GENERAL DESCRIPTION
That Gentleman evokes the pensive mood and quality of repose that are hallmarks of Andrew Wyeth's best work. The artist's model was Tom Clark, a fellow resident of Chester County, Pennsylvania. Impressed with his sitter's demeanor, Wyeth wrote: "His voice is gentle, his wit keen, and his wisdom enormous. He is not a character, but a very dignified gentleman who might otherwise have gone unrecorded." In another description, Wyeth offered another level of significance to the painting's title: “Tom Clark went about the business of living in a very orderly way. He would prepare his vegetables with a deft grace, mend his clothes with care, lift the lid of a kettle seconds before it would boil over, keep his wood stove just the right temperature, place his slippers on a newspaper so as not to soil the table top. This tall, thin gentleman always referred to objects—whether a potato, an annoying fly buzzing overhead, or a car passing by—as ‘that gentleman.’” [1]
The figure and setting display a somber dignity, as Clark sits with his back to the viewer and gazes off in quiet contemplation. The items around him show the great care and consideration with which he lived his life. Scissors and a key hang carefully from nails in the wall, and, as noted in Wyeth's description, shoes rest on a tabletop covered with parchment paper.
Wyeth gave his works an introspective feeling by paring away details and reducing his color variation. Wyeth learned the painstaking techniques of tempera painting from his brother-in-law, Peter Hurd (1904-1984), and reserved the medium for his most ambitious paintings. He was not only meticulous, even compulsive, in his realistic detail, he was also, like Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), the painter of lonely, sad and isolated people, caught in the emptiness surrounding successful America. Wyeth's dry, linear style, with its apparitional clarity, increases this sense of psychic isolation.
When first shown in Dallas in 1960, the public was so taken with That Gentleman that visitors left change in a box labeled "Help us buy this painting." As a gesture of gratitude for the local fundraising, Wyeth made the rare decision to let go of one of the preparatory sketches for his paintings. He donated That Gentleman Study (1962.11) to the Museum after reading an article about the collective effort to acquire the finished work.
[1] Andrew Wyeth (Boston, Massachusetts: Museum of Fine Arts, 1970), 95.
Adapted from
- "Highlights of the American Collection,” in Dallas Museum of Art 100 Years, eds. Dorothy Kosinski, et al. (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 2003), 48.
- Bonnie Pitman, ed., Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 284.
- Eleanor Jones Harvey, "Andrew Wyeth, That Gentleman," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed. Suzanne Kotz (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 1997), 262.
- "Andrew Wyeth, That Gentleman," DMA Connect, Dallas Museum of Art, 2012.
NOTES
This note was tagged #routed in June 2015 and Sue's revisions (in a Word doc created by ASG) have been applied to the note as of October 2015. As of January 2017 I am adding the #draft tag to this note so that it is harvested to Google Drive. Once I am sure that all pending TMS or Piction data entry is complete, I will remove the #routed tag, add the #complete tag, and move the Google Doc to Queta's folder so that it is not re-routed to Sue.
Feb 28, 2017- All revisions are complete but the multimedia assets have not been loaded into Piction. I am removing the #routed tag and replacing it with #completed but the %UMO pending tag is remaining in place until I have found and cataloged the assets in Piction.
Confirmed that provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography shown on the 2010 research document (attached as media file to the TMS recrod) have been entered into the TMS fields. At a later date, this object file has additional bibliographic resources that could be added to the TMS records for other Wyeth objects.
Fun Facts includes price information that would usually remain confidential. In this case, the amount and method of fund-raising were unique, and the information was available in multiple public resources. I felt that these factors made the information suitable for online content.
This would be a prime object for future online texts related to conservation at the DMA. The Crystal Bridges Blog recently created a post on this topic: Linda DeBerry, "Clearing the Haze on Andrew Wyeth's 'Airborne'," January 3, 2014, http://crystalbridges.org/blog/clearing-haze-andrew-wyeths-airborne/. [Sue Canterbury commented on online draft (July 6, 2015)- "That's a very polite method of "bloom" control. Mark Leonard finds that "nose grease" (literally, the oils from your nose) rubbed on the offending areas also knocks it back...until the next bloom."]
The library's artist file contains valuable research materials- not all of which are entered into TMS or present in the object file. It would be helpful if the library object file was cross-referenced (or duplicated) in the primary object file and indicated in the TMS record in some way.
This work was used in the teaching packet, "A Looking Journey." Those questions have been pasted at the end of the other teaching resources and need to be reformatted.
Talking about this painting, artist Andrew Wyeth said: Tom Clark went about the business of living in a very orderly way. He would prepare his vegetables with a deft grace, mend his clothes with care, lift the lid of a kettle seconds before it would boil over, keep his wood stove just the right temperature, place his slippers on a newspaper so as not to soil the table top. This tall, thin gentleman always referred to objects -- whether a potato, an annoying fly buzzing overhead, or a car passing by -- as "that gentleman" (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, p. 95).
