Who’s Who in the Davis Collection: Some Short Bios and Insights
Nancy Kempf, Curator, San Antonio Art League & Museum
The San Antonio Art League & Museum has always honored its foundational collection, subsidized by Texas rancher, wildcatter, and philanthropist Edgar B. Davis, who organized the national call to artists for the purchase prize Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions of 1927, ‘28 and ’29. The concept of a purchase prize was novel at the time but became popularized in other arts locales. The original wildflower stipulation expanded to the categories of ranching and cotton picking after 1927. The Art League has striven to give the Davis collection the pride of place it deserves, not only in San Antonio, and Texas, but in the history of 20th century American art.
Among many others who contribute to this all-volunteer institution, Lyn Belisle Kurtin and William Kurtin worked diligently to create a space to highlight this historically significant collection. Amy Shelton and the V.H. McNutt Memorial Foundation made the Educational Gallery for the Edgar B. Davis Collection of Texas Art a reality. The space, a long-time dream of the Art League, was opened in the fall of 2020.
In the summer of 2018, the Art League highlighted the Davis collection as part of San Antonio’s Tricentennial Celebration, for which art scholar William E. Reaves, Jr., author of “Texas Art and a Wildcatter’s Dream: Edgar B. Davis and the San Antonio Art League,” spoke eloquently at the opening reception. His scholarship is an invaluable historical and art criticism resource.
The Davis Collection is often misconceived as a collection of works entirely by Texas artists. Nothing could be further from the truth, though the competitions’ criteria required Texas subject matter as the focus. Word of the competitions, with their substantial purchase prizes – unprecedented for the time – quickly spread across the nation, from Texas to New York City to California. Though Texas artists certainly comprise an important segment of the Davis collection, its astonishing depth and breadth represent artists and regional artistic movements of the period across the U.S. and abroad.
The collection notably boasts works by founding members of the Taos Society of Artists cooperative, Oscar E. Berninghaus and W. Herbert Dunton, both known for their scenes of cowboys and the American Southwest. Later notable members of the Toas Society included the Spanish-born painter José Arpa (1858-1952), who as a young man studied at the Academia Real des Belles Artes in Seville, and Arpa’s nephew Xavier Gonzalez (1898-1993). Uncle and nephew studied together at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1920s, and Gonzalez went on to teach at Newcomb College in New Orleans.
Arpa ultimately settled in San Antonio (though he died in his native Spain), and his works are dispersed throughout the city. His mastery of composition and light is expressly evident in his beautiful work in the Davis collection, “Picking Cotton.”
Oscar Berninghaus (1874-1952) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and began his artistic career there. In 1899, he travelled west for a series of commissions in Colorado and New Mexico, and, in 1915, became one of the founding members of the Taos Society of Artists. His painting “Winter in the Panhandle” is a beautiful evocation of what is sometimes called Big Sky Country. Appearing almost square and almost monochromatic, its low horizon line evokes the stark landscape and vast sky of the West Texas landscape.
W. Herbert Dunton (1878-1936) spent his youth working as a ranch hand and cowboy before he became a commercial illustrator for periodicals such as Harper’s, Collier’s, and Scribner’s. During the Depression, he worked for the Public Works of Art Project established by Francis Perkins for FDR.
E. Martin Hennings (1886-1956) was born in New Jersy, but his family moved to Chicago when he was two. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, entered and won prizes in competitions in Europe, and became a fellow in the Taos Society of Artists, having been nominated by Berninghaus. Before WWI, he became a member of Chicago’s artist-run Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Art. He exhibited throughout the United States and was included in the 1924 Venice Biennale, the International Exhibition in Paris in 1926, and the Paris Salon in 1927.
British-born Impressionist Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939) was invited by American artist John Leslie Breck to join American artists who, around 1887, established the Impressionist Giverny Colony to work alongside Monet. The colony thrived until the First World War brought it to a close. Dawson-Watson became well-known in San Antonio for his paintings of cacti native to the region. He taught at the Byrdcliffe Arts & Crafts Colony in Woodstock, New York; as well as in Hartford, Connecticut; St. Louis, Missouri; and San Antonio.
Frank Tenney Johnson (1874-1939), who was born in Iowa, also studied at the Art Students League of New York. He travelled to paint on the Montana Blackfoot Reservation before working in Colorado and California, and spent a number of years in Cody, Wyoming, near Yellowstone National Park. By popularizing paintings of cowboys, he pioneered what became known as the Johnson Moonlight Technique, which earned him the sobriquet “Master Painter of the Old West.”
