Landscape painter William Lamb Picknell is especially famed for the quality of light in his plein-air painting, which was often glaringly intense, clear, and crisp. His inborn worship of nature was amply nourished by several American masters including esteemed Hudson River School and Tonalist painter George Inness, painter Robert Wylie, and Picknell’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although Picknell did not associate himself with any one “school” of art, he was at the heart of the American expatriate art scene. Picknell studied with Inness in Rome and with Wylie, who had been curator of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, in Pont-Aven, Brittany. In addition to the examples provided by these American expatriates, Picknell was exposed to the major trends in nineteenth-century French painting, and in particular was influenced by Courbet’s realism.
Born in Hinesburg, Vermont on October 23, 1853, Picknell was orphaned at the age of fourteen and went to live with family members in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He worked in a picture store on Tremont Street in Boston and in 1872 convinced an uncle to give him $1,000 towards art study in Europe. Encouraged by his family to pursue art, for which he had a penchant, he left Boston in 1872 and went to study with Inness for two formative years. With his Barbizon background and Swedenborgian pantheism, Inness struck a happy balance between Boston’s Tonalist painters and Transcendentalist writers. Inness did not teach, but allowed Picknell to work in his studio and copy his paintings.
After several years in Inness’s studio, Picknell moved to France. In December 1874, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme. However, there is no evidence of his study at the Ecole beyond the spring term of 1875. Instead, his real education occurred at Pont-Aven (Finistère) and Concarneau, the Brittany villages he visited for the first time the summer of 1874. There he worked, in a mentor-student relationship, alongside Robert Wylie, who had known the great American artists Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, and Thomas Hovenden at the Pennsylvania Academy. Wylie taught him to use the palette knife and insisted on painting out-of-doors, surrounded by ones subject. Mlle. Julia, Wylie’s lover and keeper of the Hôtel des Voyageurs, supported Picknell financially. While Picknell spent the summer months at Pont-Aven, Concarneau, Grèz-sur-Loing, and Moret-sur-Loing, he lived the rest of the year in Paris.
In 1876, Picknell had his first painting accepted into the prestigious Paris Salon, and thereafter he exhibited at the Salon regularly throughout the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. In 1877 he also exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in London. However, his great success came at the 1880 Paris Salon, when La route de Concarneau (The Road to Concarneau) (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.) achieved the first ever “honorable mention” for an American landscape painter, assuring Picknell’s future as an artist. The same year, he was elected to the Society of American Artists, a group of painters dedicated to impressionism, who had broken with the conservative National Academy of Design. Like the impressionist painters, Picknell was interested in capturing the color and light effects of different times of the day and seasons of the year. However, Picknell did not dissolve the forms in his paintings into pure light and color, but retained their sense of solidity. In addition, he did not diffuse the light in his paintings with hazy, atmospheric effects, but kept it crisp and fresh.
Before returning to Massachusetts in the autumn of 1882, Picknell traveled to Venice, Tangiers, and England. Once back in America, he took up residence in the Boston area and opened a small studio there. Nevertheless, he continued to travel, spending summers from 1883-1891 painting at Annisquam on Cape Ann with other renowned American artists such as his friend Thomas Hovenden and Robert Vonnoh. Following his marriage to Marries Gertrude Powers in 1889, he also visited California and Provence in 1892-93 and Florida in 1894. In 1893 he returned to France, renting a house for four years at the Villa Hortensias outside Antibes, along the Côte d’Azur. In 1897, after the death of his son William Ford Picknell, Picknell returned to Massachusetts. At this time he was in poor health and died in early August, six months after his son, at the very young age of forty-three. He was immediately honored with two retrospectives at the Saint Louis Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
