Edwin Howland Blashfield
(American, 1848-1936)
Books, 1914
oil on canvas
signed EH Blashfield and dated 19 ? 14
63 x 93in (160 x 236cm)
Provenance:
Commissioned by Mr. Everett Morss, Boston, Massachusetts, 1914.
Thence by descent through the family.
Property from a Private Hancock Park Collection.

Exhibited:
The Art Institute of Chicago, May 1915.
The Detroit Museum of Art, October 1915.

Literature:
Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1 May 1915, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 62-64.
ed. M.R. Weiner, Edwin Howland Blashfield: Master American Muralist, 2009 p. 30. .

Footnote:
Edwin Howland Blashfield:
Edwin Howland Blashfield was born in Brooklyn in 1848 to William H. Blashfield and Eliza Dodd, a portrait painter. Blashfield studied at Boston Latin School, Harvard College, and focused on engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). While at M.I.T., Blashfield s mother sent some of his drawings to the French academic painter Jean Leon Gerome, whose interest convinced Blashfield s father to allow his son to pursue a career in art.

After initial painting courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Blashfield moved to Europe in 1867 to study with Leon Joseph Florentin Bonnat in Paris and remained in Europe until 1881, when he returned to the United States and settled in New York. While in New York, Blashfield began working for St. Nicholas Magazine and produced illustrations for books, and paintings and murals for private homes.

Blashfield s career took off with his work in the dome of the Manufacturer's and Liberal Arts building at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which elicited commissions from the likes of W.K. Vanderbilt and G. W. C. Drexel for their personal residences along with a host of other private and civic projects such as the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York; the Detroit Public Library, Detroit, Michigan and the State Capitols of Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. A leader in the American Renaissance movement, he is best known for painting the murals on the dome of the Library of Congress Main Reading Room in Washington, DC.

He was a member of numerous arts organizations, including the National Academy of Design, the National Society of Mural Painters in which he served as President from 1909 to 1914, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He served from 1920 to 1926 as President of the National Academy of Design. Among his many honors, Blashfield was awarded a Gold Medal by the National Academy of Design in 1934, an honorary membership in the American Institute of Architects and an honorary doctorate of fine arts by New York University in 1926. He served on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 1912 to 1916. His circle of friends included sculptor Daniel Chester French, painters John Singer Sargent and Maxfield Parrish, and architect Cass Gilbert. He became president of the Society of Mural Painters, and of the Society of American Artists. Blashfield died in 1936 at his summer home on Cape Cod.

Everett and Ethel Reed Morss:
Everett Morss (1865-1933) was a Boston industrialist. He graduated from the M.I.T. in 1885 and married Ethel Reed in 1891. The Morsses had three children: Constance, Everett, Jr. and Noel. Everett Morss went on to become President of Simplex Wire & Cable Company (manufacturer of the first transatlantic telephone cable). Morss also served as President of the Franklin Foundation as well as Member of the Corporation of M.I.T. and its Treasurer (and briefly acting president while MIT was between presidents) and Director of several local utility companies and other businesses. He served on the War Industries Board during World War I.

The Commission:
Aware of fellow M.I.T. alumnus Edwin Blashfield s talent and renown, Everett Morss commissioned seven murals for his Commonwealth Avenue, Boston home in 1914. The three largest paintings were installed in the Morsses dining room. The figures in Hospitality were portraits of Ethel Morss and their three children in an idealized setting. As set forth in the family records, the three attendants around the central figure bear the symbols of hospitality presented to arriving guests in the fifteenth century: the palm of welcome, the basin and ewer, and the golden ship of sweetmeats. The family portraits in Hospitality bore such a resemblance to the family that in the Morsses sent their friends a Christmas card with a photograph of the painting. Mrs. Morss noted on the back of one card that The Morss family never looked so grand as this fresco depicts them, except Polly [the family s parrot] at the base. She sees all, and more too! The following year, all seven paintings were displayed at a special exhibition in the Art Institute of Chicago, and the three large paintings were exhibited later that year at the Detroit Museum of Art.

Having enjoyed Blashfield s mural decorations in his own home, in 1923 Everett Morss funded Blashfield s full-wall murals in M.I.T. s Walker Memorial (in the space now known as Morss Hall). The central panel entitled Alma Mater depicts allegories of various branches of knowledge and the pair of flanking panels are allegorical portrait works featuring likenesses of Francis A. Walker and his wife Exene Evelyn Stoughton Walker.

Comparable Works:
A related large-scale work entitled Three Muses, which rendered very specific personal likenesses in the guises of Literature, Painting and Poetry, was sold Christie s, New York, 25 February 2014, lot 130. A rare surviving mural entitled Trumpets of Missouri, commissioned in 1918 by the Daughters of the American Revolution, Kansas City Chapter, to commemorate Missouri s contribution to the United States effort in World War I, was sold Christie s, New York, 21 May 2014, lot 96.Additional Notes:
Though the recent book Edwin Howland Blashfield: Master American Muralist described the suite of murals as lost, they have been continuously in the family s possession, from Everett Morss s house in Boston to his son s home in Manchester, Massachusetts and then to his grand-daughter s home in Los Angeles, from whence they came to be offered here.

Framed 66 x 95in. Surface soiling. With a 10 x 5in area to upper section left of center of spotty inpainting that fluoresces under UV light. A few further scattered areas of inpainting. Some cloudiness to surface. Scattered small abrasions and small areas of paint loss.