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Charles W. Hawthorne (1872 - 1930) studied with William Merritt Chase in New York, becoming his teaching assistant before opening his own outdoor school of figure painting, the Cape Cod School of Art, in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1899. Portuguese Fisherboy numbers among the artist’s many depictions of members of the local Portuguese fishing community in Provincetown, about whom Anna Seaton-Schmidt writes, “The fisher people have been his best models. Living among them he has learned to understand and share their joys and griefs. He has become one of them. In some inexplicable manner the souls of his models seem to have passed into his canvases. His pictures show them to us when off their guard, revealing their inner thoughts. They are not only real people, but real people who disclose to us something that they rarely show, their aspirations, longings, hopes and fears, sentiments which, because of natural reticence, they would have been ashamed to avow. No one could call the uncouth, awkward fisher people of Hawthorne’s pictures idealised. He sees them as they are, but his vision is that of the artist and penetrates beneath their rough exteriors to the poetry that underlies all human life.”
[Sotheby’s, New York City - Oil on canvas, 99.7 x 99.7 cm]
