ARTIST: Henry McDaniel (Massachusetts, Canada, 1906 - 2008)
NAME: Saturday Afternoon
MEDIUM: watercolor on paper
CONDITION: Excellent. Framed under glass. Minor wear to frame.
SIGHT SIZE: 18 x 26 inches / 45 x 66 cm
FRAME SIZE: 26 x 34 inches / 66 x 86 cm
SIGNATURE: lower right
PROVENANCE: New England Watercolor Society (has label on verso)
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
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SKU#: 117674
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BIOGRAPHY:
Henry E. McDaniel of Quincy, Massachusetts, was born in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia in 1906. In 1925 he moved to Boston and enrolled in basic art classes at Vesper George School of Art, where he studied with William Hazelton, Prescott Jones, and Frank Waldo Murray. His formal artistic education was intermittent, and by consequence McDaniel largely considers himself a self-taught artist.An accomplished angler as well as an avid outdoorsman, McDaniel was drawn to painting the landscape, namely the streams and rivers in which he fished. What began as an ardent desire to paint water as it appeared--glistening with reflective light or mottled with shade--soon turned into one of the great hallmarks of McDaniel's artistic style. His expert ability to capture the dazzling effects of light on water is rivaled only by the bravura of his brushwork. In so many of the artist's paintings, the pristine beauty of nature is rendered crisply through McDaniel's tight brushwork and marvelous sense of color, composition, and movement. The mood of his paintings often captures the quiet concentration of the angler while also giving the glory of the spectacular landscape center stage.McDaniel's preferred medium is watercolor, which he taught himself sometime in the 1930s. A difficult medium to master, watercolor requires that an artist work quickly, almost intuitively. By consequence, McDaniel starts a painting by laying it out mentally sometimes over the course of days. He then decides how to build the composition and pencils it onto the paper using a proportional scale to establish the relationship between the forms. When he finally applies the paint, he begins with the sky, moves to the middle-ground and then to the foreground; the figures and other objects are painted last.Like so many other landscape artists, McDaniel paints specific locales and also scenes from memory; he sometimes conflates the two, creating a composite of the real and imaginary. For him, achieving the essence of a place is not in the details per se but rather in the mood and feelings that are evoked when one experiences, or is totally enveloped, by the landscape. The immediacy and freshness of the watercolor medium lends itself well to McDaniel's intent.Such artistic practice and subject matter begs a comparison with Winslow Homer, certainly the most famous American sporting artist and one of the great watercolorists. While McDaniel counts Homer as an influence, he never slavishly copied his style. Instead, working in the same genre as such contemporaries as Ogden Minton Pleissner, Aiden Lassell Ripley and John Whorf, McDaniel developed a signature style that was as original and dynamic as these artists. With them he shared a great love and talent for sporting art; the mastery of his technique in concert with his artistic skill secures McDaniel's place among this circle of acclaimed American painters.Henry McDaniel's long career is highlighted by the many honors he has received. In 1958, he won the Hatfield Award and the B.L. Makepiece Award at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He won three Richard Mitten gold medal awards in 1960, 1964, and 1966 at the New England Contemporary Art Show. In 1973 the Anglers Club of New York selected his painting Fishing the Dry on the Upper Connecticut to be reproduced as a limited-edition print for their membership; previous artists chosen for this honor include Winslow Homer, Ogden Minton Pleissner, and John Atherton. In 1976 a limited-edition print of the painting Morning on Taylor Shore was jointly produced by the International Atlantic Salmon Foundation and the Crossroads of Sport.One of these prints was presented to His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, at the International Atlantic Salmon Foundation Symposium when it was held in London in the fall of 1978. In 1986 McDaniel was commissioned to illustrate the deluxe, limited edition of "The Art of the Atlantic Salmon Fly" by the noted fly-fisherman Joseph D. Bates, III. In 1989 the Atlantic Salmon Federation named McDaniel artist of the year and in commemoration of that event reproduced Miramichi Morning as a limited-edition print. As a longtime member of the Miramichi Salmon Association and the Atlantic Salmon Federation, McDaniel recently received high recognition for his donations of artwork at various auctions over the decades. And in 2003, forty-seven of McDaniel's paintings were beautifully reproduced in a forty-page article by Douglas Marchant for the "Art of Angling Journal".McDaniel's work has been exhibited at the New England Watercolor Society and The Museum of Fine Arts, both in Boston; The American Watercolor Society in the galleries of the National Academy of Design, The Anglers Club, Crossroads of Sports Gallery, all in New York; and a host of smaller venues. His paintings can be found in numerous private collections and the permanent collections of Miramichi Salmon Museum, New Brunswick, Canada; the American Museum of Fly Fishing, Manchester, Vermont; and the Holyoke Museum, Holyoke, Massachusetts. At one time more than sixty of his works were in the collection of The Ford Motor Company's Contemporary American Art Collection in Dearborn, Michigan. He is a member of the Guild of Boston Artists and the New England Watercolor Society.