ARTIST: Richard H Bassett (Massachusetts, New York, France, Switzerland, 1900 - 1995)
NAME: Landscape - Mt Holyoke
MEDIUM: oil on canvas board
CONDITION: Very good. Normal wear. No visible inpaint under UV light.
SIGHT SIZE: 16 x 20 inches / 40 x 50 cm
FRAME SIZE: unframed (In-House framing available)
SIGNATURE: unsigned but has artist's estate stamps on verso
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
SKU#: 116240
SHIPPING: Third Party Shipping Required
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Richard H Bassett (Massachusetts, New York, France, Switzerland, 1900 - 1995)
American impressionist Richard H. Bassett was the founder and head of the Milton Academy Art Department in Milton Massachusetts from 1945 to 1965. He studied extensively in Europe and in the United States and had several one man and group shows in prominent galleries in New York and Boston including the Grace Horne Gallery on Newbury Street and Ferargil Galleries in New York. His career spanned over 80 years and in addition to the art he produced he is also noted for his contributions to the methodology of teaching art in school systems.
Richard H. Bassett was born February 21, 1900 on the campus of Trinity College (now Duke University) in Durham, North Carolina. He was the son of the prominent historian John Spencer Bassett who is still considered the most renowned professor in the College's history. In 1906 the family moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, after John Spencer Bassett published a controversial article supporting equal rights of African Americans in the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled "Stirring Up the Fires of Race Antipathy" in October 1903 where he stated "...Booker T. Washington [is] the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years..." Although Trinity College supported the elder Bassett citing academic freedom, the pressure from politicians and the public forced John Spencer Bassett to resign his position and accept a position as the head of the history department at Smith College. Northampton remained as a base for Richard Bassett until the family home was sold in 1959.
In the Spring of 1911, Bassett moved with his mother, Jessie Lewellin Bassett, to Vevey, Switzerland where he was enrolled in private school and began studies with the Swiss painter, Henri Edouard Bercher, a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and a frequent exhibitor of landscapes at the Suisse Salon des Beaux-Arts. In 1912 they moved to Paris where twelve-year-old Richard Bassett impressed the British painter Percyval Tudor-Hart with the fact that he had already learned to draw better than many of Tudor-Hart's much older students. Bassett, therefore, was invited to enter the academy of this rebellious student of Gerome's at 69 Rue d'Assas in Montparnasse. Among Tudor-Hart's other students were New Zealand-born Owen Merton and the Englishman James Wood.
At Harvard College Bassett trained with the painter Martin Mower and Professor Denman Ross. There he spent three happy years painting under Mower and studying Ross's Theory. In 1918 he entered the United States Army, but was stationed in Harvard Yard. For his fourth year at Harvard, Bassett returned to his studies with Tudor-Hart who had moved his academy to London, and Bassett returned to Harvard in 1920 only long enough to receive his B.A. cum laude. After graduating from College, Mr. Bassett lived abroad and studied art for four years in Paris, London and Florence. Returning to London he continued to study until 1923 with Tudor-Hart, whom Bassett called "difficult but brilliant". Tudor-Hart would often suspend school for a month or so to travel, and Bassett took these opportunities to return to Paris and to study at the Academie Colarossi and especially the Grande Chaumiere. He would return to the latter many times throughout his career.
After returning to Northampton in 1926, Bassett established a studio in New York and painted at the Mountain Lake Club in Florida where he worked as an independent mural painter and as an assistant to the mural painter Allyn Cox. During this period Bassett decorated rooms and facades of elaborate houses in New York, Florida, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. In 1937 he had a one man show at at Feragil Galleries in New York City. During this period Bassett studied drawing with George Bridgman at the Art Students League in New York.
In 1937, after his marriage to Henrietta Durant of Charleston, South Carolina, Bassett and his new wife moved to Boston, where he had five one-man shows in and around Newbury Street in the next few years, three of them in the prestigious Grace Horne Gallery. During this period he was living at Champney Place on Beacon Hill. This was a productive time for paintings of Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Chelsea and East Boston which explored the bleak vistas of the urban American Scene in the latter years of the Depression. He also exhibited at the Gloucester Society of Artists, Inc. numerous times including the Forty Second Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture alongside Eliot J. Enneking, Gordon Grant, Charles Gruppe and several other prominent artist of the day.
In 1945, Bassett founded and was head the art department at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. He taught fine art courses and art history until his retirement twenty years later. Bassett also served as Chairman for the Art Committee of the National Association of Independent Schools. In 1969 Bassett served as editor and an author of a full-length text for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, along with other distinguished collaborators, on the teaching of art in school systems.
In 1992, at the age of 92, he visited Paris again on his own and took a stool at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. He noted that although the fees for sitting in on the life class had gone up over twenty times since he had first taken his seat there in the 1910s he still felt "at home." Bassett lived in Milton, Massachusetts and was active in the art world until his death on February 6, 1995. A prolific painter, Bassett produced a large body of work that until 2011 was closely held by his estate.