costume and the building, likely a typical Breton longère, or one-story house with stone walls and a thatched roof. With its bright color and contrasts of light and dark, this painting prefigured Griffith's characteristic portrayal of Brown County, Indiana, in the following years. Exhibited in the Art Institute’s thirteenth annual exhibition for Chicago artists, The River Aven was reproduced in the Chicago Journal for February 2, 1909.
During his time abroad, Griffith also worked to perfect his technique for making color intaglio prints. That experience may well have influenced his painting, encouraging him to abandon the drawing-based academic approach seen in the more naturalistic Late Afternoon on the Farm as he experimented with composing in broad sweeps of color and contrasting areas of light and shade.