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Julian Onderdonk in New York
The Lost Years, The Lost Paintings
By James Graham Baker Texas State Historical Association
Copyright © 2014 James Graham Baker
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62511-024-4
CHAPTER 1
Roots
IN EARLY JANUARY 1901, Julian Onderdonk, an aspiring eighteen-year-old artist from San Antonio arrived in New York City to study art. New York would be his home for most of the next nine years, a critical time for both his life and his work. In the estimation of many art historians, collectors, museums, and most art-loving Texans, no early Texas painter stands taller than Julian Onderdonk. Except for the roughly nine years he spent in New York, Julian lived and worked in Texas, and his works depicting the Lone Star State are well known and understood; however, the work he did during the time he spent in New York has received much less attention and is poorly understood. This is the story of Julian Onderdonk's years in New York, of the artistic forces that shaped him during that time, and of how a good portion of the work he did there was lost and then rediscovered. However, before we delve into that era of his life, we need to look briefly at his Texas roots.
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Texas had known a number of artists before Julian Onderdonk was born in San Antonio in 1882. Some were truly outstanding draftsmen and genre scene painters, like the German immigrant Richard Petri. Others, like Frenchman Theodore Gentilz, are beloved for the charm and detail with which they crafted images of life in the early years of the state's history. There were military men like Seth Eastman who documented what they saw and experienced while stationed in Texas, and itinerant artists who spent some time in the state but then moved on. A few, like Edward Grenet and S. Seymour Thomas, were born in Texas but ultimately left the state and lived out most of their careers elsewhere, returning only to visit. Julian's father, Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, was part of yet another group: those who came to Texas from elsewhere and remained to make their mark. But Julian was different from all of them. He was a native son. Born and raised in the Lone Star State, he left for a time, but returned and dedicated most of his career to painting Texas. He rose high in the American artistic firmament to set an example for many who followed. For Texans, Julian confirmed that culturally the state had come of age. His talent shines forth from the thousands of paintings he produced, which speak of a reverence for the natural world and immortalize the beauty of Texas as it was when only lightly touched by human hands.
Because Julian was a Texas native and so much of his work depicts the state's landscape, Texas has been reluctant to share him with any other state. Studies of his life and work have been heavily weighted toward his works depicting Texas scenes; however, as is so often the case, the facts belie the popular myth. In many ways, Julian could be considered a New York artist. He arrived in New York in January 1901 and remained there nearly nine years, returning to Texas November 14, 1909. And it seems that he not only spent six months in New York the following year, but in nearly every year after 1910, he visited New York, sometimes staying for months. Julian came of age as an artist in New York and spent nearly half his years as an independent artist there. More than one third of his total body of work was created in and depicts scenes from New York City and the surrounding area. The understanding of his tremendous contribution to American art has been diminished because his years in New York have, up to now, been lost years, with the work he did there poorly documented and little known. In the following chapters we reclaim Julian's years in New York and the work he did there, offering him the credit he is overdue and expanding our understanding of him as an artist.
We are fortunate that the Onderdonk family had a sense of the importance of its members and their art. Julian's mother Emily preserved letters, sketches, ephemera, receipts, lists of paintings, and photos that add to our understanding. She also kept a journal that provides insight into the family and its daily life. For the first month that Julian was in New York City, he wrote home almost daily. These letters reveal him to have been a sensitive and caring son and brother. They also show a man who was an artist to the core. What interested Julian during his train ride to New York was the potential the passing scenery had as subject matter for paintings. What impressed him was the intensity of colors and the beauty of the landscape, although he failed to find anything so attractive as the hills around San Antonio.
After his first few months in New York, Julian became an irregular correspondent and journal keeper, but his art nearly always had its roots in his life and experiences and is as revealing as any autobiography about how and where he spent his days. Julian's wife Gertrude was a prolific letter writer and some of her letters have survived, particularly from the time the couple lived in New York. She wrote newsy letters to Julian's mother nearlyweekly, and they reveal much about how Julian occupied himself, what he was working on, and how his family was doing.
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Born in San Antonio on July 30, 1882, Robert Julian Onderdonk came into the world with many advantages for an aspiring artist. His parents, Robert Jenkins Onderdonk and Emily Wesley Rogers Gould, were both artists, and they provided a supportive environment in which young Julian (as he was always known) could develop his considerable native talents. Robert and Emily were not wealthy and often struggled to make ends meet; nevertheless, as a result of their personal charm, education, and culture, and their families' pedigrees, the Onderdonks held a high position in San Antonio society and traveled in the city's elite social circles.
