[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
CLARK, Eliot Candee [1883–1980]
Country Road
oil on panel / 8.75 inches by 10.5 inches
ca1930
Son of landscape painter Walter Clark and Jennifer Woodruff Clark, a student of psychic phenomena, Eliot Clark was a precocious artist who became a landscape painter in the late American Impressionist style. Moving to Albemarle, Virginia in 1932, he was one of the few Impressionist* artists of the Southern states. Likely this was a result of his association with James Whistler and his painting in 1900 at Gloucester, Massachusetts with John Twachtman, a family friend. Showing his obvious interest in Impressionism, he wrote a book about its exponents including Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, Julian Weir, and Robert Vonnoh.
The lesser known Clark is in the good company of early giants in the American Impressionist style, John Henry Twachtman and Childe Hassam — though artists of that calibre are collected by major urban institutions.
[…] Battershill’s later landscapes are conservative, what might be called traditional. This exhibits a color scheme reminiscent of the ’30s, however, and a composition similar to the Photo-Secessionist movement and Pictorialism more typical of photography in the early 20th century. It is similar in spirit with another painting in the collection by Eliot Candee Clark. […]