page_title: C.K. Chatterton
section_title: Career in art
hierarchical_section_title: C.K. Chatterton / Career in art
context_page_description: C.K. Chatterton was an American artist whose oils, watercolors, and gouaches, painted in realist style, showed the houses and streets of villages, towns, and harbors of upstate New York and the Maine coast. Critics said his work possessed directness and candor as well as an ability to capture the play and pattern of light. One of them praised his "power to find in narrow streets with trolley cars and railway culverts something stimulating in design and warm with a sense of human living." His paintings were, another wrote, "smiling without falsification of sentimentality."
  Chatterton trained at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri, Walter Appleton Clark, and others. Among his fellow students, Edward Hopper and Gifford Beal became studio mates and friends. He was professor of art at Vassar College for many years. There he taught live drawing along with the more usual techniques of landscape and portraiture in oil and watercolor.
context_section_description: Unlike most professional artists of his time Chatterton rarely contributed works to group exhibitions in commercial galleries. In 1908 a painting of his called "Snow Clad Town" appeared first in a juried group exhibition at the National Academy of Design and later as part of a traveling exposition held in Argentina and Chile. This painting can be see at left. When, in 1910, Robert Henri began to arrange group shows in New York's MacDowell Club, Chatterton included his paintings along with those of others of Henri's former students. When a painting of his called "A Peep at the Side Show" was included in an exhibition by the American Watercolor Society in 1912, the critic for the New York Herald described it in detail and said it was "a good picture of a not uncommon scene in the rural districts in spring and summer." He showed again at New York Watercolor Club in 1913 and the following year won a prize for best watercolor shown in an exhibition at New York's Salmagundi Club. 
  There is a gap during the next decade during which there are no records of exhibitions in which Chatterton participated. In that time he married, took up teaching positions, and was employed as a superintendent of art education in the Newburgh public school system. Early on, he spent summer holidays in a rented studio in Newburgh where he made large paintings of the city's street scenes.   Later—beginning in 1919—he began to spend summers in the summer resort and art colony of Ogunquit, Maine. This marked a change in his choice of subjects. Where before he mostly painted street and harbor scenes on the Hudson River in the vicinity of Newburgh, he now began to find subjects in the villages on the coast of southern Maine. Chatterton's painting, "Henry Wear's Place," of about 1920 (shown at right) is an example of his early work in Maine. When it was shown in 1927, Margaret Breuning of the New York Evening Post said "'Henry Weare's Place' with its beautiful elm, and umbrageous fountain spreading its beneficence over the little frame house huddling close to its great trunk, reveals the newer, mellower vein that this artist is developing with no loss of power in statement or design."
  In 1925 Chatterton convinced the Wildenstein Gallery to mount a solo exhibition of his work and the following year the gallery included his painting "Clinton Square, Newburgh" in a group of representative American paintings in a traveling exhibition that toured Europe and South America. When Wildenstein gave him a second solo exhibition in 1927 Margaret Breuning said his works were ""stimulating in design and warm with a sense of human living" A critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle added, "What Edward Hopper has done for the mansard roof of architecture of the 80's, Chatterton has accomplished for the early American homestead."
  Later that year Chatterton began a relationship with a gallery owner that would persist for the remainder of the gallery owner's life. The owner was Robert Macbeth and the gallery bore his name. Macbeth, who was a staunch supporter of American artists like Chatterton, had little respect for European modernist influences in American art. Calling these influences "bizarre and unintelligible," he said the American public could be relied upon to choose art that was worthwhile over art that was "merely amusing." Over the nine years from 1929 to 1938 Chatterton showed paintings in four solo and three group shows at Macbeth. Although he stopped showing in commercial galleries after Macbeth's death in 1940, his work continued to be shown in noncommercial exhibitions in New York and across the country. In 1936 he was one of 40 artists chosen to represent New York City in a national exhibition of American art that was held in the newly completed International Building of Rockefeller Center. In that year and two others his paintings were included in group shows of the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. He showed at the annual exhibition of American art at the Art Institute of Chicago (1936), the large and successful Municipal Art Exhibit in New York (1936), the
caption: C.K. Chatterton, Snow Clad Town, 1908, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches
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