50 Facts About Edwin Dickinson

Edwin Walter Dickinson was an American painter and draftsman best known for psychologically charged self-portraits, quickly painted landscapes, which he called premier coups, and large, hauntingly enigmatic paintings involving figures and objects painted from observation, in which he invested his greatest time and concern.

Edwin Dickinson's drawings are widely admired and were the subject of the first book published on his work.

The strange juxtapositions and perplexing hints of narrative in his large compositions have been compared to Surrealism, and his premier coups often approach abstraction, but Dickinson resisted being identified with any art movement.

Edwin Dickinson was born and raised in Seneca Falls, New York, in the Finger Lakes area; his family moved to Buffalo in 1897.

From late summer 1916 through year's end Edwin Dickinson investigated the possibilities of printmaking in Provincetown with fellow painter Ross Moffett, and made further attempts in the 1920s and '30s, but felt his time was better spent painting.

Hawthorne, who had himself been a student of Chase and perpetuated some of his ideas, had a strong influence on Edwin Dickinson's painting methods and ideas, many of which he retained in his later teaching.

From Hawthorne, Edwin Dickinson learned to look for the unexpected and to paint without formulas, to squint to determine value relationships, and to believe that a painting will be better if one leaves off when inspiration wanes, no matter how much is done.

Edwin Dickinson spent time teaching painting in Buffalo and working as a telegrapher in New York City until his naval service from late 1917 to 1919.

Edwin Dickinson's death seemed to reawaken Dickinson's pain over earlier losses of his mother and brother and to affect subsequent paintings.

Edwin Dickinson made a side trip to visit his grave in northern France and then to Spain; two paintings by El Greco in Toledo he declared the best he had ever seen, an admiration that persisted throughout his life.

The subject of one was especially meaningful to Edwin Dickinson, having visited Groesbeck's grave so recently, The Burial of Count Orgaz.

In 1924, Edwin Dickinson reached a low point after an inheritance from his mother and some money from his father ran out.

Edwin Dickinson 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 uncle Charles Evans Hughes, and one of Charles D Walcott, painted during an eight-week stay in Washington the previous year, were rejected.

Edwin Dickinson 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.

Between 1936 and 1942 Edwin Dickinson exhibited annually in the Passedoit Gallery in New York City.

The relationship ceased because Edwin Dickinson, still struggling to support his family, did not generate enough income from sales and needed to find "earning work".

Edwin Dickinson remained active as a teacher into the 1960s, by which time his painting output had sharply diminished following the removal of a tubercular lung in 1959 and the increased demands imposed by his growing reputation.

Notable artists who studied under Edwin Dickinson include Lennart Anderson, Francis Cunningham, and Denver Lindley.

Yet already, in the picture's strange assortment of subjects, including what he intended as a dead horse, Edwin Dickinson takes Hawthorne's statement, voicing an idea that was widely accepted in this period, as permission to sabotage narrative coherence by including imagery that defies the observer to account for its presence, a practice that he continued in many of his larger studio paintings.

Driscoll observes that Maeterinck's play deals with a suicide, and the shared title supports the view that Edwin Dickinson's picture is about the death of his brother, represented by the guitarist and by the screaming figure behind him, who embodies Burgess's interior doubts and uncertainty.

Edwin Dickinson painted it two months after his discharge from the navy at war's end at the family cottage at Sheldrake, on Cayuga Lake, where, according to a journal entry written after a visit on leave in 1918, he had had a "happy time".

Edwin Dickinson sees this pair as representing Dickinson's mother as both alive and dead, leading to a scene both present and remembered.

Edwin Dickinson interprets the old man in An Anniversary, Two Figures II, The Cello Player, and The Fossil Hunters, and the androgynous woman in Woodland Scene as his aged father, associated in four of the paintings with a young woman and with the cello substituting for a woman in the fifth.

When Edwin Dickinson was seventy, he noted in his journal that he had dreamed of his mother as a young woman.

Between 1924 and 1926 Edwin Dickinson painted four pictures growing out of his keen interest in polar exploration.

