Description:
interior workshop with man seated sideways in chair carving on a violin, wearing a cap and apron with white shirt, behind him is a workbench with a carved bas relief portrait, part of a window at the upper left with low snow covered hills visible through it
Label Text:
Our Village Carver is one of the most interesting works painted during Edwin Romanzo Elmer’s second period of activity following his brief study at the National Academy of Design. The subject of this portrait is Dr. Andrew E. Willis of Ashfield, a retired medical doctor who had taken up wood carving. He is shown in this painting working on the scroll end of a violin, with his tools and the body of a violin forming a beautiful still life on the work table to his right. Dr. Willis also carved low relief portraits of famous men, an example of which is visible behind his chair (the subject is yet to be identified).
As Betsy Jones, author of the monograph on the artist, has noted, the use of light in this painting recalls the sensitive handling of light in A Lady of Baptist Corner, Ashfield, Massachusetts. In both paintings, the sitters are concentrating on the tasks at hand: Mary Jane Elmer, the artist’s wife, works at her whipsnap machine, and the doctor is engrossed in his carving. Light emanates from a single window to illuminate their faces, hands, and work aprons. In a sense, these portraits are early and late pendants that adopt the same compositional format. The fact that they are both portraits cast as genre scenes is not unusual for the period, but, as Jones points out, the use of light as a compositional device is a new element. In the painting of his wife, the artist illuminates his subject with a Vermeerlike “immaculate light” and tightly controls his brushstrokes. In the later portrait of Dr. Willis, the light is warmer, and the painting is loosely brushed in a range of brown tonalities.
Subjects:
Canvas Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2008.57 |
