ARTIST: John Cowan Templeton (Indiana, Illinois, 1880 - 1958)
NAME: Sailboat
MEDIUM: oil on canvas. Canvas applied to board.
CONDITION: One scratch 3" long. No visible inpaint under UV light.
SIGHT SIZE: 16 x 12 inches / 40 x 30 cm
FRAME SIZE: unframed
SIGNATURE: lower right
SKU#: 119857
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BIOGRAPHY:
John Templeton seemed to have the artistic bent from birth. Born to Scottish settlers in Pennsylvania in 1880, he began to draw as a child. He became a house painter at 14 but practiced his artistic skills when he scraped the paint from old buckets and created his pictures on old window shades. He studied art at West Virginia University and traveled to San Francisco, Mexico and the Panama Canal, before returning home to marry his hometown sweetheart, Elizabeth Boyer in 1908. The couple came to the new city of East Chicago where Inland Steel had set up a plant in the city's Indiana Harbor section. Templeton painted the fancy gold script on tavern and doctors offices and in 1917 began working the late afternoon shift at Inland. He would come home and sleep for a few hours and then head out to the dunes to paint in the best early morning light. My mother just went along. If he went up to Michigan to paint, he dropped Mama off in town and she shopped, said Jean. Or more often, the whole family took the new South Shore train or went out Route 12 to the dunes. "We climbed the sand dunes. Old Mount Tom got climbed a lot while he painted for a few hours," said Templeton.John Templeton worked at Inland for nearly 30 years, and then at 70, another life began he went to Arizona and began painting watercolors for the first time. But his daughter remembered him not being fond of the medium.“He never thought he attained perfection. But I don't think any artist thinks he does. Several years later Templeton went to Rome to study with British instructors and painters, and he brought back vivid street scenes of rich brown stucco villages enlivened with flowers.He taught art classes throughout Northwest Indiana, founded the Northern Indiana Art Salon and was exhibiting member of the Hoosier Salon, the Indiana Society of Artists, the Brown County Artists and Chicago Galleries. He went on the win prizes at both salons and seemed to stretch his interest in painting until his death in 1958. A yeoman with the brush, he brought light to the canvas with impressionistic strokes of color. John Templeton was a painter, in every sense, whose talents and interests seemed to evolve with every brush stroke. A true Midwesterner, he had the adaptability of a pioneer and was able to mix careers as a steel worker in the hot strip mill with a thriving career painting signs in gold leaf. With brushes, he was an interior decorator and an art teacher. Always the experimenter, he became a trophy fisherman and helped develop successful lure techniques. And wanderlust stimulated his artistic sense to the end.