Louis Raynaud (1905-unknown) made his home in both New Orleans and Chicago, where he was an advocate for the Society for Sanity in Art, the mission of which was to guard representational art against the modernist onslaught of abstraction and surrealism (much like the notable San Antonio Italian emigre, the sculptor Pompeo Coppini).
Landscape painter Theodore J. Morgan (1872-1947) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, though his primary residence became Washington, D.C., where he was a member of the Washington Society of Artists, the National Arts Club, and the New York Water Color Club; yet his itinerant life brought him to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Dallas and San Antonio in Texas. He spent the 1920s and ‘30s painting in California and Arizona.
Maurice Braun (1877-1941) was born in Hungary. His family migrated to New York City when he was four. He studied at the National Academy of Design, and later apprenticed under William Merritt Chase. A turning point in his life came in 1909, when he left New York City for California. In 1912, he founded the San Diego Fine Arts Academy.
Millard Sheets (1907-1989), a native of California, studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (which merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to become the California Institute of the Arts). Sheets was a significant proponent of California Scene Painting (also known as Southern California Regionalism) of the first half of the 20th century. In addition to his prominence as a painter, Sheets was an architectural designer, worked as the art correspondent for Life magazine and for the U.S. Army Air Forces in India and Burma during WWII, and worked hiring artists for the Public Works of Art Project as part of the New Deal.
Native Ohioan Henry Keller (1869-1949) was the leader of the Cleveland School of watercolor painters. Probably his most notable student was the prominent American artist Charles E. Burchfield. In 1939, Keller was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician.
Though Peter L. Hohnstedt (1871-1957) was born in Ohio, where he received his earliest training in art, as a young man he drifted into odd jobs in Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee, before moving to New Orleans in 1914. A commission from the Delgado Museum won him a wealthy benefactor who backed a project to paint the swamplands of Louisiana. From there, Hohnstedt moved to Los Angeles, then to Seattle, before relocating to Texas, specifically for the Davis competitions, ultimately settling in Comfort in the Texas Hill Country. The Witte Museum houses eleven of Hohnstedt’s 1933 Big Bend paintings.
Audley Dean Nicols (1875-1941) hailed from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, studied in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Students League, then in Europe. Back in the States, Nicols made a living working as an illustrator for various periodical publications including Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s, and Scribner’s, among others. Due to health concerns, he relocated to El Paso in the 1920s, where he became a prolific landscape painter, especially of desert scenes, and influenced a group of West Texas artists that came to be known as the “Purple Mountain Painters.”
Eliot C. Clark (1883-1980) who, at the age of eleven, exhibited at the New York Watercolor Club, was also an alumnus of the Art Students League of New York where he studied with John H. Twachtman in 1897. Travelling throughout Europe in the early 1900s, Clark was heavily influenced by the Barbizon painters and the Impressionists. In 1912, he won the Hallgarten Prize for artists under the age of 35 at the National Academy of Design.
Nicholas Brewer (1857-1949), a native of Minnesota, who worked in his adopted state of Arkansas, travelled to New York to study at the National Academy of Design. Brewer’s son, Adrian Brewer (1891-1956), also in the Davis collection, like his father studied at the Art Students League of New York. Returning to St. Paul and Minneapolis to teach and then to work in advertising, his artistic endeavors were interrupted by WWI, when he enlisted in the 444th Aero Construction Squadron from which he was reassigned to create posters and paintings for the war effort. Discharged from the military in 1920, the younger Brewer travelled about the country as a landscape painter, including in Texas.
Rolla Taylor (1872-1970) was Texas-born in Galveston and became a friend of Julien Onderdonk. He studied at the Cuero Institute and at the Art Institute of Chicago, with Arthur Best in San Francisco, with Frederick Fursman in Michigan, and worked abroad in France.
Thomas Lawson Blackmon (1901-1990) was born in Ennis, Texas, and though he attended the Art Institute of Chicago and went on from there to the Academie Julian in Paris, lived most of his life in San Antonio.
Painter, lithographer, writer, and lecturer Edward G. Eisenlohr’s (1872-1961) family moved from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, when he was two. He studied in Zurich, and upon his return studied with Robert J. Onderdonk and Frank Reaugh (known as the “Dean of Texas Painters”) in San Antonio, as well as among other mentors in the northeast. He is represented in major cultural art institutions across the United States, including the Corcoran and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Eisenlohr’s influence within American landscape painting cannot be overstated.
