Hamilton Easter Field (1873–1922) was an American artist, art patron, connoisseur, and teacher, as well as critic, publisher, and dealer. Highly regarded for his knowledge of Japanese prints and his passion for American folk art and crafts, he was also praised for his devotion to contemporary American art, for his defense of non-juried art exhibitions, and for the support he gave to talented artists. At his death, the painter Wood Gaylor said of him: "Mr. Field was one of those rare personalities that come to the front once in a century or so. A combination of painter, critic, teacher and editor, he gave all his time and genius to the furtherance of American art...."
Early life and training
Field was educated at Brooklyn Friends School whose advanced curriculum included classes in drawing. Initially aiming at a career in architecture he attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn from 1888 to 1892 and in 1893 enrolled in the Columbia School of Mines, Engineering and Chemistry. He left Columbia in 1894 to study at Harvard University but left after only a few months in order to travel to Paris where, influenced by wealthy and cultured members of his mother's family, he decided to devote his life to art. In Paris he studied under Gustave Courtois and Raphaël Collin at Académie Colarossi. He also received informal instruction from Jean-Léon Gérôme and subsequently studied privately under Lucien Simon and Henri Fantin-Latour. These artists were all traditional academicians and, under their guidance, he adopted a style that had little in common with the avant-garde artists with whom he later associated. In 1898 Field went to Concarneau in Brittany where Théophile Deyrolle and Alfred Guillou had founded an art colony. There he met eight-year-old Robert Laurent and his parents. Field recognized and nurtured Laurent's talent as an artist, eventually bringing him (at age twelve) to live in his home in Brooklyn and thereafter remaining his close associate for the rest of his life.
The family that eased Field's immersion in the art world of Europe attained its wealth and influence in Parisian art circles by the manufacture of porcelain in Limoges, France. Their factory, Haviland & Co., was run by a brother of Field's mother, David Haviland. His son, Field's cousin Charles, was married to the daughter of a prominent art critic, Philippe Burty, who was both a champion of impressionism and an early admirer of Asian, particularly Japanese, art. Possessing a winning personality and outgoing nature, Field was able to use the connections he made through his art teachers and his Haviland relatives together with his skill identifying and purchasing works of art and antiques to attain a reputation as successful Parisian artist and connoisseur.
Career
Artist, connoisseur, collector
Field's success as an artist was limited by the number and intensity of his other interests. People he met in Paris, particularly his teacher Collin and the critic Burty, introduced him to Asian art and he soon became first a collector of and then an authority on Japanese prints. So great was his knowledge that at his death he was considered the "greatest authority in America on Japanese prints."
Field remained at his base in Paris for most of fifteen years, traveling from there to other locations in France, throughout Europe, and into Asia in order to study art and collect both art and antiques. In describing Field's "immense studio" in 1901, a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle exclaimed over the tapestries, paintings, and prints that covered the walls along with cases holding engravings, Japanese prints, and rare books crowding the floor called it an "artistic paradise in Paris."
When he returned to Brooklyn in 1902 for a three-year stay, Field brought with him young Robert Laurent and his parents. The four of them lived with Field's mother in the Columbia Heights house that she owned and in which Field had been raised.
Over a period of three years, beginning in 1905, Field and his mother made frequent trips to Europe, visiting Paris, London, Rome, Dublin, Florence, Zürich, and Budapest. Laurent's parents returned to France at this time. Laurent returned home with them to complete his schooling then, in 1907, joined Field and his mother on their return to Brooklyn.
In 1907 while at home between trips, Field sold some of his 1,000 Japanese prints. Returning to Europe in 1908, Field opened a studio apartment in Rome and made it his primary residence through May 1909.
In 1909 Field's second cousin Frank Burty Haviland introduced Field to his friend Pablo Picasso. Field then commissioned Picasso to make a group of eleven decorative paintings to occupy the walls of his library in Brooklyn. By 1915 Picasso had completed at least eight of the panels, though he later abandoned the project, and Field never saw the results of Picasso's labor. One of the completed paintings, "Pipe Rack and Still Life on a Table," now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was intended to be placed over a door to the room. It contains Field's initials, HEF, at the lower right. Picasso's unfinished commission would have represented the first Cubist decorative interior in the United States.
