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The impressionist artist,
Joseph Hatfield in his Canton studio on Beaumont Street in 1895. |
The colors were beautiful, and the descriptions evoked
romantic painting in sunlit galleries.
Carmine, Alizaran Crimson, Rose Madder, Aureolin Yellow, Ox-Gall, and
Smalt. In a small factory off of Beaumont Street some of the world’s best
modern paints were developed and perfected by Joseph Henry Hatfield.
J.H. Hatfield was a prolific and extremely talented artist
that travelled the world, yet called Canton his home. Born near Kingston,
Ontario in 1863, Hatfield was one of America’s most prolific and well-known
artists in the nineteenth century. Like
many young artists of the time, he would find his influences in France.
Studying at the Academie Julian in Paris in 1889-1890, Hatfield would hone his
skills by working under Benjamin Constant,
Henri Doucet, and Jules Lefebvre.
Hatfield returned to
America in 1892, joining a growing group of expatriates who introduced
Impressionism to a receptive audience at the turn of the last century. Hatfield
was in the company of such artists as Whistle, Hassam, Sargent and Cassatt. In
his early work he explored landscapes, figures and plein-air style. And his work
at the Paris Salon of 1891 was critical to his success as an artist.
The Paris Salons were
annual exhibitions of contemporary art, which were in essence a setting for the
serious exploration of modern themes and imagery focused upon artists, critics,
patrons and dealers. Through the acceptance at the Salons, an American artist
would gain renown and an impact upon the art-world.
As Hatfield himself
described it, he was not very successful at first. “I was completely
discouraged. I said to myself, you old fool, you can’t paint anymore than a
cow, you ought to give it up.” Packing away his sketch material, Hatfield
decided to become a farmer. A few days into his malaise, he saw a “wonderful
great cloud in the sky.” Hatfield exclaimed, “I’ve got to paint that cloud,”
and ran to his studio to gather brushes and paint. In a sunlit meadow in an
idyllic part of Canton, Hatfield labored for two hours in a state of frenzy,
and through the afternoon he completed his work. Arriving home, he covered the
painting and only returned to look at it the next day. As he told the story, “I
went in trembling and turned it around where I could see it.” Hatfield had once
again convinced himself he could paint.
The story illustrates
the passion and the questions that coursed through the artist. A sensitive soul
who “was responsive to the beauty down to his fingertips.” A writer described
Hatfield as someone that “loved nature, not in her grand and cosmic aspects,
but in her quiet moments of joy. He loved little pools of water in the woods
where light flickers down through the leaves and throws patterns upon the lily
pads.”
If you want to see the
full embodiment of Hatfield’s work, a trip to the Canton Public Library is in
order. There are two paintings that demonstrate the yin and yang - the shadow
and light of Hatfield’s artistry – and they hang in the Augustus Hemenway
Reading Room here in Canton. First and foremost, Hatfield was known as a
painter of figures. In the late nineteen hundreds at a single exhibition of the
Art Club of Boston, Hatfield exhibited one hundred and forty canvases,
primarily of children. The painting at the Canton Public Library hanging over
the fireplace is not a child, but instead a very elderly man by the name of
Captain Thomas Conroy, of Easton, Mass. Painted around 1892, the 35-by-45 inch
portrait looks across the room at another Hatfield painting. Tucked in the
right-hand corner is “Fowl Meadow” and it is a gloriously somber snow scene
that captures the winter light in an extraordinary way. It was said in his
obituary, “he painted landscapes because he had to, because of the inner urge
to capture one of nature’s moods and express it.”
Hatfield moved to Canton
prior to 1895 and was likely inspired by the beauty of this rural landscape. “Fowl
Meadow” certainly gives us insight into his passion for the place he called
home. And collectors were just as passionate for his work; in fact there were
at one time dozens of Hatfield paintings hanging inside Canton homes. Eugene
Williams who lived on Pleasant Street had more than twelve “Hatfields” in his
house. The Williams family, connected by marriage to the Draper family was
quite close to Hatfield. And the paintings the two families collected were pure
Canton; Pecunit Brook, Cemetery Pond, and Blue Hill from “Wetherbee”.
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Helping Mama by Joseph
Hatfield. (Courtesy of the Canton Historical Society.) |
It was, however, his
portraits of children that were his hallmark. “He loved little children as he
loved nature for their unconscious beauty, for their changing enthusiasms, for
their responsiveness emotionally to their environment, whether of people or
place.” There is a wonderful painting that
was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1894 that captures Hatfield’s
love of children. The oil on canvas shows a little girl standing in an art
studio painting her own stick figure drawing on top of a study of birches. It
turns out, the little girl was Hatfield’s daughter Doris, and indeed the
incident happened as drawn in the portrait. “Sprawled across the freshly painted
canvas, in brown ochre, was one of those nondescript line drawings that
children call men, and with a cheerful helping, expression on her face the
child was ruining the work.”
Hatfield quietly
picked up a sketchpad, “and drew the mischievous little girl, with her quaint
little knot and bright smiling face.” Hatfield was well into his drawing “when
the little culprit became aware that she was the subject,” turning toward her
father “with child-like confidence of approval she smiled and said: Helping
Papa!” And so a masterwork was created. Helping Papa would eventually be owned
by the Ricker Family of Poland Springs, Maine – the founders of Poland Spring
Water.
In 1892, Hatfield
produced a series of drawings to illustrate Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Victorian
American tale of a woman undergoing a “rest cure” for depression entitled “The
Yellow Wallpaper.” Between 1891 and 1893, Hatfield was a prolific artist
supplying illustrations to the New England Magazine, the first publisher of
Gillman’s story of mental derangement. It turns out that illustrating for
magazines was extremely lucrative, and Hatfield would join the ranks of artists
like Winslow Homer and dabble in commercially illustrating magazine articles
while building a career in art.
In 1903, Hatfield
ceased painting as a result of becoming increasingly aware that his early work was
turning dark with age. The problem was that the pigments in the paints were
failing, and he feared that most of the contemporary art would be forever lost
to imperfect paints. Hatfield turned his attention to chemistry and began to
grind his own colors. The experiment began with twenty-five cents of the finest
yellow dry pigment obtainable. The Hatfield formula called for the purest of
oils and fine marble grinding stones. At the time, pure dry colors were only
made in Europe, and Hatfield turned to England, France and Germany to procure
pigments for his paints that would create a “palette of pure permanent colors.”
In the basement of his
house in Canton, Hatfield began producing the finest artists colors in America.
Within a few years he contracted to build a 45-foot building behind his house near
the Canton Junction. At the height of his business he largely gave up his love
of painting and devoted the last twenty years of his life to the manufacture of
pure colors. It is said that chemists questioned his claims of purity, but
analysis in laboratories here and in Europe proved that Hatfield’s paints were
100% pure and would stand the test of time.
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Joseph Hatfield at Third
Cliff, Scituate, Mass. 1918 (Courtesy of the Canton Historical Society.) |
Hatfield’s obituary
ran in the Canton paper in January 1928, at the age of sixty-five, Joseph H.
Hatfield died here at his home. “Those who knew Mr. Hatfield intimately, knew
also the depth of his spiritual nature, his tremendous interest in metaphysical
problems, his eager search for the ideal philosophy of life. In his fine art of
loving came a fine art of living which is an art more difficult than the life
of a painter.”
