Charles Warren Eaton, "La Nuit (The Night)," oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 44 1/2 inches, signed and dated lower left: "Chas. Warren Eaton 1911"
Lisa N. Peters
Among the rewards of working in the gallery are the discoveries made in the course of research. These often occur in the process of organizing exhibitions, when works included receive more scrutiny than they would otherwise. Such sleuth work invariably involves several of us, as was the case when a new painting by Charles Warren Eaton arrived for our current show, fresh from the large holdings of Eaton’s art that belong to the granddaughter of the artist Samuel Foster, who had become close to Eaton during Eaton’s youth in Albany, New York.
The painting hung quietly in the owner’s front foyer for decades. Large in size for Eaton, and including the dark silhouettes of lonely pine trees set against a nocturnal landscape lit by the glimmer of moonlight that constitute Eaton’s signature statement, the painting (which came to us untitled and seemingly undated) struck us as one that the artist might have used to represent himself in an important venue.
Charles Warren Eaton, page from, "Account of Paintings Sent to Regular Exhibitions," 1910-37
Label from stretcher of Charles Warren Eaton, "La Nuit"
A clue that this was, in fact, the case emerged after we discovered in our archives, a previously unexamined ledger book kept by the artist between 1910 and 1937, the year of his death. The artist titled the book, Account of Paintings Sent to Regular Exhibitions. Our head archivist Sarah Hardin noticed that one of the entries read: “1911 / Paris Salon / La Nuit 2000; Dunes at Sunset 2000.” (The page is pictured above left.) These prices were much higher than any others Eaton recorded at the time. Sarah immediately linked up this entry with her recent examination of our painting, which revealed a small, hard-to-read label on the upper left corner of the stretcher that read Ch. Warren Eaton / no. 11655 / La Nuit (pictured above right), of which she presumed that the “11″ referred to the year. She then further discovered in the work’s lower left corner a very indistinct signature and an equally indistinct date of 1911. From this we became convinced that our hunch was correct, that not only was this a painting Eaton considered important, but one he displayed in the premier showcase of his era, the annual salon of the Société des Artistes Français, aka the Paris International Salon. Research assistant Katherine Bogden found the final piece of evidence to prove the case when she located the entry on the work on the Salon catalogue (shown below right), where concurring with the numbering on its label, the painting is listed under Eaton’s name as “no. 655—La nuit.”
Salon de 1911, 129th Exposition, Societe des Artistes Francais, Exposition Annuelle des Beaux Arts
As we were putting this information together, Eaton scholar Charles Clark paid a visit to the gallery. We were curious about the other painting Eaton showed along with La Nuit, “no. 656, Les Dunes;–coucher de soleil.” We were unfamiliar with Eaton’s paintings of dunes, but Charlie knew immediately that the subject of the second painting would have been the dunes of Knokke, Belgium, a seaside resort close to the Dutch border on the Flemish coast that Eaton painted during one of his visits to nearby Bruges.
Charles Warren Eaton’s awareness that La Nuit would represent not only his own achievement but also that of American art (he was among one of about one hundred American exhibitors at the 1911 Salon) adds a new level of mystique to a painting that on its own exudes a sense of ruminative mystery.
Postscript: We look forward to having Sarah use other entries as a means of shedding new light on Eaton’s art and unraveling the histories and puzzles hidden within it.
December 29, 2009 at 7:04 pm
[...] he was twelve, both in childbirth). (Note: Read our post on research progress made on Eaton’s Le Nuit (The Night).) Charles Warren Eaton, "The Woodland Sentinels," ca. [...]