Maine’s impressionist painter

by James Nalley

In 1861, a Bangor-born man, at the age of 15, moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he found a job as a bookkeeper. In fact, he worked as one for the next 20 years. Meanwhile, he had other aspirations. On the side, he began studying art under William Rimmer of the Lowell Institute, and specifically focused on portraits. By his early 30s, he had become so proficient that he quit his job and opened his own portrait studio. What set him apart from others was that, throughout his career, he painted people and landscapes “as he saw them,” without representing them as anything more. For example, a woman washing clothes by the river in France was simply that, and not a seductress, as suggested by some of his counterparts. Always the student, he went on to work under some of the most renowned painters/teachers in the world, until his relatively early death at the age of 65.

Frederic Porter Vinton was born in Bangor on January 29, 1846. At the age of 10, he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois, but just five years later, his family moved to Boston. There, he dabbled in several career paths, such as a clerk and a banker, before settling into bookkeeping. As stated earlier, as Vinton performed his regular job as a bookkeeper, he began studying art with William Rimmer, an American artist. Rimmer, much like Vinton, dabbled in many careers to supplement his income as an artist, ranging from carving busts from blocks of granite to earning a diploma to practice medicine. According to the book Painting and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design (2004) by David Dearinger, “Upon prompting from Rimmer, Vinton felt confident enough to send a review of some local artwork in the Boston Advertiser, thus publicizing his name as a trained artist.” At the age of 32, Vinton opened a portrait studio in Boston.

After his studio picked up business, he, like many artists of the time, traveled to Europe to hone his skills. As stated in the book The Art of Painting in the 19th Century (1908) by Edmund von Mach, “Vinton spent much of his time traveling the European continent, which influenced his work and helped differentiate it from the American work of the same time. One reviewer even called him, ‘an aristocrat of the old school,’ due to his eagerness to assimi- late everything he encountered.”

However, throughout his life, his purpose was clear: travel and study art. For example, in 1875, he traveled to Paris to study with Leon Bonnat (a French painter and professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts). In 1876, he spent one year in Munich where he studied under Frank Duveneck (an American portrait painter) at the Royal Academy of Munich. Later, he returned to Paris and remained there for two years to travel the countryside to paint people and landscapes. In 1882, Vinton traveled to Spain with Robert Blum (an American artist who specialized in pen drawings and watercolors) and William Merritt Chase (an American painter and exponent of impressionism). The three artists spent much time in Madrid and Toledo, expanding their skills and knowledge and abandoning what they cited as a “dislike of German impressionism.”

It is interesting to note that before his travels, Vinton was primarily a portrait painter. In fact, his first exhibition was in 1880, where he naturally presented a portrait. It was not until his European travels that he started exhibiting landscapes “as he saw them.” For instance, in 1884, he submitted his first landscape for exhibition: Street in Toledo. Again, he chose his subjects in their everyday settings and did not romanticize any aspect, unlike some of his counterparts.

In 1883, Vinton married Annie Peirce, after an 18-month trip across Europe. Some of his most famous paintings are portraits of his young wife. As for his paintings, they have been described as “impressionistic,” with some critics going as far as calling them “pre-1940s impressionism, greatly influenced by his European travels and his study under many important artists of the time.” In 1891, Vinton was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in New York, and (cont. on page 38)

(cont. from page 37) two years later, he was one of a handful of American painters exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Regarding the latter, Chicago hosted this world’s fair in order to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. In this case, artists from the United States and 19 foreign countries were exhibited at the exposition.

On May 20, 1911, Vinton died of a bronchial affection at his home in Boston. He was 65 years of age. Following his death, his wife released some of his paintings to various exhibits around the country. Currently, his paintings are in the collections of some of the world’s finest art museums, including: the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Boston; the Harvard University Art Museum; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Museum of the National Academy of Design in New York.

Interestingly, there were some paint- ings by Vinton that were extra special to him. In particular, there was La Blanchisseuse (1890). According to the MFA Boston, “Although washerwomen were sometimes represented in a different light, Vinton’s hard-working blanchisseuse, with her tub and the wooden box in which she kneels to keep her own clothes dry, provided an interesting subject for his new-found skill in impressionist effects.” Perhaps he believed that his first work was not worthy of exhibition, or maybe he simply painted it for his own pleasure, in homage of a special time in his life. But either way, this painting remained with him out from the spotlight and was never exhibited until after his death