Julian's father had studied in New York City at the National Academy of Design in the mid to late 1870s. When the academy ran into financial problems and closed for a time, Robert joined the newly formed Art Students League (he may even have participated in its formation). At the Art Students League, Robert had the benefit of instruction from some of the most well-trained artists in America at the time: Lemuel Everett Wilmarth, Walter Shirlaw, William Merritt Chase, and James Carroll Beckwith.
Robert also took private lessons from Alexander Helwig Wyant, a disciple of George Inness, who believed a painter's landscapes should be imbued with a poetic and spiritual expression. Inness's philosophy, which turned away from the realism and meticulous detail of the Hudson River School painters, was once viewed as artistic heresy because anything less than realism was deemed untruthful to God's creation. As photography became more and more popular and displaced painting as a medium for recording objective reality, Inness's insistence that artists express themselves in their work became a dominant theme in American landscape painting. His philosophy was to have a compelling influence on the young Julian Onderdonk.
Robert's ancestors had arrived from Holland in 1642, when New York was still New Amsterdam and a Dutch colony. The Onderdonks were a prominent family that included two Episcopal bishops: Henry Ustick Onderdonk, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania from 1836 to 1844, and his brother Benjamin Treadwell Onderdonk, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York from 1830 to 1861. Although well-known churchmen, both were ultimately suspended, and the associated scandals must have been devastating to the Onderdonk family, which was accustomed to life at the pinnacle of New York society. Perhaps it explains why Robert's father became an educator and headmaster of the College of St. James, near Hagerstown, Maryland. It may also explain the appeal of Texas to young Robert as a place where one could start fresh and leave the past behind. Curiously, Julian very early in life stated his intention to become a bishop, but at age five declared he had changed his mind and wanted to be an artist. The Episcopal Church's loss was to be a great boon for Texas art.
In Texas, Robert Onderdonk met and married Emily Wesley Rogers Gould. The Gould family was well educated, cultured, and included a former governor of Rhode Island and the well-known architect Isaiah Rogers (Emily's grandfather). Emily's brother, Stephen, had gone to Texas in 1874 after studying law at Harvard, and in letters to his parents he outlined the virtues of the young land. In 1876, the Goulds, having fallen on hard times, like so many others who moved to Texas, decided to take their chances and make a new life in the Lone Star State. Thus, it seems both sides of Julian's parentage had come to Texas seeking to improve lagging fortunes. By chance, Robert and Emily became neighbors in San Antonio and discovered they shared a love of art. Mutual interest developed into romance and romance led to marriage on April 27, 1881. Theirs was the first wedding held at San Antonio's newly consecrated Episcopal Cathedral of St. Marks.
One year and three months later, Emily gave birth to Julian in the family home, Bella Vista, newly completed at 128 West French Place in San Antonio. Julian was a special child. He was large from birth (fourteen pounds) and possessed a keen intelligence, boundless energy, an artistic eye, and an ability to work intensely over an extended period. According to his mother's diaries, he was playing with paints by the age of two and a half. Emily felt that she could foresee his artistic talents when she and baby Julian accompanied Robert to paint at Guenther's Mill in San Antonio and Julian was mesmerized by the colors and patterns reflected in the millpond's waters. She was perceptive; in his career, Julian painted almost as many scenes with water as with bluebonnets. By age seven Julian was already producing sketches like the one in figure 1.1.
Julian grew up amid family—including his maternal grandparents and occasionally his uncles—and friends at Bella Vista. The house, which was situated on a rise just above San Pedro Springs, overlooked the growing community of San Antonio two miles to the south. As Julian grew, so did the neighborhood, which began to fill in with residences, but the boundless view of Texas Hill Country still stretched away to the north. One who lived in this environment either came to commune with the Great Spirit infused in the landscape or fled to the confines of more civilized city living. Julian embraced the wilderness. His character and inclinations were indelibly stamped with the vastness of Bexar County, Texas, and with the way one's soul can expand in the presence of God's handiwork only lightly molested by humanity. Live oak, mesquite, and cedar trees, cacti, limestone outcroppings, and a profusion of wildflowers constituted his natural environment. On the human side, San Antonio was perhaps the most picturesque and fascinating city in America at the time, with its mix of Hispanic, Anglo, German, French, African American, and many other ethnicities. The Mexican people who lived around the old quarry just north of Julian's home enlivened the landscape with their goats, horses, cattle, and sheep. Julian developed a love of their picturesque homes known as jacales, which seemed to fit organically into the environment, and their style of dress often found expression in his artwork (figures 11.64, 11.65, 11.66, and 11.67).
