WILTON LOCKWOOD PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY
WILTON LOCKWOOD
American, 1862-1914
BIOGRAPHY
“Robert Wilton Lockwood, named in part for his birthplace, Wilton, Connecticut, later dropped his Christian name. When he was four his mother died, and the family moved to New York. He soon returned to Connecticut, however, and lived with two of his aunts on a farm in Rowayton, where he attended the local school. As a young man, he was employed in a New York broker's office, and it was there that someone introduced him to John La Farge, in whose studio he trained as a designer of glass in the early 1880s. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York and then in 1886 in Paris under Jean Joseph Benjamin-Constant. For much of the next decade Lockwood remained abroad, returning to New York for a short time to paint portraits to finance the remainder of his stay in Europe. This was probably about 1891, as his portrait of John La Farge (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is dated that year. Lockwood married in London in 1892 and then went to live in Munich and later in Paris. His work was exhibited in both Munich and Berlin, but he achieved his first real critical success in Paris when he exhibited a group of portraits at the Champs de Mars exhibition in 1895. In December of that year a one-man exhibition of his work was held at the St. Botolph Club in Boston.
“Lockwood returned to the United States in 1896 and settled in Boston. At this time he painted mostly portraits, such as Rev. Edward Abbott (Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine) and Dr. Robert Fletcher (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland). During an exhibition of his paintings at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York in 1902, one critic noted that, in his portraits, the artist attempted ‘to give each canvas some special quality not only of artistic presentment but of human characterization’ (International Studio 16 [April 1902], p. lxx). He is, however, best known for his still lifes, the subjects of which are often the peonies that he cultivated at his summer home in South Orleans on Cape Cod.
“In the early 1900s, Lockwood's paintings were awarded honors at exhibitions in Paris, Buffalo, and St. Louis. He was a member of a number of major art organizations, including the Society of American Artists, from 1898, and the National Academy of Design, where he became an Associate in 1902 and an academician a decade later. In 1912 he took a studio in New York and worked there until he became ill. He died at the age of fifty-two in Brookline, Massachusetts, and the following year the St. Botolph Club mounted a memorial exhibition of his work.”
[Doreen Bolger Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1980, vol. III, pp. 404-5]
Museum Collections:
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA
