William Henry Kemble Yarrow (American, 1891-1941). Massachusetts Landscape. Oil on canvas. 30 x 39 inches (76.2 x 99.1 c...

Description

William Henry Kemble Yarrow (American, 1891-1941)
Massachusetts Landscape
Oil on canvas
30 x 39 inches (76.2 x 99.1 cm)
Signed lower right: Yarrow

PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Virginia.

William Henry Kemble Yarrow was born in Glenside, Pennsylvania, into a prominent Philadelphia family. Although the details of his life are not well documented, it is known that he began painting at age seventeen, when he enrolled as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1909 and 1910, alongside fellow students John Storrs and Charles Demuth. Yarrow's teachers during this period were Thomas Anschutz, Hugh Breckenridge and Henry McCarter.

In 1910, Yarrow traveled to Paris to enroll at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi. While in Paris, he came under the influence of Paul Cézanne and, later, of fellow American Stanton Macdonald-Wright. He also became a close friend of Thomas Hart Benton, who shared Yarrow's attraction to Synchromism and Regionalism.

Yarrow's artistic talents were recognized upon his return to America when, in 1915, he received the silver medal for an Impressionist nude at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. A year later, he received the gold medal at the Art Club of Philadelphia for his full-length painting Nude.

Despite Yarrow's exposure to Modernism and his friendships with Macdonald-Wright and Benton, he did not venture into Modernist painting until the second half of the 1910s, when he began exhibiting at the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Over the next several years, he exhibited and wrote regularly on the state of modern art in America.

Yarrow's flurry of promoting Modernism culminated in April of 1921 in Philadelphia when he chaired a committee with Benton, Paul Burlin, Arthur B. Carles, Bernard Gussow, Joseph Stella and Alfred Stieglitz to organize the "Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings Showing the Later Tendencies in Art."

Yarrow's Massachusetts Landscape, one of only a small group of paintings by the artist to ever surface on the market, successfully demonstrates the artist's inimitable ability to combine Synchromism and Regionalism in a style that is uniquely his own.


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