MacMillan was a Provincetown native and Edwin Dickinson knew him well.

In 1949 Edwin Dickinson tried including the Nike in his Ruin at Daphne, and bought a reproduction of the sculpture.

The title refers to the fossils that Edwin Dickinson had searched for as a child in Sheldrake, and again while visiting in the summer of 1926 before starting work on the painting.

Edwin Dickinson opened the eyes in his painting, and in so doing, not only immortalized his brother, but gave him back the life he remembered him having.

Edwin Dickinson compares it with another painting of the balloon ascent, The Finger Lakes, 1940, and contrasts the soft, romantic mood and style of that painting with the menacing character of the earlier work, with shadows that appear to rise from the earth and the wildly swinging gondola of the balloon.

Driscoll believes that Edwin Dickinson identifies with the subject's inner strength in facing disappointment and adversity.

Ward cautions against trying to interpret the picture in terms of the sitter's biography; he notes that another sitter had originally posed for the seated figure, and both worked as models that Edwin Dickinson had used before.

Edwin Dickinson interprets the floating figure as the mother as he remembers her, with the rose, equated with a breast as a symbol of motherly love, and visually connected to the old woman's loins by the plow handle, as if it traced the path of her resurrection.

The tests were inconclusive, but Edwin Dickinson's daughter believes the problem was depression, a family problem that had led to the death of his brother, and was perhaps exacerbated by his still-unresolved struggle with Woodland Scene, on which he had at that time spent five and a half years.

Edwin Dickinson posed for his head lying on his back and looking at an overhead mirror.

Work progressed steadily in 1934, except for the period Edwin Dickinson worked on Stranded Brig, followed by his hospitalization, and for two months at the beginning of 1935, when he finished up work on Woodland Scene at Esther's request.

Edwin Dickinson put the painting aside in June 1935, after receiving word that his eldest brother, Howard, had been murdered in Detroit.

Edwin Dickinson did little work on the painting until May 1936, and finished it November 1,1937.

In 1930 and 1931 Esther arranged for Edwin Dickinson to draw portraits of about a dozen persons, all of which seem to have been accepted, but none of which have been reproduced or exhibited, in contrast to the one he did at this time of her daughter as a surprise gift to her.

Edwin Dickinson thought that Self-Portrait, with a French villa in the background, a black stovepipe framing his right shoulder, and a dark cloud engulfing, but not darkening his head, was his best.

Edwin Dickinson's daughter relates that, because he was bearded and was seen drawing and painting on the beach, rumors spread in 1941 that he was a German spy mapping the terrain, an idea that was not yet squelched in 1943, despite an appeal to the American Legion to intervene on his behalf.

The darkness in which the microscope hovers relates to the dark pool in which Edwin Dickinson's head sits in the Self-Portrait with French villa, of 1941 and the darkness of his Self-Portrait head of 1914.

Edwin Dickinson's wife was operated on in January 1954, and three weeks later and three days before the anniversary of his brother's death, he began his last Self-Portrait.

Edwin Dickinson's major painting of the 1940s, a work that he worked on between 1943 and 1953, was Ruin at Daphne, inspired by the Roman ruins that had impressed him on his European visit.

Edwin Dickinson wanted to dedicate the picture to his brother Burgess, an intention he had harbored long before the painting began.

Edwin Dickinson was excited about the challenge posed by having to invent the buildings, which permitted him compositional freedom to indulge in a complex interplay of form much like that permitted to a purely abstract painter.

Only in early 1952 did Edwin Dickinson finally begin to overpaint the preliminary reds and pinks in which he had worked out the picture's design.

Edwin Dickinson continued the use of a palette knife, even in the large paintings, but gradually made greater use of brushes and thinner paint.

Edwin Dickinson's smock was covered with paint on the right side because he wiped his finger on it.

Edwin Dickinson painted some more fully finished, somewhat larger landscapes in the later 1920s, such as Cliffs Longnook, 1927, and Parker's Cliffs, 1929, the former a gift to his sister Antoinette, and the latter to his father and his second wife, Louise.