Rae
1939
Oil on canvas, 20 x 16

Solowey first painted his wife Rae in 1930, the year the two married; she would be his primary model for the rest of his life. Although many of these portraits harken to classic renditions of the female subject, they suggest in particular the highly charged mental states and pensive dispositions found in the late portraiture of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), whose works and reputation Solowey surely encountered during his student days at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (where Eakins taught until his forced resignation in 1886). Turning away, she denies her gaze to the beholder in a manner suggesting John Singer Sargent's (1856-1925) painting, Madame X (1884; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Solowey gave this portrait to Rae's mother, who complained that the painting only depicted "half" of Rae.


Rae
1939
Oil on canvas, 20 x 16


Pink Turban Rae
1950
Oil on canvas, 20 x 16

Solowey had deep admiration for the neoclassical French painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). He appears to have been especially influenced by Ingres' Bather in a Pink Turban (1808; Musée du Louvre), which Solowey pays homage to here, and which he includes in the background of his painting Still Life Materials (n.d.; James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA).


Picture Hat
1954
Oil on canvas, 24 x 20


Farm House Group
1940
Oil on canvas, 18 x 48

Solowey positions the houses here amid the foliage of the middle ground, relegating the architecture to an array of subtle geometric planes, suggesting an affinity with contemporary "precisionist" artists such as Charles Demuth (1883-1935) and his fellow Bucks County resident Charles Sheeler (1883-1965). Yet in its dramatic horizontal format, its ambitious coloration and spacemaking, and its reconciliation of natural and artificial elements, Farm House Group attests to the artist's subjective interpretation of the rural Pennsylvania countryside.

Solowey painted Farm House Group for the mantle above the fireplace in the cottage, referred to as the "Little House," on the Solowey property in Bedminster. This photo shows the artist painting from a vantage point nearly identical to that which he maintains in the work at right.


Landscape With Red Barn
c. 1940
Oil on canvas, 30 x 36


Storm
n.d.
Oil on canvas, 16 x 20

Approaching Storm
n.d.
Pencil on paper, 8 x 11

Approaching Storm
c. 1976-78.
Etching, 20 x 16 (with mat)

Evening
1976
Watercolor on paper, 16 x 20 (with mat)

Depicting the field and lane at Solowey's Bedminster studio, the scene represented in these works fascinated the artist enough to inspire him to return again and again to the glade for subject matter. It is not clear when the first work was created; nor is it certain in which medium Solowey first depicted this landscape (the artist also produced an etching of this vista). This group of images does however suggest that the artist repeatedly mined the expressive possibilities of a theme by depicting the subject in different media.

"Our farm here in Bedminster had been painted and drawn innumerable times since it is one for all seasons…," wrote Solowey's wife Rae in a letter to writer Helen Papashvilly.


Portraits from the Performing Arts

From 1929 through 1942, Solowey produced over 900 drawings of celebrities of stage and screen which were reproduced in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, and New York Post. Throughout this period he produced likenesses of many of the most renowned actors and performers of the day. He used charcoal in the theatre portraits because of its quick response to his hand, and because of its strong contrasts which left an indelible mark on the page and reduced the possibility of error in reproduction. Joining naturalistic detail with theatrical gestures and poses, Solowey emerged as a leading portraitist-illustrator during these years, and the Solowey theater portrait came to be esteemed by actors and audience alike.

A pioneer in newspaper illustration, Solowey was one of the first artists to introduce halftone to newspaper reproductions. Unlike many fellow artists, he insisted on working from life rather than photographs. He usually produced the images in a matter of minutes, either on the set or in a dressing room during an actor's break.

Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in Tonight at 8:30
1937
Charcoal on paper

After their success in Private Lives in 1930, Noël Coward (1899-1973) and Gertrude Lawrence (1898-1952) were eager to play together again; the two had been friends wince childhood. Tonight at 8:30 was intended as a series of nine one act plays, ranging from music hall comedy to high tragedy, from slapstick to musical romance, that would be performed as triple bills on three consecutive nights. It open to ecstatic reviews in both London and New York.

Solowey had previously drawn Coward (with Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne) in Design for Living, 1933, and Lawrence in Private Lives, 1931 and later in Skylark, 1939.


Helen Hayes and Maurice Evans in Twelfth Night
1940
Charcoal on paper

Although Helen Hayes (1900-1993) had been on stage since she was six, and received star-billing when she was 20, it was in the 1930s that she cemented her reputation as "the First Lady of the Theatre." New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote that, in her portrayal of Mary Stuart of Scotland in Maxwell Anderson's Mary of Scotland (1933), Hayes "raised herself to queendom by the transcendence of her spirit." It was one of two instances in which Helen Hayes felt her acting was "touched by the divine."

The other occasion was in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. On the last week of her critically acclaimed tour, Hayes believed she had finally captured her character. She called her husband, playwright Charles MacArthur, and screamed, "Charlie, I did it! I did it! I was Viola tonight. I found the key!" MacArthur was amused. He laughed and said, "May I remind you that you're closing tomorrow night?" "But Charlie," she explained, "I've got two more whacks at it. Isn't it marvelous?"

Solowey also drew Hayes in the 1927 play, Mr. Gilhooey and in the 1933 production of Mary of Scotland.


