Description:
Oil on canvas portrait of a young boy against a dark background, the boy is depicted with tousled, light colored hair, the boy's head is heart-shaped with luminous soft facial features, below is the suggestion of a white collar over a dark coat or jacket. The painting in signed in the lower left hand corner, "Fuller" in red paint. The rectangular carved and gilt wooden frame is ornamented with leaf and shell decoration with ungilded side edges. The frame has an attached label for "G. FULLER." The frame is missing its original overframe (an additional exterior frame that attached to this frame.) The additional frame is confirmed in photographs accompanying the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's Memorial Exhibition of the Works of George Fuller, 1884.
Label Text:
In 1877 the Doll and Richards Fuller exhibition in Boston was reviewed in the article “Three Boston Painters,” Atlantic Monthly XL, no. 242 (December, 1877), 715-16. It is likely that this comment refers to this Fuller painting. "The most satisfactory, upon the whole, of these studies of heads is that of a boy, whose light hair, rebellious to the brush, bristles over his forehead and short round face, and whose serious gray eyes, looking straight out from the canvas, have that dreamy, vacant gaze, susceptible of various interpretations according to the mood of the beholder, which is so often in portraits by the old masters—in those of Rembrandt especially—lends the charm of a certain mystery and unfathomableness to the expression."
George Fuller was born in 1822 on his father's farm in Deerfield, Massachusetts. He probably received artistic encouragement from his aunt, uncle, and half-brother, all of whom were painters. Initially, however, he worked for a short time as a clerk in Boston and spent several years (1837-1839) on a railroad surveying expedition in Illinois and Ohio. Returning home, he attended three terms at the Deerfield Academy before moving to Boston in 1840 to launch his career as an artist. After a short, unfruitful experimentation with the daguerreotype process, Fuller became an itinerant portrait painter, traveling in upstate New York with his half-brother and aunt. In 1842 he spent several months studying in Albany with sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, a friend from Deerfield whom he had met on the surveying trip. When Brown left for Italy, Fuller returned to Massachusetts, joining the Boston Artists' Association in 1843. For the next five years he executed portrait commissions, dividing his time between Boston and the interior of the state. He then moved to New York City, where he registered in the antique school of the National Academy of Design in 1848. He became an associate member of the Academy in 1853. His years in New York and Brooklyn (to which he moved by 1852) were interrupted by occasional summer trips to Deerfield and three excursions to the southern states, where he sought portrait work and made a series of genre sketches, with particular attention to the slave population. Fuller's hitherto undistinguished career came to a halt, however, when his father died in 1859. The artist decided to move to Deerfield to manage the family farm, but he first took a six-month tour of Europe in 1860. Upon his return, he married Agnes Gordon Higginson and settled down to raise cranberries and tobacco. Fuller intended his farming career to be short, but he ended by remaining at Deerfield for fifteen years, painting little and exhibiting only infrequently. In 1875, however, the price of tobacco fell and he was forced to declare bankruptcy. Fuller's "second" career began the next year, when he exhibited a group of paintings in Boston to recoup his financial losses. Many of the works were sold, and by the time of his second one-person show in 1877 he was hailed as a visionary wonder, emerging from years of rural anonymity to become a force in a new school of poetic, ruminant painting having little to do with his previous straightforward naturalism. Fuller's new canvases took as their subjects idealized female figures (particularly young girls), bleak rural landscapes, and vaguely historical Puritan themes. Fuller's surprising success was not limited to Boston. Beginning in 1878 he sent pictures to New York annually. While his reception at the National Academy was unenthusiastic, the younger members of the Society of American Artists greeted him as one of their own, and he was soon elected to their membership. Eventually he was able to buy back the Deerfield property from a relative, although he never returned to active farming. He continued to spend his summers there but took to passing his winters in Boston, or nearby on the coast. He died at his winter home in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1884.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2023.36.1 |
