Description
Belford, who has written extensively on Benson, concentrates on his sporting art, which is the aspect of his career that won him both national and international renown and financial prosperity. Drawing on a store of family memories, diaries, letters and archives, she creates an intimate portrait of a man who was not only a successful artist but a consummate sportsman. She touches on every aspect of his life and art, from his student days at the Boston Museum School to his frequent trips to his farm house on Cape Cod, and his annual salmon fishing and shooting expeditions. Illustrated with color and b&w reproductions. Oversize: 9.5x11.5
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Frank Benson, a pivotal artist of the American Impressionist movement had three great loves in his long and productive life: his family, his art, and the sporting life. As a boy, Benson dreamed of being an ornithological illustrator. In mid-life, after an extremely successful career as a portraitist, he returned to the wildfowl and sporting subjects that were his lifelong passion. Over the next forty years, in etching, lithography, watercolor, and oil and wash, he portrayed birds beloved since childhood, scenes of his hunting and fishing expeditions, and still lives of incomparable delicacy. Whether painting a hunter setting out decoys, a wash of geese by moonlight, a watercolor of a companion poised to gaff a salmon, or an etching of a group of ducks silently gliding in for a landing, Benson conveyed the joy and beauty of a sportsman’s life.
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