BOGART AND BACAL. LAUREL and Hardy. Tom and Jerry. Lewis and Clark. And finally, Hawthorne and Hensche. Hawthorne and Hensch?” you say. In the twentieth-century American world of Impressionist painting, they are the twosome worth looking at.
Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872-1930) and Henry Hensche (1899-1992) had a teacher-student relationship. Their legacy, and their particular method of painting, are seen as having established an enduring school of Impressionism in the United States, especially on the Eastern seaboard.
French Impression had arrived in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century in dribs and drabs. American painters, as they all did, went to Europe to study, then came home with French styles. Hawthorne did so, but then took a detour of sorts. He was well educated in the art academy, studying under William Merit Chase in New York City. After sampling the Impressionist impulse, he decided its main approach—very short brush strokes of pure color—had hit its limits.
To supersede that limit, Hawthorne advocate applying “spots of color” of varying sizes, not single brush strokes. He founded his school in Cape Cod, Mass. And there is was that his assistant, Hensche, took up the master’s advice, advancing it further. Their approach has since been called the Cape Cod School, and by others, “the colorist tradition.”
The two painters took good advantage of the bright sun on the New England coast. They taught students outdoors. They directed them to paint ordinary objects on a table, or a human figure against the bright background sky. To discipline them in avoiding detail, Hawthorne counseled the application of spots of color with a putty knife. Later, Hensche refined that to a large palette knife. As Hawthorne put it, “Our tool of trade is our ability to see the big spots.”
By the time Hawthorne was passing from the scene, they had agreed that they had revolutionized painting. As Hensche would say at the end of his life, “There is only one way to paint.” And it was the way Hawthorne and Hensche, born in Germany, had innovated.
Today, students of Hensche have spread his gospel, and by osmosis, their techniques have filtered into a lot of Impressionist-type painting, especially outdoor (plein air) painting. When teaching his students, Hawthorne emphasized fast painting, taking the measure of color, putting down the spots—and if it didn’t work right away, put that painting aside and try another.
Painting brighter than you see (in a high key), he said, because indoors it will become less bright. Paint freely and thickly. Move from bright colors to the mud and gray colors that dominate nature. And God forbid, don’t be an “illustrator.” Don’t tell a story. Paint things that are nothing special until you make them significant in a finished the painting.
The thoughts of the two artists are captured in two small books of interviews with them. Their thoughts and recollections are telling. There was no lack of confidence here.
“Draw as little as is compatible with your conscience—put down spots of color,” Hawthorne said. “Seeing things as silhouettes is drawing—the outline of your subject against the background, the outline and size of each spot of color against every other spot of color it touches, is the only kind of drawing you need bother about.”
Both painters advocated outdoor still life of hard objects as the best way to master the technique. Said Hawthorne: “The painting of still life gives one the widest range for study— a bottle is as serious a subject for portraiture as a person. In arranging, place things so they have color and so that you can see it well. If you cannot decide on color and values in the beginning, move your still life around until you get things simple so that you can see big relations.”
Painting reached a kind of “perfection” in Monet’s haystacks, Hensche argued, but that had still not achieved the pinnacle. “Now we know that there is only one way in which we see objects,” he said ( i.e., as large or small spots of color, their edges meeting in different ways). Only with the proper use of spots can you obtain the values that portray true light—morning, noon, or sunset—“big masses of color holding to that light key,” something the French Impressionist fell short on.
At one point, Hensche intimated to Hawthorne that they had come upon a revolution in painting. The former recalls, in 1929, when Hawthorne returned to Cape Cod from Europe, and said to his student, “You know, Henry, I think we have something here.” Hensche went on: “He [Hawthorne] was the discoverer of the complete color system of painting. I made it teachable, but he was the initiator of the idea. In the higher planes of ideas, very few people understand genius.”
In the interview, Hensche’s confidence comes through, although the interviewer notes that the painter is somewhat “bitter” that the greatness of his discovery has not gained recognition. Still, Hensche has no doubts about its greatness: “We have finally reached the stage, after centuries and centuries . . . that we can discard former methods of painting and consider them passé. They are erroneous. They are not true now, but they were the best our ancestors could do.”
Every art student would benefit from a teacher of such bold confidence, or perhaps such Germanic certitude. Many “master” painters have expressed this kind of authority. It is essential to passing on a serous mode of painting.
Hensche’s interviewer summarized that the Hawthorne-Hensche approach is not a “how-to” technique, but rather a way to study the world before trying to painting it. Nevertheless, it has become at times doctrinaire, as have all painting approaches when they enter instruction or become “schools.”
It’s easy to see traces, or retreads, of past insights in what they two great painters assert as new and revolutionary. Or, their approach can be taken as one of many alternatives. What can be said, for sure, is that the “spot” school of painting offers the discipline, and strictures, that many new painters need—and for old painters a way to break habits.