[From the catalogue-in-progress for “Landscapes & Livestock”, a loan exhibition for Agincourt Homecoming in the Fall of 2015]

WAUGH, Frederick Judd [1861-1940; attributed]

Cave Man

undated

oil on board / 16 inches x 16 inches

Waugh was born in New Jersey, son of a portrait painter, and was fortunate enough to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art during 1880-1883 with Thomas Eakins.  Waugh also studied in Paris (in the Académie Julian), then lived in the Channel Islands and Maine before settling at Montclair, New Jersey. He is known primarily as a painter of seascapes. Some of Eakins’s American iconoclasm can be seen in Waugh’s bold composition, but the moody color scheme and the contrast of light and dark are more typical in the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder, another Philadelphia influence.

This was a recent anonymous gift to the Community Collection in memory of Seamus Tierney, theater director, whose last production “Medea” was inspired by Martha Graham’s ballet “The Cave of the Heart.” Tierney died in 2011. The set for Tierney’s production was inspired by the Waugh painting.