Edwin Dickinson - The Period From 1943 To 1958

The Period From 1943 To 1958

Between 1936 and 1942 Dickinson exhibited annually in the Passedoit Gallery in New York City. This was made possible because he painted no large, time-consuming works between the time he left off work on Composition with Still Life in 1937 and began work on Ruin at Daphne January 1, 1943. The relationship ceased because Dickinson, still struggling to support his family, did not generate enough income from sales and needed to find "earning work." In 1944 he moved the family to New York in the belief that it would help him secure a teaching job, but during the first year he had to get by with some commercial work, including drawings for a French magazine that were rejected and a copy of a photograph of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-Shek. But Pat found employment at the Hewitt School that lasted until her retirement in 1966, and in 1945 Edwin was hired to teach at three schools and began a period of teaching that lasted until his retirement, also in 1966. The other reason for discontinuing the connection with Passedoit was that he wanted time to work on a new painting, Ruin at Daphne, on which he continued to paint, with periodic interludes and lapses in enthusiasm, until 1953, for a total of 447 sittings (about 1341 hours). A donor purchased Ruin at Daphne and gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1955. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased The Fossil Hunters in 1958, and in 1988 the M. H. de Young Museum purchased The Cello Player, the last major painting of Dickinson's to enter a museum (and, along with Ruin at Daphne, one of the few Dickinson paintings usually on view to the general public).