"The Narrows," 1942

Below is an initial draft of the first article to appear on the West Gallery blog. -- Thomas G. West and Benjamin R. West. 

Note: The story below is to be part of a future book on Charles Massey West, Jr., and Anne Warner West,  their lives and their art. It has been revised with additional text for limited circulation. 

“The Narrows,” 1942

by Thomas G. West

In the autumn of 1942, “The Narrows,” a painting by Charles Massey West, Jr., a native of Centreville, Maryland, was one of the prize winners at the Fifty-Third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago.

For West in 1942, it was not the top prize, but there he was, shoulder to shoulder with the top artists of the era -- artists like Grant Wood, Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe who have come to represent, over time, the very best of a distinctly American form of art.

It is true that the year before, in 1941, the “The Narrows” had already been shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, and also had been published in Art Magazine. But this was somehow different.

It wasn’t the top prize. But it was major recognition in a major show.

* * * * *

The Death of Grant Wood, Famous for “American Gothic”

In the fall of 1942, the Chicago show and its exhibition catalogue mainly honored Grant Wood, who had died earlier that same year. Wood had already become an icon of American painting.

With images such as “American Gothic” (of course, very well known, see below),  “Daughters of Revolution” and “Good Influence” (all reproduced in the catalogue), Wood had linked humor and satire with pride in the simplicity of middle America. Sometimes he used a flat, almost plastic palate, with smooth forms, high contrast and deep shadows -- not commonly seen again until the Pixar computer animation films some 70 years later.

“Nighthawks” -- Edward Hopper’s “Triumph”

The top prize that year at the Art Institute of Chicago had gone to Edward Hopper for “Nighthawks,” a canvas that was to become itself another icon of American painting. Lonely people in a bright diner in a dark cityscape -- familiar in numerous magazine articles, satirical imitations and young persons’ wall posters -- culminating as the central focus of the major show on Hopper in the East Wing of the National Gallery, Washington, DC, that closed January 21, 2008.

Art historian and commentator Robert Hughes called Hopper the most important painter of the period and it is noteworthy that “Nighthawks” is the lone image that spans the backs of his multi-tape video history of American painting.

It is also notable how pivotal  “Nighthawks” was in Hopper’s professional life. One writer notes in the US National Gallery show catalogue: “In May 1945, having become famous and successful after his triumph with ‘Nighthawks,’ Hopper was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters.” (Barter, 2007, p. 211.)

Hopper paintings have retained high interest and value even after many decades of fashionable non-represenational art. In one recent example, one of Hopper’s paintings (“Blackwell’s Island,” 1928) was sold at Christie’s in New York, May 23, 2013. “Estimated at $15-20 million, it brought $17 million – making it the evening’s top lot and setting a new Christie’s record for a single work in an auction of American Art.” (Architectural Digest, September 2013, p. 66.)

Very Best of Distinctly American Painters

For West, it was not the top prize, but there he was, as we have seen, shoulder to shoulder with the top artists of the time – a group of artits who have come to represent the very best of a distinctly American art form during an important period of American history.

In the show catalogue, West’s short biographical sketch was listed in facing pages with other short sketches of the top prizewinners. Hopper’s bio noted that his “early work aroused so little interest that he gave up painting for several years.”  In West’s bio, his hometown is spelled incorrectly but his study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (PAFA, attended 1931-1934; the oldest and most prestigious art school in America) is noted along with his then current teaching position (at the John Herron School of Art, Indianapolis) and his award in 1934 of the Cresson Memorial Traveling Scholarship (for 4 months of study in Europe).

In the show catalogue, there are black and white photographs of the winning paintings. Hopper’s “Nighthawks” is in the middle of the booklet, Plate VII, “Awarded the Ada S. Garrett Prize.”  One page leaf away is “The Narrows” by Charles M. West, Jr., Plate IX, “Awarded the Honorable Mention for Landscape.”

It is interesting to note that the Wood and Hopper paintings figure prominently in the way the Art Institute of Chicago presents itself to the public even today -- in 2013 -- 71 years after this show and catalogue. Proudly proclaiming itself as the finest museum in America for 2013 (“Winner, Voted #1 Museum in the United States, Travelers’ Choice 2013”), the front cover of the short guide book to the museum has a photograph of “American Gothic” – while the long guide book shows a blown up detail section of “Nighthawks.” The museum shop even sells an expensive leather tote bag with the full “Nighthawks” painting shown on both sides.

Those Who Showed But Did Not Win Prizes

Also listed in the 1942 Chicago show catalogue were paintings by well-known and not so well known artists of the period whose work was exhibited but did not win any prize. (The full catalogue listing is quoted below, indented, without quotation marks; comments from this writer are in brackets. Images of paintings by some of these artists have been inserted below. In one case, the painting shown here is the actual painting exhibited in the Chicago show.)

Some of those listed were associated with the Pennsylvania Academy (many now known as part of the “Pennsylvania Academy School” or “Pennsylvania Impressionists” or “American Impressionists”) or with the “Brandywine School” of painters in Wilmington, Delaware (started by magazine and book illustrator Howard Pyle), including N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth and James Wyeth.

Henriette Wyeth, born Wilmington, Delaware, 1907; lives in San Patricio, New Mexico, 233 [ref. number for paintings exhibited in this show], Portrait of N. C. Wyeth. [Daughter of N. C. Wyeth, sister of Andrew Wyeth, aunt to James Wyeth.]

Peter Hurd, born Roswell, New Mexico, 1904; lives in San Patricio, New Mexico, 133, Prairie Shower. [Husband of Henriette Wyeth; much later famously commissioned to do portrait of LBJ.]

Francis Speight, born Windsor, North Carolina, 1896; lives in Roxborough, Pennsylvania, 217, Scene in West Manayunk. [West’s teacher at the PAFA; both Speight and West were students of Daniel Garber among other famous PAFA teachers. Speight and his wife Sarah were long time close friends of Charles and Anne West (Sarah was their classmate). Sarah Speight painted a portrait of the young Charles West (at art school) that now hangs in the West Gallery in Centreville. The West Gallery also owns a painting of another Manayunk scene, “Cliff House,” by Francis Speight. ]

Walter Stuempfig, Jr., born Philadelphia, 1914; lives in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, 218, Family Reunion. [West’s classmate at the PAFA]

Donald M. Mattison, born Beloit, Wisconsin, 1905; lives in Indianapolis, 167, Good-by. [Mattison was West’s boss at the time. As director of the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana, Mattison had recruited West, then at the University of Iowa, as a young star teacher. Indeed, as it become evident later, Mattison had been hired at this time to bring in new, high-quality talent, capable of producing students who would win major prizes in the US and Europe. See article by R.B. Perry, American Art Review, April 2011, cited below.]

Thomas [Hart] Benton, born Neosho, Missouri, 1889; lives in Kansas City, 59, Negro Soldier.

Georgia O’Keeffe, born Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887; lives in New York, 180, Red Hills and Bones.

* * * * *

Boyhood in Centreville, the Once-Busy Wharf Area

It was not the top prize. But it was a long way to have traveled for the boy from Centreville -- a small river town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that had been in many ways unchanged for more than a century. The town of 2000 people on the Corsica River in a timeless rural area of farmers, watermen and shopkeepers on the Delmarva Peninsula, had long been a virtual island between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean -- reachable from Baltimore or Annapolis on the Western Shore only by slow ferry boat or ancient steamer. The two bridges across the bay were not built until the 1950s and the 1970s.

Born in 1907, the young Charlie West had spent his boyhood mostly in the town’s nearby wharf area (not far from the family home on Chesterfield Avenue) -- not unlike Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn -- following the river traffic, absorbing outrageous local superstitions from the cooks, deck hands and travelers, seeing plays and melodramas at the James Adam’s Floating Theater when it was in town -- escaping his four older sisters and his no-nonsense, small-town businessman father (who ran a dry goods store opposite the Courthouse).

At the Centreville Wharf, the Model for “Showboat”

The James Adams Floating Theater was a theater built on a barge towed from river town to river town around the Chesapeake Bay and other Eastern Seaboard locations, such as North Carolina. It was said (and we now know, correctly) to have been the actual basis for the stories later used in the musical “Showboat.”

