page_title: Roy Cleveland Nuse
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Roy Cleveland Nuse / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: "Age of Speed," oil, 35" x 40", depicting three children and two nephews of the artist.
context_page_description: Roy Cleveland Nuse was a Pennsylvania Impressionist artist and a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1925 to 1954. For almost 60 years he lived and painted in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, working in a plein-air, impressionist style. His six children were often the subjects of his paintings, depicted especially in rural, outdoor settings. Working primarily in oils, but also in pastels, Nuse painted landscapes, figures in the landscape, still lifes and portraits.
context_section_description: Early in his career, Nuse exhibited works in juried national competitions, and had work accepted in the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. However, by the 1930s, as the popularity of Modernism grew, he was having little success and he stopped applying to shows. He became embittered toward the art world that was not interested in representational artists, but remained determined to continue painting in his Impressionist style. During this period, Nuse became known as a portraitist in the Philadelphia area and received a number of commissions to paint physicians and others.
  In 1954, Nuse chose to retire from PAFA because of philosophical issues, even though his students begged him not to. He continued to teach privately at his home, and many of his students were devoted to him. Nuse continued to teach and paint, including portrait commissions, into his eighties.
  When Roy Nuse died in 1975, he left a substantial body of his work to his six children. Although he clearly sold many paintings over the years, he never kept records of sales and there is no way to estimate how many of his works are in private collections. For reasons that are not clear he would not have anything to do with art dealers, preferring to sell his work himself.
  In 2000, the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania acquired one of Nuse’s masterpieces, “Age of Speed” which depicts five children playing with a wheel in front of a barn. This painting was on display during the retrospective exhibit, “Roy C. Nuse – Figures and Landscapes” at the Michener Museum in 2002.
  Another painting, “Artist’s Wife with Three Children” is in the permanent collection of the Woodmere Art Museum. Other paintings by Nuse are in the permanent collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Swarthmore College, Moravian College and Thomas Jefferson University.
  After years of critical and commercial neglect, interest in Pennsylvania Impressionism and the New Hope School began to develop in the 1980s and has continued to gain momentum. The 2002 Michener Museum exhibition and some successful results from sales of Nuse’s work at Freeman’s auction house in Philadelphia have helped to establish his place in art history as a Pennsylvania Impressionist.
caption: "Age of Speed," Roy C. Nuse, oil, 1920. Depicting three children and two nephews of the artist.
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