Archibald Standish Hartrick
(1864 - 1950)
The Creeps, c.1939
£3,450
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Archibald Standish Hartrick (1864 - 1950)
Size:
Height – 18cm
Width – 13cm
The Scottish painter Archibald Standish Hartrick (1864-1950) spent some months in 1886 working in Pont-Aven, an artists’ colony in Brittany.
He later published a lively account of his meetings there, particularly with the artist Paul Gauguin. He produced a painting of Gauguin’s studio (now in the collection of the Courtauld Gallery) in 1886, and exhibited this under the title ‘Breton Laundry’ at the Paris Salon in 1887.
Both Hartrick and Gauguin lodged at the Pension Gloanec, a favourite haunt of visiting artists in the central square of the village. Hartrick recalled his initial impression of Gauguin: Tall, dark, rather handsome, with a fine powerful figure, and about forty years of age, wearing a blue jersey, and a beret on the side of his head, is how I saw him first.’ This is the guise in which Hartrick paints Gauguin in this portrait; an image he later reproduced in his memoir ‘A Painter’s Pilgrimage through Fifty Years‘, 1939. The watercolour is one of two portraits that Hartrick made of Gauguin, the other purchased by the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 1944.
Hartrick also enjoyed close friendships with Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec during his time in Paris, having met them at the Atelier Cormon. He created similar portraits of both artists; the former now in the Van Gogh Museum, and the portrait of Toulouse-Lautrec part of the Tate Gallery collection.
Painter, illustrator, draughtsman and lithographer.
Hartrick studied at Edinburgh University, at the Slade School under Legros, and in Paris at the Acad mie Julian, and under Cormon before 1887.
He exhibited his first picture at the Paris Salon. In Paris he met Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and other artists, and Gauguin in Brittany. When he returned to Scotland, he came into contact with the artists of the Glasgow School.
From 1889 Hartrick worked in London as an illustrator for The Graphic, The Pall Mall Magazine, etc. He was member of the N.E.A.C. 1893; R.W.S. 1910; one of the founders of the Senefelder Club; exhibited at the R.A. 1895’1907.
With his wife Lily Blatherwick, also an artist, he lived in Gloucestershire, where he painted mainly landscape and country scenes. Exhibited with his wife at the Continental Gallery 1901.
Back in London he took up teaching at Camberwell School of Art and later at the Central School. Author of A Painter’s Pilgrimage through Fifty Years 1939.
