JULIE HELLER GALLERIES

Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872 – 1930) was an American and genre painter and a noted teacher who founded the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899.

 

He was born in Lodi, Illinois and his parents returned to Maine, raising him in the state where Charles' father was born. At age 18, he went to New York, working as an office-boy by day in a stained-glass factory in New York, and studying at night school and with Henry Siddons Mowbray and William Merritt Chase, and abroad in both  Holland and Italy. While studying abroad in Holland as Chase's assistant, Hawthorne was influenced to start his own school of art.

 

His winters were spent in Paris and New York City, his summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the site of his school. In addition to founding the Cape Cod School of Art, Hawthorne was also a founding member of the Provincetown Art Association established in 1914. While in Paris Hawthorne became a full member of the French Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1917.