And, ala Abigail Adams, remember the ladies…
Isabel Branson Cartwright (1885-1966) was born in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and attended the Philadelphia School of Design before being awarded a European fellowship that allowed her to study in London, the Netherlands, France, and Italy. She married a Texan in 1910, moved to El Paso, and continued to paint. Upon her husband’s death in 1917, she returned to Philadelphia, and became a member of the women’s artist group known as the Philadelphia Ten. While the group was active, Cartwright was represented in all 65 exhibitions the group held over its 28-year tenure.
Marie Hull (1890-1980) was born in Summitt, Mississippi. As a young woman, she attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, studying under William Merritt Chase, among others. She also attended the Colorado Fine Arts Center and the Art Students League of New York. When she won second place in the 1929 Davis competitions, she used the purchase prize to travel to Europe. Some of her works were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (1935-1943) of FDR’s New Deal. Hull settled in Mississippi, and was, in 1931, selected to exhibit in the Paris Spring Salon.
Landscape painter Jessiejo Eckford, better known as Jessie Jo (1895-1941), was a native of Dallas, and though she died at 46, traveled extensively across the Southwest, the Northeast, the Ozarks, and Mexico to paint. She showed in prestigious exhibitions throughout the U.S., as well as in numerous venues throughout Texas, and is represented in the National Gallery of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
Ella Koepke Mewhinney (1891-1962) was born in Nelsonville, Texas. She studied at the American Women’s League in St. Louis, Missouri, and in 1919, spent six weeks at the Art Students League in New York. She helped to organize the Texas Art Camp at Christoval and championed women artists, who at the time were dismissed as decorative and frivolous. Her work in the Davis collection reflects a modernist sensibility that reinterprets the very concept of landscape painting, presciently focusing in as cinematic close-up.
This summary does not include every artist who exhibited in the numerous Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions mounted over the three years of Edgar Davis’s philanthropic aegis, but it gives a brief overview of the most significant, and a glimpse into the role these exhibitions played in the larger context of lesser-known American art. We are privileged to have this new space in which to share a selection of the Davis collection with the public.
Nancy Kempf, SAALM BOD
Nancy Kempf, Curator, San Antonio Art League & Museum
The San Antonio Art League & Museum has always honored its foundational collection, subsidized by Texas rancher, wildcatter, and philanthropist Edgar B. Davis, who organized the national call to artists for the purchase prize Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions of 1927, ‘28 and ’29. The concept of a purchase prize was novel at the time but became popularized in other arts locales. The original wildflower stipulation expanded to the categories of ranching and cotton picking after 1927. The Art League has striven to give the Davis collection the pride of place it deserves, not only in San Antonio, and Texas, but in the history of 20th century American art.
Among many others who contribute to this all-volunteer institution, Lyn Belisle Kurtin and William Kurtin worked diligently to create a space to highlight this historically significant collection. Amy Shelton and the V.H. McNutt Memorial Foundation made the Educational Gallery for the Edgar B. Davis Collection of Texas Art a reality. The space, a long-time dream of the Art League, was opened in the fall of 2020.
In the summer of 2018, the Art League highlighted the Davis collection as part of San Antonio’s Tricentennial Celebration, for which art scholar William E. Reaves, Jr., author of “Texas Art and a Wildcatter’s Dream: Edgar B. Davis and the San Antonio Art League,” spoke eloquently at the opening reception. His scholarship is an invaluable historical and art criticism resource.
The Davis Collection is often misconceived as a collection of works entirely by Texas artists. Nothing could be further from the truth, though the competitions’ criteria required Texas subject matter as the focus. Word of the competitions, with their substantial purchase prizes – unprecedented for the time – quickly spread across the nation, from Texas to New York City to California. Though Texas artists certainly comprise an important segment of the Davis collection, its astonishing depth and breadth represent artists and regional artistic movements of the period across the U.S. and abroad.
The collection notably boasts works by founding members of the Taos Society of Artists cooperative, Oscar E. Berninghaus and W. Herbert Dunton, both known for their scenes of cowboys and the American Southwest. Later notable members of the Toas Society included the Spanish-born painter José Arpa (1858-1952), who as a young man studied at the Academia Real des Belles Artes in Seville, and Arpa’s nephew Xavier Gonzalez (1898-1993). Uncle and nephew studied together at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1920s, and Gonzalez went on to teach at Newcomb College in New Orleans.
