Edwin Austin Abbey

Abbey remained with Harper & Brothers until 1878. During that time, he evinced a preference for literary subjects from Renaissance England. Abbey had fallen under the spell of England and its potential for representation in the fine arts while a student at the Pennsylvania Academy. His teacher there, Christian Schuessele, was a noted exponent of Shakespearean themes. But beyond Schuessele’s direct influence, Abbey as a student embarked on a long and passionate study of the work of the British Pre-Raphaelites, including especially William Holman Hunt, Sir John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, although he did not wholeheartedly emulate their practices. While he was seduced by the truthful, realistic style of the Pre-Raphaelites, Abbey once said that his goal was “the representation of events not as they might be supposed to poetically to have happened, but as they really might have happened” (Lucas, op. cit., p. 189)-he rejected the social relevance for which the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood strove.

Above all, Abbey’s fascination lay in the grand, medieval costume scenes and literary allusions of Rossetti and the younger members of his coterie of followers, Edward Burne-Jones and Val Prinsep. These modern-day British medievalists’ large-scale, sumptuously colored canvases served as Abbey’s guiding light throughout his career.

In 1878, sensing perhaps that Abbey’s talents would be best served by visiting England, Harper & Brothers sent him on what would prove to be a fateful trip to that country, where he was to immerse himself in England’s literary past as research for a series of illustrations based on Robert Herrick’s poetry. With an eye on Herrick but his mind forever thinking of the Bard, Abbey traveled to Stratford-on-Avon before settling in London for the winter. He stayed abroad for two years, living principally in London but also traveling to Paris and Munich, where he studied very briefly with a student of the German academician, Wilhelm Diez. He came back to New York in 1881, but the very next year he returned to England, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.

Abbey became a fixture in the London art world. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, he was accepted among the Pre-Raphaelite circle as one of their own. He also befriended two other Americans who expatriated themselves to England, Frank Millet and John Singer Sargent. He was elected a member of the Royal Institute of the Painters in Water Colour in 1883, and in 1885, he exhibited a drawing for the first time at the Royal Academy. In 1888, Abbey had his first show in England when he exhibited with Alfred Parsons at the Fine Arts Society, London.

Abbey married Mary Gertrude Mead in New York in 1890, and, the following year, the Abbeys moved into “Morgan Hall,” a splendid house in the town of Fairford, in Gloucestershire, England, where Abbey had summered since 1885. Abbey’s work continued to grace the pages of magazines and books in England and America, and he achieved a reputation as one of the finest and most popular illustrators of his day. But despite the fame accorded him as an illustrator and the security that this provided, Abbey perhaps sensed that in order to achieve true greatness, he would have to distinguish himself in the highest realm of the fine arts, oil painting.

Abbey’s first oil painting was “May-Day Morning” (1890-94, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), a large, richly colored canvas of two figures strolling through a walled flower garden. This was exhibited at the Royal Academy that spring, the first appearance of his work at that institution since he showed a drawing there in 1885. Abbey’s first decorative project was “A Game of Bowls”, a mural done in 1890 for the Hotel Imperial in New York through the connection of the American architect, Stanford White, who designed the building. Thus began a long and productive association between the painter and the architect. (The mural is now in the New York Racquet and Tennis Club, which was designed by McKim, Mead & White.)

In 1890, with only two oil paintings behind him, Abbey received the commission for the greatest work of his career: he was to join John Singer Sargent and the great French artist and decorator, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, to provide a series of decorations for the newly built Boston Public Library. The library was designed by McKim, Mead & White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens was put in charge of the interior decorations. Saint-Gaudens approached Abbey with the commission to paint fifteen panels for the Library’s Delivery Room. Abbey accepted, and expanded his studio at Morgan Hall to accommodate the massive project, and he and Sargent worked side-by-side on their respective components of the commission in its spacious interior. Abbey settled on the subject of the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. The Boston Public Library commission was hailed as a major triumph, and it vaulted Abbey into the forefront of American art. He was hailed as a living old master, and he rapidly became one of the most sought-after talents the field of decoration.

Over the next two decades, Abbey distinguished himself as the preeminent American decorative painter and muralist, and he received a host of honors, awards, and distinguished commissions. In 1897, Yale University awarded Abbey an honorary Master of Arts degree, and in 1902 the University of Pennsylvania conferred the honorary degree of LL.D. upon him. In 1898 he was elected a Royal Academician following the smashing success of his The Play Scene in “Hamlet” (1897; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), which was shown at the Academy the previous year. Also in 1898, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts acknowledged Abbey’s eminence in the field of art by presenting him with its Gold Medal of Honor.

In 1900, Abbey exhibited his “Hamlet” in the American Section at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where it garnered a gold medal. In 1901, Abbey was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design, New York, and was also elected president of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. In 1902, King Edward VII made Abbey official court painter of the King’s coronation, and that same year he accepted a prestigious commission to decorate the new state capitol at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 1904, Abbey was elected president of the Bath Society of Artists, and 1905 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A tireless worker, Abbey suffered a physical breakdown in 1906. Although he spent six months traveling in an effort to heal, Abbey never fully recovered, and after a protracted illness of several months, he died in London in 1911. That year, a huge exhibition of over 300 works selected by his dear friend, John Singer Sargent, was shown in a memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy. Conscious of Abbey’s lifelong identification as an American artist, Abbey’s widow, Gertrude, donated a huge cache of some 2,000 of Abbey’s paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints to the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1931.