Removed TMS object tag because rule exists.
Removed text from Curatorial Remarks and put as two text entries for archival purposes.
CONSIDER SCANNING: Use for both this and the study
If needed, numerous additional sketches, quotes relating to Tom Clark, and other Wyeth depictions of Clark are reproduced in the catalogue for Andrew Wyeth Close Friends (Jackson, MS: Mississippi Museum of Art, 2001), pages 104-120.
Teaching ideas source- Excerpt from~"Andrew Wyeth, That Gentleman," DMA Connect, Dallas Museum of Art, 2012. Accessed 1 January 2015.
OBJECTIVES: To analyze a composition in terms of emphasis.
To explore the narrative qualities of a painting.
To consider the artist's use of the illusion of texture.
??Before you look at That Gentleman, do the following:
Go back to the previous image and unfocus the image.By making everything blurry, you have taken subject matter "out of the picture."
(A transparency of the image is recommended for this activity)
Should this be a VIRTUAL OBJECT or some other type of relationship with the study for this work?
Did not get to review the following possible assets in archives:
2012.002- Vertical Files, 1899-present. Series 2: Folder 82: Objects- "That Gentleman" Andrew Wyeth
Multiple photographs of individuals standing with the painting and related to the exhibition An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art (September 29 to November 29, 1987)
Add Vice President's House as exhibition? Need to review object list from exhibition pamphlet. Can also add other DMA objects to the exhibition in TMS because right now it does not have related objects (January 2017).
Catalogue essays specific to object
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Produced- Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
scissors
painting
portrait
shoes
interior
chair
profiles (figures)
key
shadow
bald: DMA
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
1960 to before 1962: Mr. and Mrs. Alexander M. Lauglin, New York [1]
1960 to before 1962: M. Knoedler & Co., Inc, New York [1]
From 1962: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas Art Association Purchse [2,3]
[1] This provenance is taken from the research document compiled from the object record in September 2010. It appears in the same order as listed in the document.
[2] Public donations were included.
[3] The Dallas Arts Association is the predecessor to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. The name was abandoned in 1970. Works from this collection were transferred to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. The name of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1933, was changed to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1983.
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
John Wilmerding, "Derivation and Originality in the Art of Andrew Wyeth," Bromberg lecture series, September 24, 1987; in conjunction with An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art, September 29- November 29, 1987. (Wilmerding was the Deputy Director of the national gallery of Art, and curator of concurrent NGA exhibition "Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures," File name: WyethWillmerding, original format- U-matic, KCA-60XBR.
12936249: UMO
12936257: UMO
Object number added to Piction (1/24/2017)
IMAGE ASSETS
WEB RESOURCES
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
Registrar's Office- Object file original documents, 1907-2009. Box 14: Andrew Wyeth letter to Jerry Bywaters (January 19, 1962) regarding That Gentleman and the gift of That Gentleman Study. This letter has been typed and both the typed and handwritten versions were scanned from the object file. If the originals are in good condition, high-res scans would be a great addition to website.
FUN FACTS
- That Gentleman debuted at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts' "Famous Families in American Art" exhibition for the 1960 State Fair of Texas (October 8 to November 20, 1960).
- The Dallas Museum of Art made headlines with the 1962 purchase of That Gentleman. The price of $58,000 was the highest amount paid by a museum for a painting by a living American artist. The record was preceded and surpassed by other museums' purchases of his paintings. The Philadelphia Museum of Art set the record in 1959 when they purchased Ground Hog Day, and the Farnsworth Art Museum (Rockland, Maine) continued to raise the bar when they acquired Her Room in 1963. This title was previously held by another artist represented in the Museum's collection. Frederic Edwin Church, painter of The Icebergs (1861, 1979.28), sold another monumental landscape for $10,000 in 1909. (The Heart of the Andes, 1859, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) The most recent record-breaking sale of a work by a living American artist occurred in 2013 when Jeff Koons (whose Inflatable Balloon Flower (Yellow), 1997, 2005.56 is owned by the DMA) sold a version of his over-sized Balloon Dog sculptures for over one thousand times Wyeth's 1962 record.
- Andrew Wyeth's use of egg tempera makes his paintings particularly vulnerable to the formation of a gradual haze on the surface. Conservationists determined this powdery bloom or efflorescence results from fatty acids in the paint rising to the surface. Though careful cleaning can remove the bloom, its recurrence means that Wyeth's tempera works benefit from a continuation of the patient and detail-oriented approach used in their creation.
