Blendon Campbell -Dancing Nymphs on a foggy Shore -1920s Oil painting
oil panting on board -Signed -circa 1920s
board size :14 1/2" x 23 1/2" (37 x 60cm) Frame size: 25 x 34"
Artist biography
Blendon Reed Campbell (1872 - 1969) was active/lived in New York, California, Florida, Missouri. He is known for Portrait and landscape painting, murals, illustration. Blandon Reed Campbell ,Born in St Louis, MO on July 28, 1872. After studying in Paris with Constant, Laurens and Whistler, Campbell moved to San Francisco in 1893. His first job as an artist was with the Chronicle. In 1902 he founded the California Society of Artists with Piazzoni, Martinez, C. P. Neilson, W. H. Bull, and Matteo Sandona as a reaction to the conservative attitudes of the San Francisco Art Ass'n which they felt restricted opportunities for younger artists. By 1930 he had moved to NYC and in the early 1950s returned to Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula.
He produced a body of work as divergent as a colorful oil on canvas of dancing nymphs to work as dark in color and mood as his Depression-era "Derelict, N.Y.," 1933. A line of darkly-dressed, Depression-caused derelicts sit amidst garbage along a wooden fence diagonally retreating into the painting, with buildings and newly-washed clothes drying beyond. Posters on the fence advertise fun at "Coney Island" and an automobile offering "speed" and "comfort" for $450, low to us today, but as far away as the moon for these unemployed.Campbell painted a series of nymphs in the 1930's, in the depths of the Depression perhaps to much the same effect as escapist Shirley Temple films and other movie musicals.Campbell studied in Paris with Laurens and Constant at the Academie Julien and later with Whistler. He was a prize-winning artist in venues ranging from the Paris Salon in 1899 through numerous exhibitions ending in 1949. His work hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and Museum of Modern Art in New York City.He died in Tampa, FL in September 1969. Exh: Paris Salon, 1899.