Joseph Rodefer DeCamp was a successful portrait painter; he also created exquisite interior views with a soft-edged luminosity, as well as landscapes characterized by the broken brushwork, bright light and color, and contemporary subjects of impressionism. DeCamp began his art studies as a teenager at the McMicken School of Design in his native Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1878, he enrolled in the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany, and became a student of the American expatriate painter and fellow Cincinnati native Frank Duveneck. As a member of the “Duveneck boys” who worked with Duveneck in Munich and Italy, DeCamp was exposed to progressive art influences and associated with many future leaders of American art.
Following his return to America in 1883, DeCamp eventually settled in Boston, where he taught at nearby Wellesley College and at the Museum of Fine Arts’ school. At the latter, he joined Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell, and Philip Leslie Hale in developing a local impressionist idiom. After a brief period in the late 1880s during which he imitated the bravura brushwork and dramatic presentation of the portraits of John Singer Sargent, DeCamp continued to reject the dark tonalities he had learned in Munich. As a “Tarbellite,” his color scheme lightened and he worked for soft edges and luminous effects in his interior scenes, which often featured a woman backlit by a window; in his landscapes, painted outdoors, he used a more familiar impressionist technique of broken brushstrokes and lush color. DeCamp and other members of the so-called Boston school were also deeply influenced by the art of Japan, portraying Japanese objects and clothing in their images and incorporating a Japanese aesthetic of spare, elegant design.
DeCamp was in great demand for his commissioned portraits and as a teacher in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. His work, including a mural decoration for Philadelphia’s City Hall, won numerous prizes and awards, and he was elected an associate member of the National Academy in 1902. In 1898, however, DeCamp joined Benson, Tarbell, and other progressive artists when they seceded from the Society of American Artists, a once revolutionary organization founded in 1877, to form a new exhibition group under the simple designation Ten American Painters. Many of “The Ten,” who exhibited together until 1919, adhered to a modified impressionism.
The Boston area remained DeCamp’s home for the rest of his life, but he also worked on the Massachusetts and Maine coasts. In 1909 he visited Spain, France, England, and North Africa. At the close of World War One he returned to Paris to undertake a major work, a group portrait of the Peace Commissioners meeting at Versailles; other important commissions came his way in his last years. The one-man traveling retrospective exhibition that was organized shortly after DeCamp’s death testifies to his standing in the contemporary art world.