Arpa ultimately settled in San Antonio (though he died in his native Spain), and his works are dispersed throughout the city. His mastery of composition and light is expressly evident in his beautiful work in the Davis collection, “Picking Cotton.”
Oscar Berninghaus (1874-1952) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and began his artistic career there. In 1899, he travelled west for a series of commissions in Colorado and New Mexico, and, in 1915, became one of the founding members of the Taos Society of Artists. His painting “Winter in the Panhandle” is a beautiful evocation of what is sometimes called Big Sky Country. Appearing almost square and almost monochromatic, its low horizon line evokes the stark landscape and vast sky of the West Texas landscape.
W. Herbert Dunton (1878-1936) spent his youth working as a ranch hand and cowboy before he became a commercial illustrator for periodicals such as Harper’s, Collier’s, and Scribner’s. During the Depression, he worked for the Public Works of Art Project established by Francis Perkins for FDR.
E. Martin Hennings (1886-1956) was born in New Jersy, but his family moved to Chicago when he was two. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, entered and won prizes in competitions in Europe, and became a fellow in the Taos Society of Artists, having been nominated by Berninghaus. Before WWI, he became a member of Chicago’s artist-run Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Art. He exhibited throughout the United States and was included in the 1924 Venice Biennale, the International Exhibition in Paris in 1926, and the Paris Salon in 1927.
British-born Impressionist Dawson Dawson-Watson (1864-1939) was invited by American artist John Leslie Breck to join American artists who, around 1887, established the Impressionist Giverny Colony to work alongside Monet. The colony thrived until the First World War brought it to a close. Dawson-Watson became well-known in San Antonio for his paintings of cacti native to the region. He taught at the Byrdcliffe Arts & Crafts Colony in Woodstock, New York; as well as in Hartford, Connecticut; St. Louis, Missouri; and San Antonio.
Frank Tenney Johnson (1874-1939), who was born in Iowa, also studied at the Art Students League of New York. He travelled to paint on the Montana Blackfoot Reservation before working in Colorado and California, and spent a number of years in Cody, Wyoming, near Yellowstone National Park. By popularizing paintings of cowboys, he pioneered what became known as the Johnson Moonlight Technique, which earned him the sobriquet “Master Painter of the Old West.”
Louis Raynaud (1905-unknown) made his home in both New Orleans and Chicago, where he was an advocate for the Society for Sanity in Art, the mission of which was to guard representational art against the modernist onslaught of abstraction and surrealism (much like the notable San Antonio Italian emigre, the sculptor Pompeo Coppini).
Landscape painter Theodore J. Morgan (1872-1947) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, though his primary residence became Washington, D.C., where he was a member of the Washington Society of Artists, the National Arts Club, and the New York Water Color Club; yet his itinerant life brought him to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Dallas and San Antonio in Texas. He spent the 1920s and ‘30s painting in California and Arizona.
Maurice Braun (1877-1941) was born in Hungary. His family migrated to New York City when he was four. He studied at the National Academy of Design, and later apprenticed under William Merritt Chase. A turning point in his life came in 1909, when he left New York City for California. In 1912, he founded the San Diego Fine Arts Academy.
Millard Sheets (1907-1989), a native of California, studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (which merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to become the California Institute of the Arts). Sheets was a significant proponent of California Scene Painting (also known as Southern California Regionalism) of the first half of the 20th century. In addition to his prominence as a painter, Sheets was an architectural designer, worked as the art correspondent for Life magazine and for the U.S. Army Air Forces in India and Burma during WWII, and worked hiring artists for the Public Works of Art Project as part of the New Deal.
Native Ohioan Henry Keller (1869-1949) was the leader of the Cleveland School of watercolor painters. Probably his most notable student was the prominent American artist Charles E. Burchfield. In 1939, Keller was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician.
Though Peter L. Hohnstedt (1871-1957) was born in Ohio, where he received his earliest training in art, as a young man he drifted into odd jobs in Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee, before moving to New Orleans in 1914. A commission from the Delgado Museum won him a wealthy benefactor who backed a project to paint the swamplands of Louisiana. From there, Hohnstedt moved to Los Angeles, then to Seattle, before relocating to Texas, specifically for the Davis competitions, ultimately settling in Comfort in the Texas Hill Country. The Witte Museum houses eleven of Hohnstedt’s 1933 Big Bend paintings.
