William A. Harper (1873–1910)
William A. Harper, from a photograph published in Chicago News, Feb. 6, 1905.
William A. Harper moved as a boy from his native Cayuga, in Ontario, Canada, to Illinois, living in Petersburg and Jacksonville before arriving in Chicago. As an African American with limited opportunities for employment, he took a job as a janitor at the Art Institute of Chicago while saving money in order to study at its school. Harper enrolled in 1895 and graduated with honors in 1901. Early that year, the Art Students’ League annual show at the Art Institute included three landscapes by Harper that were “said to be among the most perfect on exhibition,” according a Chicago newspaper reviewer.[i]
Harper went to Houston to teach drawing. While there, he was represented in the 1902 annual exhibition of the Chicago Society of Artists with two landscapes, one of which was reproduced in the Chicago art journal Brush and Pencil. The following year, two of his paintings were juried into the Art Institute’s annual Chicago artists’ exhibition, in which he would participate annually for the remainder of his short life. During a sojourn in Europe from 1903 to 1905, Harper studied at the Académie Julian and painted in France and in Cornwall, England. Hailed in the Chicago press as the “janitor artist,” he won a prize from the Municipal Art League for his group of nine paintings in the Art Institute’s Chicago artists’ exhibition in 1905. [ii] That year, when Harper exhibited with the Society of Western Artists, he was named one of five “rising young men” of the Chicago art scene in the periodical The World Today.[iii] By 1907, the Union League Club of Chicago had added three of Harper’s works to its exclusive art collection.[iv] During this period, the artist painted during his leisure daytime hours and supported himself by working as a night-watchman at the Art Institute.
In 1907, Harper returned to Europe, where he worked alongside landscape painters William Wendt and Charles Francis Browne and studied in Paris under African American expatriate artist Henry Ossawa Tanner. One of his entries in the Chicago artists’ exhibition of 1908 was awarded the Young Fortnightly Prize. Harper’s health was failing when he traveled later that year to Mexico. He painted there until shortly before his death from tuberculosis at age thirty-six. A memorial exhibition of sixty works by Harper at the Art Institute drew wide notice in the Chicago press, where it was observed that, at his death, “he already had marked a vital impress upon the art of his home city.”[v]
[i]Chicago Conservator, Feb. 16, 1901, in AIC Scrapbooks, v. 14.
[ii] “Colored Man Wins Position,” Chicago News, Feb. 6, 1905.
[iii] James Spencer Dickerson, “The Society of Western Artists,” The World Today 10 (1905): 299.
[iv] L. M. McCauley, Catalogue of Paintings, Etchings, Engravings and Sculpture (Chicago: Union League Club, 1907), 14, 49.
[v]Chicago Record-Herald, Aug. 7, 1910, in AIC Scrapbooks, v. 26.
William A. Harper, Landscape, undated
Oil on canvas, 16 by 20 inches
William A. Harper’s sketch-like landscape shows a deserted scene of a riverbank with trees, some bearing the russet leaves of early autumn. The vivid colors in this work include rich blues, not only in the flowing water and the sky but tinting the dense woods on the far shore. Distinct brushstrokes are evident, particularly in the trees on the right; in the foreground, more blended paint indicates succeeding bands of muddy bank, rock, and dry soil. Harper seems to have been less concerned with conveying the surface qualities of the landscape’s features than with exploring relative tonal and color values and the juxtaposition of near and distant elements in the landscape.
From the beginning of his brief career, Harper focused on painting landscapes. He found his subjects in a variety of locales, notably Cornwall and rural France, which he interpreted in a romantic manner that reveals the influence of the French Barbizon school and of his most important landscape teacher, Charles Francis Browne. This painting, however, manifests a fresh immediacy, strong color, and rapid brushwork that, combined with its absence of any human presence, suggests an American setting. It may depict the area around Eagle’s Nest, an exclusive summer art colony overlooking the Rock River at Oregon, Illinois. Harper’s mentor Browne was a founding member of the colony and an avid painter of the surrounding scenery. Possibly thanks to him, by 1905 Harper had already spent several summers at Eagle’s Nest as an “assistant” to the artists. There he also found time to paint works “that commanded our genuine admiration and respect,” according to an unnamed colony artist.[i]
Harper’s memorial exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1910 included two works, The Stream and The River Bank, of which either might have been this landscape. Never previously exhibited, according to existing records, these paintings may have been among several relatively minor, even student works included in the memorial show, which was intended to liquidate the artist’s estate. All the exhibited paintings were for sale, perhaps to benefit Harper’s father and brother, who were living in Decatur, Illinois, at the time. In this work, the signature at lower left, in which a faint “Harper” was reinforced with a more distinctly painted “W. A. Harper,” perhaps indicates the artist’s transition from student to confident professional.
[i]Chicago Inter Ocean, Feb. 9, 1905, in AIC Scrapbooks, v. 20.