Louise Upton Brumback
Louise Upton Brumback (January 17, 1867 – February 22, 1929) was an American artist and art activist known principally for her landscapes and marine scenes.
She said these traits "proved a solid rock upon which to build up an independent art expression which soon showed to men painters that they had a formidable rival.
On finishing high school in the late 1880s, Louise Upton Brumback first looked to a career in music, but soon turned her attention to painting.
[4] She undertook formal study at the age of 33 when she attended William Merritt Chase's school for plein air painting held in the summer months at Shinnecock Hills, Long Island.
[5][6][7] In 1923 she told an interviewer that she sought formal instruction only to learn good technique, believing that the best art showed the artist's individuality and skill of self-expression.
[8] Having no need for the money that art sales would provide, Brumback rarely exhibited her paintings in private galleries and never competed for prizes.
[4] The first show of her professional career was a group exhibition held in 1902 at the Art Club in Kansas City, Missouri, where she and her husband made their home.
[8][note 3] In the early years of the twentieth century, she frequently traveled to New York City, and in 1905 she provided a painting called Moonrise to a group exhibition at the National Academy of Design.
The critic for a local paper called her work "sincere, frank and sympathetic", and said Brumback, although "by no means well known", was "rapidly gaining recognition".
[36] Her work drew praise for its strong brushwork, excellent composition, and rich, glowing color,[37] clean palette and vigorous handling,[2] and clear, straightforward presentation of its subjects.
[5] In 1921, when the West Coast pictures appeared in a show at Buffalo's Albright Art Gallery, a local critic said they were "characterized by her great versatility and variety of subject matter — still life, the seashore, clouds, snow, forests, mountains—each treated in a different manner" and of one in particular, "a daring essay...there is movement, even excitement, in the canvas, brought out by the opposition of the lines, but chiefly by the opposition of the complementary colors".
Working out of doors in rural settings, she sought to capture the subjective feeling of a scene, its "mood of nature," as she put it, however much time and effort it might take to achieve that goal.
[42][43] While praising the "strong, clean palette and vigorous handling" in her landscapes and marines, one critic noted that her success derived from knowing what to leave out of a picture as well as what to put in it.
[note 8] The art reporter for the New York Evening Post praised a solo exhibition of that year for the subtlety and rhythm of the flower paintings and landscapes in oil and watercolor that it contained,[44] and the reporter for the Times drew attention to the painting Gloucester in Winter in this show for its success in evoking a mood: the charm of a coastal resort that "flees with the opening of the Summer hotels".
[4][note 9] Deploying these character traits as an activist, she became a strong advocate for artists and of democratic principles within the art world.
Solo exhibitions included shows at the Folson Gallery (1913, New York), Fine Arts Institute (1914, Kansas City, Mo.
In December 1882 he embezzled large sums from a bank he owned in an effort to cover a huge loss he had incurred in a speculation on the price of oil.
[86] In 1909 Brumback and her husband built a larger house, designed by Louis Curtiss,[87][note 17] and she drew murals in its rooms showing scenes of Gloucester much like her easel paintings.
