On a recent trip to Carmel, CA. my wife and I stopped in to visit with Patrick Kraft, Gallery Director at William A. Karges Fine Art specializing in Early California paintings. Patrick showed us this little jewel of an oil on board painting signed - William Henry Clapp 1917, Cuba.
William Henry Clapp (1879-1954) was a notable California Impressionist Painter with Canadian roots who studied in Paris from 1904-08 at Académies Julian, Colarossi, and Grande Chaumière.
Clapp was taken by the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism he found in France. Most of the original Impressionists artists were alive and active, and the next generation was coming on the scene. He was particularly influenced by the work of Seurat and Signac. After his studies he returned to Canada where he appeared as 'a new voice' for Canadian painting, invigorating and inspiring younger painters. His membership in the Royal Canadian Academy was proof that his fellow painters accepted him. The public found him harder to take.
In 1915 Clapp sailed for Cuba, where his father managed a plantation on the Isle of Pines. For two years he painted swampy waterways overhung with palms and hot country roads, sometimes in soft diffused mists, sometimes with sharp, short, piercing glazes that turned paintings into vibrating jewels like this one.
Leaving Cuba in 1917 the year of this painting, he settled permanently in Oakland where he was destined to make an enduring mark on California art. His painting was so far in advance of what was being done that he became a radical pioneer. Clapp and Selden Gile gathered four other painters and constituted The Society of Six, to whom Clapp brought the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist visions that he had learned in France, the only one of the group who had actually been there. Clapp also served as director and curator of the now Oakland Museum for 31 years from 1918-49.
A biographer Lawrence Jeppson is compiling a book on Clapp titled The Joy of Vision!. In Jeppson’s introduction he calls Clapp an "Urbane Impressionist", a title I’m drawn to like this painting.
Image: William Henry Clapp 1917, Cuba. complements of William A. Karges Fine Art
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