Audley Dean Nicols (1875-1941) hailed from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, studied in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Students League, then in Europe. Back in the States, Nicols made a living working as an illustrator for various periodical publications including Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s, and Scribner’s, among others. Due to health concerns, he relocated to El Paso in the 1920s, where he became a prolific landscape painter, especially of desert scenes, and influenced a group of West Texas artists that came to be known as the “Purple Mountain Painters.”
Eliot C. Clark (1883-1980) who, at the age of eleven, exhibited at the New York Watercolor Club, was also an alumnus of the Art Students League of New York where he studied with John H. Twachtman in 1897. Travelling throughout Europe in the early 1900s, Clark was heavily influenced by the Barbizon painters and the Impressionists. In 1912, he won the Hallgarten Prize for artists under the age of 35 at the National Academy of Design.
Nicholas Brewer (1857-1949), a native of Minnesota, who worked in his adopted state of Arkansas, travelled to New York to study at the National Academy of Design. Brewer’s son, Adrian Brewer (1891-1956), also in the Davis collection, like his father studied at the Art Students League of New York. Returning to St. Paul and Minneapolis to teach and then to work in advertising, his artistic endeavors were interrupted by WWI, when he enlisted in the 444th Aero Construction Squadron from which he was reassigned to create posters and paintings for the war effort. Discharged from the military in 1920, the younger Brewer travelled about the country as a landscape painter, including in Texas.
Rolla Taylor (1872-1970) was Texas-born in Galveston and became a friend of Julien Onderdonk. He studied at the Cuero Institute and at the Art Institute of Chicago, with Arthur Best in San Francisco, with Frederick Fursman in Michigan, and worked abroad in France.
Thomas Lawson Blackmon (1901-1990) was born in Ennis, Texas, and though he attended the Art Institute of Chicago and went on from there to the Academie Julian in Paris, lived most of his life in San Antonio.
Painter, lithographer, writer, and lecturer Edward G. Eisenlohr’s (1872-1961) family moved from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, when he was two. He studied in Zurich, and upon his return studied with Robert J. Onderdonk and Frank Reaugh (known as the “Dean of Texas Painters”) in San Antonio, as well as among other mentors in the northeast. He is represented in major cultural art institutions across the United States, including the Corcoran and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Eisenlohr’s influence within American landscape painting cannot be overstated.
And, ala Abigail Adams, remember the ladies…
Isabel Branson Cartwright (1885-1966) was born in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and attended the Philadelphia School of Design before being awarded a European fellowship that allowed her to study in London, the Netherlands, France, and Italy. She married a Texan in 1910, moved to El Paso, and continued to paint. Upon her husband’s death in 1917, she returned to Philadelphia, and became a member of the women’s artist group known as the Philadelphia Ten. While the group was active, Cartwright was represented in all 65 exhibitions the group held over its 28-year tenure.
Marie Hull (1890-1980) was born in Summitt, Mississippi. As a young woman, she attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, studying under William Merritt Chase, among others. She also attended the Colorado Fine Arts Center and the Art Students League of New York. When she won second place in the 1929 Davis competitions, she used the purchase prize to travel to Europe. Some of her works were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (1935-1943) of FDR’s New Deal. Hull settled in Mississippi, and was, in 1931, selected to exhibit in the Paris Spring Salon.
Landscape painter Jessiejo Eckford, better known as Jessie Jo (1895-1941), was a native of Dallas, and though she died at 46, traveled extensively across the Southwest, the Northeast, the Ozarks, and Mexico to paint. She showed in prestigious exhibitions throughout the U.S., as well as in numerous venues throughout Texas, and is represented in the National Gallery of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
Ella Koepke Mewhinney (1891-1962) was born in Nelsonville, Texas. She studied at the American Women’s League in St. Louis, Missouri, and in 1919, spent six weeks at the Art Students League in New York. She helped to organize the Texas Art Camp at Christoval and championed women artists, who at the time were dismissed as decorative and frivolous. Her work in the Davis collection reflects a modernist sensibility that reinterprets the very concept of landscape painting, presciently focusing in as cinematic close-up.
This summary does not include every artist who exhibited in the numerous Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions mounted over the three years of Edgar Davis’s philanthropic aegis, but it gives a brief overview of the most significant, and a glimpse into the role these exhibitions played in the larger context of lesser-known American art. We are privileged to have this new space in which to share a selection of the Davis collection with the public.
Nancy Kempf, SAALM BOD