100 years
Published Saturday October 11th, 2008
In 1908 it was an exclusive group wearing tuxedos and evening gowns. Today's Saint John Art Club members may be in jeans but they still nurture the talented. In the past it was Miller Brittain, Jack Humphrey and Fred Ross - now it's artists such as Jack Bishop. Story by Kate Wallace
A hundred years ago, when the Saint John Art Club was founded, the monthly meetings were formal events where the men wore tuxedos and the ladies donned elegant evening gowns. Hopeful members were vetted by the executive before getting a yea or nay in a general members' vote.
Later, the club moved to a system where rejected hopefuls were blackballed. The select membership counted among its ranks leading local artists, as well as the cream of society, including Lady Alice Tilley, wife of Father of Confederation Sir Leonard Tilley, and the lieutenant-governor.
This fall, the Saint John Art Club commemorates its centenary as well as its status as the longest continuing art club in Canada with several events across the city. The club of today is a much more informal, inclusive organization than the one founded in 1908, says Emma May Weisseneder, a member and past president who loves to paint flowers and scenes from her Rothesay garden and who edits the club newsletter.
Gone are the glad rags and black balls of yore. These days, members wear jeans to meetings and anyone is welcome to join so long as they pay up the $30 annual membership dues.
"The art club is accessible to anyone," Mary Cormier, a past president who joined the club in the 1960s, making her one of its longest standing members, said recently.
In its early years, the elite club drew both admiration and scorn in the local press, according to minutes from one of its meetings in 1911. While one newspaper described its members as "successful businessmen and bright, clever women identified with aims and interests of art," another wrote they there were "a collection of cranks and idle women, locking up good money on pictures and trash and trying to talk as if they knew something about it."
Established the year Henry Ford released the Model T, Simone de Beauvoir was born, Wilfred Laurier was prime minister of Canada, and Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables was first published, the art club was founded with the general purpose of promoting art.
A century later, that mission is unchanged.
Today, the club supports the artistic development of its members through workshops and monthly exhibitions in its gallery in Brunswick Square. It organizes an annual painting and photography competition at the Atlantic National Exhibition. A biennial mini-art raffle and an annual small works Christmas show, where paintings go for $55 to $125, help the club fulfill one of its central aims: nurturing the city's young and emerging artists.
In its early years, the club was at the heart of art education in the city, running its own art school from 1912 to 1934. From studio space at 140 Union St., and later in a space above the city market, three of Saint John's most celebrated painters - Miller Brittain, Jack Humphrey and Fred Ross - first practiced their art.
These days, the club's ranks of about 120 members are split nearly evenly between men and women. Many are Sunday painters and avid amateurs. Weisseneder estimates around half are retired.
The level of involvement varies from member to member.
"We have dedicated painters who turn out work constantly," Cormier said. "And then there are the people who paint commissions, and those who paint for shows or exhibitions."
As part of the anniversary celebrations, a book co-written by Cormier and Weisseneder chronicling the club's history will be launched Friday at the Saint John Arts Centre, where an exhibition of works by club members will also be on display as part of an uptown gallery hop. The self-published history offers an overview of art in Saint John from the early 1800s onward.
"When I started to delve back into the history, I couldn't believe it," Weisseneder said.
She discovered that well before the club was founded, the arts had been thriving in the Port City for more than a century. She found records indicating a drawing school has been established in 1807. By the 1830s there were four art schools in the city.
She also discovered that the Saint John Art Club, established in 1908, was not the first of its kind.
In the midst of Saint John's golden age, which ran from the mid-1800s to the end of the 19th century, the city enjoyed an unprecedented level of wealth from shipbuilding, lumber and shipping. Art, architecture and design were celebrated during this period, especially during the building boom following the devastating Great Fire of 1877. In 1882, famed playwright Oscar Wilde came to the city to lecture on how art and design beautify everyday life.
In 1879, in the midst of this period of prosperity and growth, celebrated Saint John artist and teacher John C. Miles founded the St. John Art Club (a year after he opened an art academy that taught 2,000 students during its 18 years). It continued until the 1890s, when support died out, the club's decline mirroring that of the city.