TEACHING IDEAS
RULES
Apply to objects where number equals 1962.27
Category
rules_operator
AND
General Description
That Gentleman evokes the pensive mood and quality of repose that are hallmarks of Andrew Wyeth's best work. The artist's model was Tom Clark, a fellow resident of Chester County, Pennsylvania. Impressed with his sitter's demeanor, Wyeth wrote: "His voice is gentle, his wit keen, and his wisdom enormous. He is not a character, but a very dignified gentleman who might otherwise have gone unrecorded." In another description, Wyeth offered another level of significance to the painting's title: “Tom Clark went about the business of living in a very orderly way. He would prepare his vegetables with a deft grace, mend his clothes with care, lift the lid of a kettle seconds before it would boil over, keep his wood stove just the right temperature, place his slippers on a newspaper so as not to soil the table top. This tall, thin gentleman always referred to objects—whether a potato, an annoying fly buzzing overhead, or a car passing by—as ‘that gentleman.’” [1]
The figure and setting display a somber dignity, as Clark sits with his back to the viewer and gazes off in quiet contemplation. The items around him show the great care and consideration with which he lived his life. Scissors and a key hang carefully from nails in the wall, and, as noted in Wyeth's description, shoes rest on a tabletop covered with parchment paper.
Wyeth gave his works an introspective feeling by paring away details and reducing his color variation. Wyeth learned the painstaking techniques of tempera painting from his brother-in-law, Peter Hurd (1904-1984), and reserved the medium for his most ambitious paintings. He was not only meticulous, even compulsive, in his realistic detail, he was also, like Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), the painter of lonely, sad and isolated people, caught in the emptiness surrounding successful America. Wyeth's dry, linear style, with its apparitional clarity, increases this sense of psychic isolation.
When first shown in Dallas in 1960, the public was so taken with That Gentleman that visitors left change in a box labeled "Help us buy this painting." As a gesture of gratitude for the local fundraising, Wyeth made the rare decision to let go of one of the preparatory sketches for his paintings. He donated That Gentleman Study (1962.11) to the Museum after reading an article about the collective effort to acquire the finished work.
[1] Andrew Wyeth (Boston, Massachusetts: Museum of Fine Arts, 1970), 95.
Adapted from
- "Highlights of the American Collection,” in Dallas Museum of Art 100 Years, eds. Dorothy Kosinski, et al. (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 2003), 48.
- Bonnie Pitman, ed., Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 284.
- Eleanor Jones Harvey, "Andrew Wyeth, That Gentleman," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed. Suzanne Kotz (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 1997), 262.
- "Andrew Wyeth, That Gentleman," DMA Connect, Dallas Museum of Art, 2012.
Fun Facts
- That Gentleman debuted at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts' "Famous Families in American Art" exhibition for the 1960 State Fair of Texas (October 8 to November 20, 1960).
- The Dallas Museum of Art made headlines with the 1962 purchase of That Gentleman. The price of $58,000 was the highest amount paid by a museum for a painting by a living American artist. The record was preceded and surpassed by other museums' purchases of his paintings. The Philadelphia Museum of Art set the record in 1959 when they purchased Ground Hog Day, and the Farnsworth Art Museum (Rockland, Maine) continued to raise the bar when they acquired Her Room in 1963. This title was previously held by another artist represented in the Museum's collection. Frederic Edwin Church, painter of The Icebergs (1861, 1979.28), sold another monumental landscape for $10,000 in 1909. (The Heart of the Andes, 1859, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) The most recent record-breaking sale of a work by a living American artist occurred in 2013 when Jeff Koons (whose Inflatable Balloon Flower (Yellow), 1997, 2005.56 is owned by the DMA) sold a version of his over-sized Balloon Dog sculptures for over one thousand times Wyeth's 1962 record.
- Andrew Wyeth's use of egg tempera makes his paintings particularly vulnerable to the formation of a gradual haze on the surface. Conservationists determined this powdery bloom or efflorescence results from fatty acids in the paint rising to the surface. Though careful cleaning can remove the bloom, its recurrence means that Wyeth's tempera works benefit from a continuation of the patient and detail-oriented approach used in their creation.
Archival Resources
Registrar's Office- Object file original documents, 1907-2009. Box 14: Andrew Wyeth letter to Jerry Bywaters (January 19, 1962) regarding That Gentleman and the gift of That Gentleman Study. This letter has been typed and both the typed and handwritten versions were scanned from the object file. If the originals are in good condition, high-res scans would be a great addition to website.
Web Resources
Notes
This note was tagged #routed in June 2015 and Sue's revisions (in a Word doc created by ASG) have been applied to the note as of October 2015. As of January 2017 I am adding the #draft tag to this note so that it is harvested to Google Drive. Once I am sure that all pending TMS or Piction data entry is complete, I will remove the #routed tag, add the #complete tag, and move the Google Doc to Queta's folder so that it is not re-routed to Sue.
