Provenance:
William Macbeth Gallery, New York, New York (label verso)
Shore Galleries, Boston, Massachusetts (stamped verso)
Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Private Collection, Pennsylvania

Exhibited:
Hawthorne Retrospective, June 16-September 17, 1961 (label verso)
The Chrysler Art Museum of Provincetown. Lent by Walter F. Chrysler, Jr.

Illustrated:
Hawthorne Retrospective, The Chrysler Art Museum of Provincetown, page 57, no. 64

Charles Webster Hawthorne was born in Lodi, Illinois, while his mother was visiting family in the Midwest. His father was a sea captain and ice farmer from Richmond, Maine, a town of just over two thousand residents linked by the Kennebec River to the port city of Bath. Hawthorne attended the local public schools and enjoyed a simple childhood, working at numerous part-time jobs, including cutting ice for his father from the frozen Kennebec river that was used for packing and shipping fish. Although there was little indication in his childhood that Hawthorne would enjoy a prosperous career as a painter and an art teacher, after graduating from his local high school in 1890, he sought his parent's permission to go to New York City to train to be an artist.

Hawthorne arrived in New York with no money, but soon found work on the East River docks to support himself. After almost three years of living frugally and working at a variety of jobs he was finally able to afford art classes. In 1893, Hawthorne enrolled at the Art Students League, which was considered the preeminent American art school. Hawthorne's first instructor was Frank Vincent DuMond (1865-1941), who was to become a legendary teacher during his fity-nine year tenure at the League. Hawthorne encountered DuMond as a young man, who had just recently returned from Paris. The following year (1894), Hawthorne studied with George de Forest Brush (1855-1941), and Henry Siddons Mowbray (1858-1928). Although George de Forest Brush was seventeen years older than Hawthorne, he had a boyish appearance and an uninhibited and enthusiastic manner of teaching that was to influence Hawthorne's own approach to teaching art. While Hawthorne was his student, Brush was painting family groups for which his wife and children posed, a theme Hawthorne himself would turn to ten years later. While studying at the Art Students League, Hawthorne also studied briefly at the National Acadmey of Design. In 1896, he began studies with William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) at Chase's Shinnecock Summer School of Art on Long Island. Chase had long been a popular teacher at the Art Students League and enjoyed a reputation as one of the leading artist-teachers of his day. Chase was an eloquent spokesman for the high purpose of art in American life and society, and attracted many amateur artists as well as serious art students to his school. Hawthorne's work at Shinnecock during the summer of 1896 must have made a strong impression on Chase, for the master asked him to stay on that fall to help organize his Chase School, which would open before the end of the year. The following summer Hawthorne became Chase's assistant.

In the summer of 1898, Hawthorne departed on his first trip to Europe. He spent the summer in the Netherlands, painting in Zandvoort, a picturesque fishing village on the shore of the North Sea frequented by a number of the Hague School artists. Hawthorne also toured the museums of Haarlem while abroad and was greatly influenced and inspired by the paintings of the Dutch masters he saw there, particularly by the works of Frans Hals (1582-1666).

Hawthorne returned from Europe to New York, where by the winter of 1898 he had established a studio in the Holbein building on West Fifty-fifth Street, the start of a thirty-two year professional presence there. In 1899, Hawthorne discovered Provincetown, while scouting for a place to locate his own summer art school. On the furthermost tip of Cape Cod, a narrow peninsula stretching sixty-five miles out into the Atlantic from the Massachusetts coast, Provincetown was at that time inhabited by mostly Portuguese fishermen and their families and a smaller number of Yankees. By the end of the summer Hawthorne had decided to make Provincetown his headquarters and to start his own school there, which he would name the Cape Cod School of Art. He would be the first to find inspiration for his art in the everyday life of the local fishermen and their families, and his art school would eventually bring hundreds of students from all over America to share his inspiration.

Although Hawthorne's art depicts many subjects, the fishermen of Provincetown, quietly engaged in their work, and their families were an enduring subject that Hawthorne returned to again and again throughout his career. These straightforward compositions, including one or more figures shown at close range to the viewer were exhibited widely and were the basis of Hawthorne's major public reputation. Hawthorne's paintings of the men and women of Provincetown project a penetrating, often enigmatic gaze that looks out beyond the world of the canvas, the artist, and the viewer. That gaze, which comes from deep within, reflecting interiority rather than exteriority, became the hallmark of Hawthorne's work. He knew this look from his earliest encounters with men of the sea. Perhaps his father had the look that he found again in Provincetown among the fishermen, the look of those accustomed to long periods of isolation away from family and friends, exposed to danger at sea. His paintings of these people are portraits of the human spirit, portraying the nobility of ordinary people for whom he felt both sympathy and admiration. Portraits and paintings of women at leisure in interior settings were also mainstays of Hawthorne's work throughout his career. In addition, he painted landscapes in the vicinity of Provincetown, nudes, and an impressive body of work in watercolor.

The present work Waiting, is a beautiful example of Hawthorne's mature style and his favored subject, the Portuguese fisherman and families of Provincetown. Such portraits are now considered to be his most important works. Waiting employs all of the signature elements of his style, featuring figures shown at close range to the viewer, the penetrating and emotive outward gaze, the dignity and sincerity with which he imbues his humble yet virtuous, subjects and the deep, rich palette of a true colorist.

Exhibitions:
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1900-1931 (prize, 1915, 1923)
National Academy of Design, New York, New York, 1900-1926 frequently, (prize in 1904, 1906, 1911, 1924, 1926) (gold, 1914, 1915)
Salmagundi Club, New York, New York, 1904 (prizes)
Carnegie Institute, 1908 (prize), 1925 (prize)
Exposición Internacional (the World Exhibition), Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1910 (medal)
Brooklyn Art Association, Brooklyn, New York, 1912
Newport Art Association, Newport, Rhode Island, 1912 (inaugural), 1928 (prize)

Exhibitions continued:
Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, California, 1915 (medal)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1917 (medal), 1923 (medal, prize)
Society of Independent Artists, New York, New York, 1917, 1919, 1936, 1941
Concord Art Association, 1922 (prize), 1925 (medal)
Philadelphia Exposition, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1923 (medal, prize)
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia, 1908-1930 (silver med., 1923; gold med., 1926)
Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1926 (gold)
National Museum American Art, Washington, District of Columbia, 1983

Memberships:
American Academy of Arts and Letters
American Water Color Society
Artists Fund Society
Century Association
Lotos Club
National Academy of Design, 1908, (Associate member)
National Academy of Design, 1911, (Academician)
National Arts Club
National Association of Portrait Painters
National Institute of Arts and Letters
Players Club, New York, New York
Salmagundi Club, New York, New York
Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France

Collections:
Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York

Collections continued:
The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia
Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio
Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan
Engineer's Club, New York, New York
The Everson Museum Of Art, Syracuse, New York
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis, Indiana
Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, Mississippi
Lotos Club, New York, New York
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts
Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
Mulvane Art Museum, Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island
Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, Michigan
National Academy of Design, New York, New York
National Art Club, New York, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey
Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
St. Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri
San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California

Collections continued:
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, District of Columbia
Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
Town Hall, Provincetown, Massachusetts
Union League Club of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts

References:
American Art Analog, Chelsea House Publishers
Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975, Sound View Press
Charles Webster Hawthorne: Paintings & Watercolors, Richard Mühlberger, Chameleon Books, Inc. MA