Julian became an artist under his father's tutelage, and by the late 1890s he was paying his tuition at the West Texas Military Academy by teaching art at the school. By 1900 he was teaching professionally and he even had private pupils. Although by 1901 he had moved to New York, he still appeared in the 1901 San Antonio city directory as an art teacher at Laurel Heights School, no doubt a position he had held in 1900. He could have continued on as an artist in San Antonio, but he and his father realized that to fulfill his potential he needed formal training in a more artistically charged atmosphere. Julian longed for the kind of advanced training his father had received at the Art Students League in New York City.
San Antonio banker and entrepreneur G. Bedell Moore, a family friend and distant relative, took an interest in Julian's art and agreed to loan him the money to travel to New York and enroll at the Art Students League. Moore may have liked Julian, but Moore was a businessman, so he loaned Julian the money rather than becoming his patron. This loan was to become a considerable burden for Julian and would force him into arrangements he would come to regret. But, on the day after Christmas 1900, a formal loan note was drawn up and the first $100 allowed Julian's dream to become reality. At just eighteen he must have been in high spirits as he prepared to travel to New York.
Julian's twig was bent early by a family environment that centered on fine art and a natural environment of grand vistas, huge sky, and the enormous stretches of hill country spreading north from his childhood home. Julian took with him to New York a love of the wide-open spaces and distant vistas he had grown up with. He would learn much in New York and his art would evolve in dramatic ways. No doubt his experience in New York helped shape the tree of Julian's life, but in many ways the die had been cast. The boy was taken out of the Texas countryside, but the love of that countryside would never leave him.
CHAPTER 2
1901
Early Days in New York City
THE TRAIN SLOWED TO A STOP and passengers rushed to get off on that cold January day in New York City—cold by Texas standards anyway. Among them was a baby-faced eighteen-year-old youth whose black hair framed his slightly chubby face. Julian Onderdonk had arrived in his ancestral home. He aspired to become a great artist and he hoped that New York would provide him the training to succeed. Robert Onderdonk, before leaving the East twenty-five years earlier to seek his fortune as an artist in San Antonio, had been an early student of William Merritt Chase, and Julian sought to follow in his father's footsteps. He must have looked around in amazement at the crowded and busy city that would be his home for the next nine years. Little did he know how those years would test him, mature him, and help him to grow into one of the finest artists to come from the Lone Star State.
Julian set about finding a place to live, enrolling in classes, and meeting other students. According to a letter he sent his family on January 13, 1901, his first address in New York City was 332 West Fifty-Sixth Street. His rented room was near the Art Students League building, which was on Fifty-Seventh Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. He hoped that his skills would be sufficient to become an artist, but he feared that among so many talented and aspiring artists he would not stand out.
Unaware that the Art Students League required students to submit drawings to be evaluated for placement in appropriate classes, Julian had to produce these drawings quickly, while other students may have worked for weeks on their submissions. Much to his disappointment, his drawings of the human form were not judged good enough to qualify him for life drawing class and he was put to sketching plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures. Looking at the pen and ink drawings he had done before leaving Texas (figure 2.1), this may be hard to understand. These works show a steady hand and sharp perception; but, in truth, the human figure was never the focus of Julian's art. Landscape painting always interested him more, and once in New York he found himself among the best aspiring artists America had to offer.
Julian enrolled in a drawing class taught by Kenyon Cox, who was a harsh taskmaster but an excellent draftsman. It was a difficult winter and spring for Julian as he watched his limited funds dwindle, and at times he felt discouraged by his slow progress while surrounded by so many talented students. To the sophisticates of the East, Julian's dress, accent, and manners must have appeared rustic. He does not seem to have made many strong friendships, but he focused on his art and on living frugally. Money was a constant problem, and over the course of the next two years Julian's debt to G. Bedell Moore grew to $500.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Julian Onderdonk in New York by James Graham Baker. Copyright © 2014 James Graham Baker. Excerpted by permission of Texas State Historical Association.
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