Old Market Woman

 
Old Market Woman
Image Rights & Reproductions Requirements
Artist
Creation date
Materials
oil on canvas
Dimensions
36 x 26 in. 43 3/4 x 33 x 3 1/4 in. (framed)
Credit line
Gift of the Friends of American Art
Accession number
20.194
Collection
American
Currently On View In
Joan D. Weisenberger Gallery - K210

Portraiture constituted a great portion of the training at Munich’s Royal Academy, where Forsyth spent six years. Bravura brushstrokes in this woman’s time-worn hands and face show the influence of 17th-century Dutch masters Rembrandt and Frans Hals, exemplars studied in the Academy’s painting class.

Forsyth was born in Ohio but moved to Indianapolis as a child. Reportedly the first student to enroll at the Indiana School of Art in 1877, he played an active role in the city’s arts. Forsyth taught at Steele’s private school in Indianapolis, with J. Ottis Adams in Muncie and Fort Wayne, and finally at the John Herron Art School until 1933.

Purchased from the artist by Friends of American Art and donated to the museum.
Reproduction of these images, including downloading, is prohibited without written authorization from VAGA.

350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2820
New York, NY 10118
Tel: 212-736-6666
Fax: 212-736-6767
e-mail: info@vagarights.com
site: http://www.vaga.org/

Indiana

William Forsyth

Old Market Woman, 1885

36x 26 inches

oil on canvas

Gift of the Friends of American Art

Learn More

William Forsyth was born in California, Ohio, not far from Cincinnati. His early use of the family’s walls as a drawing board convinced his parents that their son need a specific space to express his creativity.  When he was ten, his family moved to Versaille, Indiana and then to Indianapolis.  Forsyth started his art studies with Barton Hays when he was fifteen.  He earned his living painting houses with his brother and used his free time to explore his artistic talents.  Forsyth became on of the first student in the newly established Indiana School of Art and later worked as an assistant instructor at the school.  His desire for more formal training led Forsyth to follow his friend Theodore Clement Steele to Munich to study at the Royal Academy. During the summer he traveled around Europe and sent the paintings he completed during these trips home to sell at exhibitions.  When Forsyth finished his studies, he stayed in Europe for another two years then returned to Indiana and set up a school in Muncie with J. Ottis Adams.  After the school closed, Forsyth joined the faculty of the newly opened John Herron Art Institute where he worked from 1906 to 1933.  Well into his seventies, but not prepared emotionally or financially for retirement, Forsyth took commissions from the Public Works Administration, which had been established to help artists during the Depression.  In 1934 Forsyth had a heart attack and died a year later.

In 1883 William Forsyth entered the Technical Painting Class of Ludwig von Löfftz, where he received a full grounding the painting of portrait heads and figure studies.  In this canvas painted about midway through his six-year stay in Europe, Forsyth focuses on the time-worn quality of the woman’s hands and facial features.  Old Market Woman exemplifies the Munich School’s dark tonality and bravura brushwork, derived from the 17th-century Dutch portraits of Rembrandt and Hals.

Reference

Martin Krause.  The Passage: Return of Indiana Painters from Germany, 1880-1905, Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1990.  ISBN 00-936260-52-1