On historic Prince William Street, the same street where Miles hosted the first St. John Art Club in his studio, Tim Isaac Art and Antiques shares the story of Saint John's art history. On Friday, the same night as the book launch at the arts centre, Isaac will host a retrospective show of around 20 works dating from the 1800s onward, including paintings by John W. Gray, John Hammond and Violet Gillett. Miles wasn't the only famous Saint John artist to have worked on Prince William Street. In the old red brick building where Isaac's shop and gallery is located, Fred Ross, Saint John's most famous living artist, once had a studio while his wife Sheila ran the Ring Gallery on the building's second floor.
About a decade after the earlier club died out, the Saint John Art Club was born in 1908. Again, Miles was there. He was one of the club's 129 founding members. Membership that year was $2 for men and $1 for women.
A watercolour by Miles was the first piece in what became the permanent collection of the club.
Two of his canvases, as well as one by his son, Frederick H. C. Miles, are included in an exhibition of the art club's former permanent collection at the New Brunswick Museum. It is on display until January.
"From the very beginning, the club started collecting paintings," Weisseneder said at the packed opening at the museum Sept. 25. "There weren't commercial galleries in those days."
In 1912, the club spent $1,000 acquiring 14 paintings.
"It may seem minimal, but in that day and age, $5 was a lot of money," she said.
By the '90s, many members were questioning the value of owning the collection, which had swelled to 44 works and was a challenge to store and keep track of.
The collection features works by art club members - Fred Ross, Julia Crawford, Marion Jack, Ray Butler, Jack Humphrey - as well as paintings by well-known artists from New Brunswick and beyond who never joined the club, including Herzl Kashetsky, Molly Lamb Bobak and Robert Percival.
In 1995, the art club narrowly voted to gift the collection to the museum for $1.
"It was a happy solution," Weisseneder said. "We not only got the permanent collection cared for, we also got a home." Part of the deal was that the club could hold its monthly meetings at the museum, as well as other events from time to time.
The donation helped the museum tell a wider story of the history of New Brunswick art, too. Twelve of the 44 works are now part of its permanent art exhibitions.
One of the two works by John Miles in the temporary exhibition is his oil On the St. John River, newly returned from the provincial conservation lab in Sackville.
"It came back and it just sparkled," Peter Larocque, curator of New Brunswick cultural history and art, said. The restored work also filled in a blank in the museum's records.
"It was one of our notorious 18,000 X-files," Larocque said. These "X-files" are works whose origins are unknown.
When the painting came back from the lab, he noticed some writing on the back of it. He could just make it out: "Donated to the Saint John Art Club by Mrs. Woodman, 1917."
He dug around in the art club's records and, sure enough, the meeting minutes reflected the gift.
While the club's early focus on collecting art has been abandoned, its commitment to the city's up-and-coming artists has never wavered.
In the late 1990s, it used the money once earmarked for a building fund to establish an educational fund. Since 1989 the club has awarded $17,000 in scholarships to area high school students entering post-secondary fine arts programs. Every summer it hires art students as gallery assistants, allowing them to paint every day.
Jack Bishop, a Hampton-based artist who graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2007, worked for the club's gallery for two summers, in 2003-04. In 2005, the club helped arrange work for him at the Jailhouse Gallery and Studio, which is run by the Hampton Art Club.
"It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, to get those jobs," Bishop said during a recent interview from Nauwigewauk, where he lives and paints.
Instead of manning a grill or a cash register at a "goofy fast-food summer job" he spent the summer painting.
"I felt part of such a community there," he said. "By the end of the second summer, I had so many regulars coming through, it was hard to get any work done in the gallery."
Some people would drop by on their coffee break to visit and chat, some would come to look at the work, and some would come to buy, including numerous commissions. He reckons he made about 50 works his first year, increasing his output in 2004 to around 100 canvases.
Since his graduation in 2007, Bishop's career has taken off. His work is in the collection of the Art Bank of Canada and the New Brunswick Art Bank, and he is represented by Gallery Page and Strange in Halifax, which recently showed his work at the Toronto International Art Fair. On Saturday, a solo show of his work opens at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton as part of the gallery's annual Studio Watch: Emerging Artist Series.
Bishop said his summers spent working at the art club built up his confidence.
"I think I found my own voice when I was working there and it kind of evolved," he said. "I think it really encouraged me to know something like this was possible."
Kate Wallace writes about the the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to
Salon.
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