The watercolor by Charles West, “The James Adams Floating Theater,” was signed “CW’36.” Charles did several watercolors and oil paintings of this floating theater and related scenes. Stories from the lives of those living on this floating theater were, in fact, the actual basis for those later used in the novel Show Boat by Edna Ferber and the musical by Jerome Kern and Oskar Hammerstein. The origins of the novel and the musical are recounted in a history of the James Adams Floating Theater -- described at another location by historian Mark A. Moore (in Bath, North Carolina) -- provided in the following passage:

“. . . Edna [Ferber] finally beheld the arrival of the massive show boat. The  ‘James Adams Floating Palace Theatre came floating majestically down the Pamlico and tied up alongside the rickety dock.’ The craft was enormous. Painted white with dark trim, the flat-bottomed vessel was 132 feet long, 34 feet wide, and drew 14 inches of water. The long rectangular barge — a full two stories high — kindled in Edna Ferber all of the romance and river lore that her studies had yielded thus far: ‘There began, for me, four of the most enchanting days I've ever known.’ . . . Miss Ferber scratched furiously on a pad of yellow notepaper as [owner-actor] Charles Hunter, smoking steadily, spun his tale for Edna. ‘It was a stream of pure gold,’ she confessed. ‘Incidents, characters, absurdities, drama, tragedies, river lore, theatrical wisdom poured forth in that quiet flexible voice. He looked, really, more like a small-town college professor . . . than like a show-boat actor.’

“. . . Miss Ferber initially resented the idea of a musical adaptation of her novel. But she signed a contract in November 1926, and was quickly won over by Jerome Kern's beautiful score, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. One of the compositions written for Show Boat has become an icon of Broadway and cinematic song. . . . ‘I must . . .  confess,’ admitted Edna, ‘to being one of those whose eyes grow dreamy and whose mouth is wreathed in wistful smiles whenever the orchestra . . . plays Ol' Man River . . . . I never have tired of it . . . . And I consider Oscar Hammerstein's lyric to Ol' Man River to be powerful, native, tragic, and true.’ When Kern first played and sang the song for Edna, ‘I give you my word,’ she confessed, ‘my hair stood on end, the tears came to my eyes, I breathed like a heroine in a melodrama. This was great music. This was music that would outlast Jerome Kern's day and mine.’ And so it has.”

Centreville Dance Hall

Among Charlie’s close boyhood friends in Centreville was the African-American Bush Gaines. They remained good friends throughout their adult years. On at least one occasion, Bush took Charlie to the “Colored-Only” dance hall in Centreville’s “Sandy Bottom” area (the location, near the intersection of South Commerce and Little Kidwell, is now empty except for a small park structure, recently installed). The painting, called the “Dance Hall” or the “Paladoria Inn,” became the subject of one of West’s most loved but least-seen paintings.

Some observers have noted that the painting appears to be patterned (in some respects) on the painting “La Danse Au Moulin-Rouge” and especially the “Moulin Rouge -- La Goulue” poster (1891) both by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec -- the latter with distant audience, lively dancer in the middle ground and cartoon-like characterization of a man in the near foreground. West greatly admired the work of Toulouse-Lautrec along with other French artists of the period.

* * * * *

A Balance Point

The prize for “The Narrows” wasn’t the top prize. But in the fall of 1942, at the age of 35, the recognition received at the Chicago show was special indeed -- a kind of watershed, a balance point in his life as a painter and artist, one generation removed from a family of farmers and shop keepers.

It was only 11 years before that he had won a full scholarship to attend art school at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia – mainly based at the Academy’s Country School at Chester Springs, PA.

It was only 8 years before that he had been awarded the top art school prize to study and paint in Europe -- almost losing his life from appendicitis as the grand ship steamed toward France.

At the hospital in Paris, after his operation, he was befriended by a Hungarian Countess and her rich American husband -- and was invited to recuperate at their grand chateau near Paris. In so doing, he saw, first hand, the last days of a style of life -- with lush gardens, expensive cars, grand estates and grander parties -- that was to end forever only five years later -- when war broke out in Europe in 1939.

Influence of French Impressionists

In his painting, West loved the dash and freshness and vitality of the French Impressionists of the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. He saw it as a style well suited to the rural landscapes and river scenes that he had known all of his life.

Two years before the Chicago show, in 1940, West had married a fellow art school student, Anne Dickie Warner. Their first son had been born in March of 1941, named after his father and grandfather – so the baby became the third Charles Massey West, known as “Chip.” A second son was born in August of 1943 – named Thomas Gifford West (with a middle name from his maternal great grandfather, Frank Gifford Tallman).

Upon seeing the Chicago catalogue, the man who later became the head of the Pennsylvania Academy sent a note to the former student: “Dear Charlie: I can only take time for the merest word this morning, but the Chicago Art Institute catalogue has just come to my desk and I see that you have crashed through again. Heartiest congratulations and best wishes for all the Wests! Sincerely Yours, Joseph T. Fraser, November 11, 1942.”