Feb 28, 2017- All revisions are complete but the multimedia assets have not been loaded into Piction. I am removing the #routed tag and replacing it with #completed but the %UMO pending tag is remaining in place until I have found and cataloged the assets in Piction.
Confirmed that provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography shown on the 2010 research document (attached as media file to the TMS recrod) have been entered into the TMS fields. At a later date, this object file has additional bibliographic resources that could be added to the TMS records for other Wyeth objects.
Fun Facts includes price information that would usually remain confidential. In this case, the amount and method of fund-raising were unique, and the information was available in multiple public resources. I felt that these factors made the information suitable for online content.
This would be a prime object for future online texts related to conservation at the DMA. The Crystal Bridges Blog recently created a post on this topic: Linda DeBerry, "Clearing the Haze on Andrew Wyeth's 'Airborne'," January 3, 2014, http://crystalbridges.org/blog/clearing-haze-andrew-wyeths-airborne/. [Sue Canterbury commented on online draft (July 6, 2015)- "That's a very polite method of "bloom" control. Mark Leonard finds that "nose grease" (literally, the oils from your nose) rubbed on the offending areas also knocks it back...until the next bloom."]
The library's artist file contains valuable research materials- not all of which are entered into TMS or present in the object file. It would be helpful if the library object file was cross-referenced (or duplicated) in the primary object file and indicated in the TMS record in some way.
This work was used in the teaching packet, "A Looking Journey." Those questions have been pasted at the end of the other teaching resources and need to be reformatted.
Talking about this painting, artist Andrew Wyeth said: Tom Clark went about the business of living in a very orderly way. He would prepare his vegetables with a deft grace, mend his clothes with care, lift the lid of a kettle seconds before it would boil over, keep his wood stove just the right temperature, place his slippers on a newspaper so as not to soil the table top. This tall, thin gentleman always referred to objects -- whether a potato, an annoying fly buzzing overhead, or a car passing by -- as "that gentleman" (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, p. 95).
Removed TMS object tag because rule exists.
Removed text from Curatorial Remarks and put as two text entries for archival purposes.
CONSIDER SCANNING: Use for both this and the study
If needed, numerous additional sketches, quotes relating to Tom Clark, and other Wyeth depictions of Clark are reproduced in the catalogue for Andrew Wyeth Close Friends (Jackson, MS: Mississippi Museum of Art, 2001), pages 104-120.
Teaching ideas source- Excerpt from~"Andrew Wyeth, That Gentleman," DMA Connect, Dallas Museum of Art, 2012. Accessed 1 January 2015.
OBJECTIVES: To analyze a composition in terms of emphasis.
To explore the narrative qualities of a painting.
To consider the artist's use of the illusion of texture.
??Before you look at That Gentleman, do the following:
Go back to the previous image and unfocus the image.By making everything blurry, you have taken subject matter "out of the picture."
(A transparency of the image is recommended for this activity)
Should this be a VIRTUAL OBJECT or some other type of relationship with the study for this work?
Did not get to review the following possible assets in archives:
2012.002- Vertical Files, 1899-present. Series 2: Folder 82: Objects- "That Gentleman" Andrew Wyeth
Multiple photographs of individuals standing with the painting and related to the exhibition An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art (September 29 to November 29, 1987)
Add Vice President's House as exhibition? Need to review object list from exhibition pamphlet. Can also add other DMA objects to the exhibition in TMS because right now it does not have related objects (January 2017).
Catalogue essays specific to object
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Produced- Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
scissors
painting
portrait
shoes
interior
chair
profiles (figures)
key
shadow
bald: DMA
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
1960 to before 1962: Mr. and Mrs. Alexander M. Lauglin, New York [1]
1960 to before 1962: M. Knoedler & Co., Inc, New York [1]
From 1962: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas Art Association Purchse [2,3]
[1] This provenance is taken from the research document compiled from the object record in September 2010. It appears in the same order as listed in the document.
[2] Public donations were included.
[3] The Dallas Arts Association is the predecessor to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. The name was abandoned in 1970. Works from this collection were transferred to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. The name of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1933, was changed to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1983.
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
John Wilmerding, "Derivation and Originality in the Art of Andrew Wyeth," Bromberg lecture series, September 24, 1987; in conjunction with An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art, September 29- November 29, 1987. (Wilmerding was the Deputy Director of the national gallery of Art, and curator of concurrent NGA exhibition "Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures," File name: WyethWillmerding, original format- U-matic, KCA-60XBR.
12936249: UMO
12936257: UMO
Object number added to Piction (1/24/2017)
rules
Apply To
Objects
number
Equals
1962.27
source file
object_notes_3_c-0304.xml.nores