Annie Cooper Boyd
Spring has finally come to Warsaw! Sorry I couldn't hide my excitement :)
Today read about Annie Cooper Boyd, one of the female artists who took classes at Shinnecock School.
Annie Cooper Boyd was born in Sag Harbor, Long Island in 1864, remaining there to capture the town’s evolving industry and quaint, idyllic waterfronts for the rest of her life.
Once a pupil of William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock School, Boyd took a liking to Europe’s growing Impressionist movement. Her earlier works - mostly landscapes depicting Sag Harbor’s port traffic, local structures, and rolling dunes - contain traces of such influence, though relying more on line and form than anything else. As a result, they serve a certain documentary purpose, giving glimpses into the Long Island whaling industry and daily town life at the turn of the twentieth century.
Boyd often employed oils, but in Shinnecock Studio she turns instead to watercolor. The pigments bleed into the heavily textured paper, lending to the earth a muddy, washed-out appearance. Chase’s studio is quickly sketched; the colors contained within the thin outline seem to have been applied with equal celerity.
The clouds above the landscape are composed entirely of negative space created by the delicately rendered sky around them. They fade into the base of the horizon, immixing with ruddy hints of red to create a barely perceptible violet hue suggestive of a sunset.
Given the signature at the bottom right of the composition, it’s possible that the cottage was painted en plein air during a lesson taught by Chase. While this sketch alone is artfully rendered, it is but a sample of the care Boyd took in her subtle endeavors with watercolor.
- Anthony deFeo
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