Flecks of Foam, c. 1911/1912

Henry Golden Dearth’s career can be divided into two distinct periods. The first, from around 1890 until 1912, is marked by a tonalist style that, in the words of an early critic, was "characterized by paintings of quiet landscapes reflecting a peaceful, somewhat dreamy temper of mind, and executed with a free though more or less conventional technique."[1]  [1]
“Henry Golden Dearth Memorial Exhibition: Art at Home and Abroad,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 1919. The most noteworthy among these early works depicted the landscape around Boulogne and Montreuil-sur-Mer in the Pas-de-Calais, on the French coast of the English Channel, where the artist had a summer home and worked for part of each year. Paintings from this first period of his career have positioned Dearth as a minor member of the American Barbizon school.[2]  [2]
For this reason he was included in Peter Bermingham, American Art in the Barbizon Mood (Washington, DC, 1975), 134–135, and most recently David A. Cleveland, A History of American Tonalism: 1880–1929 (Manchester, VT, 2010), 171–172, 310, 468.

Dearth’s second period commenced around 1912 and lasted until his untimely death in 1918 at the age of 54. During that brief six-year interval, and probably influenced in part by the unusually painterly and colorful late works of Adolphe Monticelli, Dearth's technique underwent what was characterized as an “extraordinary revolution.” He began “letting his pigment spurt directly from the tubes onto the canvases, and there manipulating it with palette knife or brush handle, or letting it remain in fresh jets of pure color as brilliant as a newly set palette.”[3]  [3]
“Henry Golden Dearth Memorial Exhibition: Art at Home and Abroad,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 1919. Dearth was so concerned with disassociating himself from his tonalist style that in 1915 he asked The Metropolitan Museum of Art to substitute a new portrait for an early view of the harbor at Boulogne. The New York Times reported that the latter was “not considered by the artist as representative of his work.”[4]  [4]
“Art Museum Gets Two New Pictures,” New York Times, July 12, 1915.

Although Dearth also practiced portraiture and still-life during his later years, his contemporaries most admired his many distinctive representations of rock pools. Most of these, including Flecks of Foam, were painted near the artist’s studio in Le Pouldu, a small hamlet in Brittany along France’s northwest coast, where Paul Gauguin (French, 1848 - 1903) and a number of his followers had worked a generation earlier. Flecks of Foam is an early and highly representative example of Dearth’s rock pool subjects and demonstrates how ideally suited his new technique was to the task of “commemorating the pebbled shore line of Brittany, with its deep pockets and richly colored rocks.”[5]  [5]
“Henry Golden Dearth Memorial Exhibition: Art at Home and Abroad,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 1919. When the painting was auctioned at the American Art Galleries in 1916 the accompanying catalog described Dearth’s rendering as

a low, rambling, rocky coast [that] is brilliant with spots of color—blue, red, yellow, green, black, pink, brown—on a gorgeous summer day, and a woman in white, sheltered under a red parasol, is seated on a rock shelf looking over a sea that all but laps her feet. The spent waves circling among outlying boulders are foam-flecked; farther away are emerald shallows; and the distant sea is blue under a horizon of faint rose.[6]  [6]
Hugo Reisinger Sale, auction catalog, American Art Galleries, New York, Jan. 18, 1916, no. 5; the sale catalog incorrectly states that the painting was purchased from M. Knoedler & Co. in 1902, not 1912.

At the time of Dearth’s Memorial Exhibition in 1918 the New York Times noted: “Generally a human figure is introduced in the composition, a girl perched on the rocks in her Summer white, reading . . . treated abstractly as a decorative unit in the scheme of the picture, but carrying, nevertheless, a charm of human individuality.” The same source also drew attention to the brilliant palette Dearth used in his pool scenes, as well as their flat, decorative quality: “Coral red, purple, gold, and blue are interwoven into a brocade such as a Venetian lady of the Renaissance might have worn at a festival. The effect is less that of a painting than that of an enamel, the color flowing thickly and making no compromise with the third dimension or the envelope of tone from which form emerges full and serene.”[7]  [7]
“Henry Golden Dearth Memorial Exhibition: Art at Home and Abroad,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 1919.

The influential critic Charles L. Buchanan of the International Studio greatly admired Dearth’s new style in the rock pool series, and in 1918 deemed them “one manifestation of Dearth’s art wherein he achieved perfection.” Dismissing the early tonalist works as ones that “showed him as merely one or more of a myriad of painters who were more or less repainting Barbizon,” Buchanan felt that “in his quite strangely new and consummate studies of pools and rocks, and in his marines, Dearth presented us with a kind of beauty of workmanship and originality of conception that placed him among the finest painters of his generation.”[8]  [8]
Charles L. Buchanan, “Henry Golden Dearth,” International Studio 64 (1918): cxvi–cxvii. Also see Elisabeth Luther Carey, “The Paintings of Henry Golden Dearth,” American Magazine of Art 10, no. 6 (Apr. 1919): 196–201. An additional measure of the painting’s importance can be gleaned from the fact that it was initially purchased by Hugo Reisinger, a German-born merchant who was a major collector and early proponent of modern American art.[9]  [9]
On Reisinger see Susanne Scharf, “Hugo Reisinger: George Bellows’ Unknown Patron,” in George Bellows Revisited: New Considerations of the Painter’s Oeuvre, ed. Melissa Wolfe (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2016), 53–69.

Robert Torchia

August 17, 2018