In 1910 Field returned from the last of the overseas trips that he took with his mother and thereafter the two of them spent most of the warm months in Maine and the rest of the year in Brooklyn. After her death in 1917 Field continued this pattern of dual residence. Field's favored locale in Maine was a coastal community called Ogunquit that had begun attracting artists at the end of the nineteenth century. Field had and his mother had begun summering there in 1904 and later bought a house they called Thurnscoe where Field made paintings that he showed in a commercial gallery in New York in 1905.
Taking advantage of his solid reputation as an authority on Japanese prints and European art in general and capitalizing on the quality and extent of his personal collections Field was able to establish himself as a successful art dealer afterwards.
Art patron, educator, gallery owner, principal in artists' associations
In 1905 Field was given a solo exhibition at the William Glausen Gallery in Fifth Avenue in New York. All the paintings he showed were in a traditional style, revealing little or no influence of Cubism or other progressive movements. They varied widely in locales depicted, if not in the style in which they were made. An article in the New York Times describes the fifty works on show as "landscapes, townscapes, marines, figure pieces, and sketches from the coast of Maine and Long Island Sound, from Paris and New York, from France and Italy--even from Finland and Japan"
In 1912 Field purchased the building next door to his mother's home and remodeled it from a boarding house into an art gallery on the first two floors with rooms rented out to boarders on the other floors. The gallery, called Ardsley House, held frequent, brief exhibitions that rarely gained mention in the New York press. Ardsley House exhibitions were frequent and short. Most consisted of paintings by Field himself and by Robert Laurent or of prints from the collections of Field and Laurent. Field sought to attract "persons of refinement and culture" as boarders, particularly artists and musicians.
Field's first reported work as art teacher took place in 1905 before he and his mother departed on their extended European travels. At that time Field gave art instruction to boys at the Little Italy Neighborhood Settlement House. In 1911 Field began to build studios at Perkins Cove in Ogunquit designing them in the form of local fishermen's shacks and using parts from old barns in their construction and by 1914 had begun operating a summer school there.
In 1916 Field bought a building at 110 Columbia Heights which, like Ardsley House, was both adjacent to his mother's home and in use as a boarding house. One of its former tenants was John Roebling who had chosen the location because it gave him views of the Brooklyn Bridge while it was being constructed. Field turned it into studios for use as an art school while keeping other rooms to be let out to boarders and made available to needy artists either for free or at low rent. He called the building the Ardsley Studios and the school the Ardsley School of Modern Art. The school attracted progressive young painters who had attended classes at the Art Students League in New York, including students of Kenneth Hayes Miller. They included Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Niles Spencer, Stefan Hirsch, Adelaide Lawson, and Lloyd Goodrich. Artists who occupied rooms in the boarding house part of the building included Hirsch, Kuniyoshi, Katherine Schmidt, and Elsa Rogo.
Field did not attempt to impart a favored style on his students but rather emphasized individual development based on an instinctive approach to art. Overall, he hoped to engender a version of modernism that was uniquely American. He also indulged in a lively social life organizing get-togethers among artists that included drunken costume parties.
As Field's aesthetic taste evolved he became more and more attracted to early Americana, including rustic furniture and rugs as well as pictorial art in a naïve style. In about 1917 he bought a farm near Ogunquit, in Cape Neddick, Maine. He called it Sowerby Farm and began referring to himself as a farmer.
From 1916 onward Field became increasing involved in the work of artists' associations. In that year he was elected president of the Brooklyn Artists Association. A year later he joined the Society of Independent Artists, became its corresponding secretary, and began to participate in the group's exhibitions. From 1918 to 1920 he served on the society's board of directors, leaving over a disagreement with Walter Pach concerning a policy of giving publicity to some artist-members and not others. In 1920 he formed a new organization, Salons of America, which would, like the society, exhibit the work of its member artists, but which would be free of the taint of favoritism.
Critic, editor, publisher
In 1913 Field wrote and self-published a book, The technique of oil paintings : and other essays. Subsequently, he established himself as a well-known and highly respected art critic. In 1919 he succeeded his friend Helen Appleton Read as art editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In that year and the next he wrote reviews on exhibitions and artists for Arts and Decoration. In 1919 he also founded The Arts magazine and became its editor, publisher, and main contributor. The money he gained from subscriptions and advertising permitted him to expand it and increase the frequency from quarterly to monthly. It contained sixty-four pages at the time of his death in 1922.