When the Chicago show closed December 10, 1942, America had been at war for its first full year. The art school closed. West was retrained to become a draftsman in the local war industries in Indianapolis (as an employee of the P.R. Mallory Company).

Thirty years later -- after resettling his young family in his own hometown and having taught painting, sculpture and history of art at several schools, art schools and colleges -- eventually -- at the end of December 1972, at the age of 65, West’s life was at an end.

He was buried, with a small family service, along side his parents in the family plot in Centreville (eventually, under one of the plain classical tombstones that he himself had designed), as flights of geese flew overhead in the cold of early January.

“West Gallery” on Lawyers Row

His wife Anne turned a small building, former law offices on Lawyers Row in the center of the town, into a gallery to honor her husband's paintings and those of others.

West’s father’s dream was that his son would become a lawyer, the top of the social scale of the small agricultural town and county, a northern-most outpost of very Southern rural attitudes and traditions.

It is no small irony that West’s paintings -- his art and his career so much a puzzle to his father and virtually everyone else in this essentially provincial town and rural county -- finally ended up at the center of the law offices that face the old Queen Anne’s County Courthouse. There, property deeds had been exchanged and fought over for hundreds of years -- land ownership long having been in the area the main path to wealth and social position.  Over the years, Anne West painted a number of views of the Courthouse from the rented building, former law offices, that eventually became the “West Gallery.”

Anne Dickie Warner West -- descended from an old Quaker family of millwrights, silver smiths, artists and engineers (as well as sailing ship captains and, later, one famous movie stunt pilot – Frank Gifford Tallman -- the third of that name) from Wilmington, Delaware, and, previously, Philadelphia (years before the arrival of William Penn) -- lived on for another 34 years of painting and travel,  grandchildren and family visits in Centreville and Chestertown -- passing away in her sleep in the afternoon of November 10, 2006, at the age of 97, just a month short of her 98th birthday.

References and Readings

Art Institute of Chicago, 1942. Catalogue of the Fifty-Third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Barter, Judith A., 2007. “Travels and Travails: Hopper’s Late Pictures” in Edward Hopper, Boston, MA: MFA Publications, pp. 211-225. The book was published in conjunction with the exhibition “Edward Hopper,” organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Other sections of this book were written by Carol Troyen, Janet L. Comey, Elliot Bostwick Davis and Ellen E. Roberts.

Huisman, P., and M.G. Dortu, 1964. Lautrec by Lautrec. A Studio Book, The Viking Press. New York, NY. (The Moulin Rouge poster and paintings cited above are reproduced on p.  67 and pp. 80-81.)

More, Mark A., “Historic Bath: Edna Ferber and the James Adams Floating Theater,” http://www.nchistoricsites.org/bath/edna-ferber.htm

Perry, Rachel Berenson, 2011. “Indiana Realities: Regional Paintings 1930-1945.” American Art Review, Volume XXIII, Number 2, March – April 2011, pp. 68-75.

Sellin, David, 1986. “Francis Speight,” in Francis Speight: A Retrospective, November 7 – December 6, 1986. Taggart, Jorgensen & Putman, 3241 P Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20007.

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Request: All those knowing of art work by Anne West or Charles West are requested to contact Thomas West so the paintings and other pieces can be photographed and catalogued. Many thanks, West Gallery.

Contact information: thomasgwest@gmail.com or thomasgwest@aol.com. Mobile phone: 202-262-1266. 

Blog: http://inthemindseyedyslexicrenaissance.blogspot.com. (See videos on dyslexic talents and visual thinking in art, science and other fields at “Dyslexia: The Unwrapped Gift” and “Dyslexic Advantage” on YouTube -- as well as a video on Thinking Like Einstein and In the Mind’s Eye on the website “AT&T Tech Channel.”)

Note: A series of photographs of paintings by Anne Warner West and Charles Massey West, Jr., is available on the web. Instructions: Request “Charles M. West, Jr.” Then click on this portrait image to bring up the full set of 38 images. If needed, request “slide show” with full screen image and commentary text below.

Copyright 2013, 2022: Thomas G. West. Rights for all West art work and papers are held by Thomas G. West. Permission to reproduce non-West paintings will be secured for a future book prior to publication. Images are from open internet sources unless otherwise noted. Draft chapter section, with additional images and text, revised Juy 2022.