Edwin Dickinson - Years of Struggle

Years of Struggle

The early recognition awarded to a few of Dickinson's works (most notably Interior, which was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1916 and three other major venues, and Old Ben and Mrs. Marks, 1916, which was shown in New York in 1917 and in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris in 1919, where Dickinson saw it) did not continue after his return from Europe. Despite the financial support of a patron, Esther Hoyt Sawyer, Dickinson struggled to earn enough from his work to live on. He hit bottom in 1924 after an inheritance from his mother and some money from his father ran out. He was unable to sell An Anniversary, a major painting on which he had worked steadily for thirteen months, and two commissioned portraits, one of his illustrious uncle, Charles Evans Hughes, and one of Charles D. Walcott, painted during an eight-week stay in Washington the previous year, were rejected. The sale of another major painting (The Cello Player, 1920–21) to a friend, for $500 in installments, was not enough to enable him to continue as an artist. The crisis was resolved in July 1924 when Esther's husband arranged to pay Dickinson a monthly salary in exchange for the right to choose paintings of his equivalent in value. This arrangement continued for twenty-one years, ending only when Dickinson secured steady teaching jobs at the Art Students League and Cooper Union in 1945.

In 1928 Dickinson married Frances "Pat" Foley, shortly after the completion of The Fossil Hunters, an 8-foot-high (2.4 m) painting on which he spent 192 sittings and that achieved considerable notoriety when exhibited at the Carnegie International of 1928, because it was hung sideways, a mistake perpetuated by subsequent exhibitions in 1929 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (where the error was caught before the opening) and in New York at the National Academy of Design, where it created an even greater uproar by winning a prize in its disoriented condition.)

Esther Sawyer arranged for the sale of Dickinson's works, especially drawings, portraits, and landscapes to her wealthy friends, and in 1927 she and her husband purchased the important Dickinson painting An Anniversary, 1920–21, and donated it to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Dickinson also devoted more time to his landscapes in the 1930s because they were easier to make and sell than his larger works, which he was having greater difficulty exhibiting in major exhibitions. In a letter to Esther in 1933 he wrote that he hoped to live by the landscapes he was painting. In February 1934, he was invited to participate in the first Depression-era program for artists, the half-year Public Works of Art Project, which offered him weekly pay and an exhibition of the painting in Washington in May. He finished the work on time by reworking an abandoned painting, one of a small group done from imagination on a favorite subject, polar exploration, and changing its title to Stranded Brig. The major paintings of this period were Woodland Scene, 1929–1935, which Esther purchased and gave to Cornell University, and Composition with Still Life, 1933–37, which the Sawyers gave to the Museum of Modern Art in 1952.

A second trip to Europe with his family followed in 1937-38, where he painted landscapes in southern and northern France and visited Rome, Florence, and Venice until Hitler cut short his stay. While still abroad Dickinson had his first one person show in New York City at the Passedoit Gallery. It included The Cello Player, The Fossil Hunters, Woodland Scene, Stranded Brig, the recently completed Composition with Still Life (exhibited under its original title, Figures and Still Life), fifteen landscapes sent from France, and fifteen other paintings. It was well covered by art critics, with a generally favorable response. A year after the family's return Dickinson bought a house on Cape Cod in Wellfleet, which they continued to own and live in when he and his wife were not teaching in New York.