Ethel Barrymore in The Love Duel
1929
Charcoal on paper

Ethel Barrymore in The Love Duel was Solowey's first theater portrait drawn from life. He would later recalled the sitting:

"She was very gracious. I was scared to death. It was the first drawing I did for the theatre from life and, in fact, I insisted I wanted to do them from life rather than photographs, which most of the people who worked for the newspapers worked from photographs. So I insisted that the press agent make an appointment for me with Miss Barrymore. I went to her dressing room and she said that usually she had very little time, but she was gracious enough to give me an appointment.

I went to her home, it was the old Colt mansion in the '40s, and she had a marvelous skylight studio up on the fourth floor. So I went up and started to wait. My appointment was for 10:30 and I waited till twelve. And I was getting more nervous by the second! After all she was a great lady of the theatre.

At last she came down-she was in bed asleep-she came down and tried to sit for me. She tried to hold a pose but she was smoking incessantly. She must have smoked a half-pack of cigarettes during the period. She gave me an hour and ten minutes. And that's about as much as she's given to any artist. But I did the drawing and it turned out well."

Barrymore autographed the drawing in the upper right hand corner. The reproduction appeared in The New York Times on April 7, 1929.


George Balanchine
1938
Charcoal on paper

The great choreographer George Balanchine (1904-1983) was working on the Broadway production of Rodgers and Hart's I Married An Angel when Solowey sketched this portrait.


Frank Capra
1941
Charcoal on paper


Rae
c. 1937
Pastel on paper, 27 x 21
Frame by Ben Solowey
Collection of Fran and Eve Swiacki

This image captures the figure's psychological intensity through an economy of artistic means--a series of bold lines and broad planes of color. In a later discussion advocating the elimination of particulars as a means to locate the subject's essence, Solowey articulated a modernist ethos that explains in part the present work: "I lean to a simplicity which has room only for those details which can effectively become part of the whole."


Cottage, Pompton, New Jersey
1935
oil on canvas, 30 x 36
The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The State Museum of Pennsylvania
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Myron Beitman

With broken brush work, dynamic lighting, and bold coloration, Solowey creates an expressive surface reminiscent of French impressionist painting. The branch at top at the trunk at right act as framing devices, holding in check the variegated terrains.


Willow in Winter
1945
Oil on canvas, 20 x 24

Solowey was fond of this vista, and produced of at least three variations of this winter scene, changing only his vantage point. When the willow was struck by lightning, he painted a watercolor of the tree under conservation. When it finally fell, he did a series of drawings of the stump, which was later uprooted and which now serves as a table in a Chicago home.


Autumn
1938
Oil on canvas, 30 x 25

Solowey painted this scene of the farmhouse in Bedminster from roughly where one parks their car today. The image is more of a composite of different views than a faithful transcription of the locale.


Jardin De Luxemburg
1924
Oil on wood panel, 13 x 16

Ben first went to Europe in 1924. When he was unable to win a Cresson scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he chose to work his way across the Atlantic as a steward on the SS Leviathan. He spent about six months in Europe, primarily in Paris. He brought back forty paintings, two of which were copies executed at the Louvre. At least half of his European works were oil sketches on board, painted en plein air (out of doors) in Paris and the French countryside. The present painting is one of the few signed works from that period.

The Luxembourg Gardens had long been a favorite motif for American artists abroad. Robert Henri (1865-1929) and William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), painted the vista in the decades preceding Solowey's European sojourn. He had a critical acquaintance with Henri and Chase, who, like Solowey, spent


Along Third Street--Harrisburg
n.d.
Oil on board, 13 x 16

Married to Rae, whose family was from Harrisburg, and travelling to the region for portraiture commissions, Solowey was well-known in the state capital. Solowey frequently stayed at the old Penn Harris Hotel (where Strawberry Square now stands), where he would use his room as a studio. When not painting portraits, he often sketched the vista from the window. This work depicts Third Street adjacent to the State Capitol.


Cross River, New York
1932
Oil on canvas, 36 x 30

Unlike most of his fellow painters in New York, Solowey never painted cityscapes, opting instead to paint pastoral landscapes exclusively during the thirteen years in which he lived in the city.


Amber Bracelet
n.d.
Oil on canvas, 30 x 25
Collection of Joan and Sandy Leopold

Solowey here pictures his wife Rae positioned against his landscape painting, Sassaman's Farm (c. 1943), which hangs in the present exhibition, on the wall at left. The artist achieves a painterly unity by merging the blouse carefully modelling her wrists and fingers in light and shadow, Solowey imbues the hands with an expressiveness rivaling that of the psychologically charged face.


Our Garden
c. 1937
Oil on canvas, 24 x 28
Frame by Ben Solowey


Rae Standing, Yellow Blouse
1940
Oil on canvas, 40 x 25
Frame by Ben Solowey


Self Portrait In Studio
1958
Oil on canvas, 40 x 25

Solowey envisioned the practice of painting as a convergence of mental and manual faculties, and the artist, gazing intently as he holds his brushes and palette, pictures himself laboring with his head and his hands. Solowey appears to be left-handed because he depicts himself looking into a full-length mirror.


Portrait of Ethel Grunberg
1946
Charcoal on paper
Collection of Ethel Grunberg

Portrait of Alyce Spector
1966
Charcoal on paper
Collection of Morton and Alyce Spector

Solowey sketched Mrs. Spector in her early thirties, exactly twenty years after he drew her mother, Mrs. Grunberg, at the same age. In this pair of drawings, the artist models facial features expressively in light and shadow, achieving a boldness and richness one usually associates with a finished painting.


Rae
1938
Conté crayon on paper, 29 x 22