John Taylor Arms began his education at Princeton University. There he got involved with the engineering program, but after two years decided to transfer to MIT’s architecture program. He finished his education there in 1914 and continued to live a life most ordinary, with a wife and family following the war. He worked as an architect for many years and finally became a partner in his own architectural firm. His interest in etching began when his wife had bought him a kit to use as a hobby; this hobby soon turned into a passion, and Arms began etching his way through New York, focusing on the Brooklyn Bridge and cityscapes. After exhausting his interest in New York City scenes, Arms focused more interest on the other side of the Atlantic. He took many trips to Europe and completed series of gargoyles, French cathedrals, Italian cathedrals and Venetian cityscapes. The consistency within these works is found in their intricacy. Using great detail, Arms gave his audience the opportunity to draw intimacy from his works. Since his works are incredibly specific in depicting simple subjects—a gargoyle, a church, an alleyway—the viewer is comfortable looking at the print for a long period of time. The detail enhances the experience.

Throughout his artistic life, Arms dedicated himself to educating the public and sparking interest in graphic design, specifically etching and printmaking. He was a member of many printmaking societies, serving as president of the American Society of Graphic Artists, and he held many workshops and lectures around the country. These efforts teaching definitely slowed Arms' work rate, but he still created an impressive amount of quality works. His pieces vary in both subject and size, ranging from 5 x 7 millimeters to somewhat larger prints over twelve inches long.

The combination of Arms' attention to detail and philosophy made him a unique artist. The amount of detail in his etchings can be attributed to his educational background in architectural drawings. The painstaking style of etching he utilized is difficult to master, but once developed produces prints that are believable mainly because of the exactness of the artist's perspective. So many artists are concerned with either making sure that they are being true to the form or their emotional attachment to the subject, but Arms chose a more holistic approach. He tried to bring together the spiritual and technical aspects of art. He sought to associate the physical structure of a building with the sensation a viewer felt standing in front of a massive structure. This cohesive style draws the viewer's eye to examine an Arms piece from multiple perspectives, creating a connection not often evoked by similar subjects as depicted by lesser artists.

Robert Benjamin Norris was born in 1910 in southern California, where he completed his undergraduate education, executed his first professional paintings, and first exhibited to critical acclaim. Although he continued to paint for 20 years after retiring to New York City and Philadelphia, he may be best known in Hawaii, where he spent the highly prolific middle part of his professional career.

Norris has long been identified with the Southern California Watercolor School, which includes his colleagues, Phil Dike, Thomas Craig, Millard Sheets, Milford Zornes and Hardie Gramatky. Although he moved to Hawaii in 1936, he often returned to paint in southern California through the late 1940s and his style remained essentially that of the Southern California Watercolor School through that time.

Norris studied at Pomona College, Harvard, and the Sorbonne, but supplemented his schooling by working directly with Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Jean Charlot, Josef Albers and Max Ernst. When the University of Hawaii resumed classes after World War II, Norris became Chairman of the Art Department and seized the opportunity to invite distinguished artists as visiting professors or artists-in-residence. Ernst exerted an especially potent influence, about which Norris later wrote: “I had invited him to the University. He was both charming and accessible to us, giving me a chance to hear and to understand some authentic ‘info’ about Surrealism. I eventually merged some of the conventional Surrealist forms of automatic painting with Far Eastern paper handling techniques.” Ben Norris’ abstract interpretations of the Hawaiian landscape Wind from the Sea I and The Pali, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950, were painted during this decade of artistic exploration.

As a teacher, academic, and artist, Norris had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and continued to master new stylistic methods throughout his career. While well known for his bold watercolors, Norris also became an accomplished printmaker, and experienced much success with his oil and acrylic paintings, as well as his collages. His varied work always seems to imbue a mystical or spiritual aspect, which Norris spoke of in a 1965 interview for Art in America:

“The act of painting is a combination of apprehension of the environment in which we live with the affirmation and the consolidation of the self within this setting. My home-grown Zen is hybridized from Max Ernst’s surrealism, a number of contacts with psychiatry (the healing priesthood of our time), and the Religious Society of Friends, called Quakers.”

Norris exhibited steadily from 1933 through 2001 in solo and group exhibitions, and garnered many awards including a Fulbright Professorship and a Yaddo Fellowship. He is represented in many permanent collections including the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Hawaii State Art Museum, The Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C), the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, Texas), the Oregon State University Memorial Union (Corvallis, Oregon), and the National Museum of American Art. His work has been exhibited nationally at museums across the country including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, and the Los Angeles Museum. Childs Gallery is proud to have represented this prolific and talented artist since 1998.

Born in Boston in 1897, Donald Harcourt De Lue created, in a career spanning sixty years, more monumental sculpture than any other recent American artist, and is regarded as one of America's greatest monumental sculptors in the Realist style in the twentieth century. His works include: Rocket Thrower, executed for the New York World’s Fair of 1964; The Spirit of American Youth, for the Omaha Beach Memorial, Normandy; Quest Eternal, at the Prudential Center in Boston; Washington at Prayer, at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; and three of the monuments at the Gettysberg Battlefield. An accomplished draftsman, De Lue also created an extensive portfolio of designs on paper (over 2,000 in total) that inspired or related directly to his three-dimensional works, as well as a limited number of drypoint prints between the years 1933 and 1934.

At age twelve, De Lue apprenticed with Boston sculptor Richard Recchia, and later with Bela Pratt and Robert Baker. His relationships with these artists replaced his troubled familial ones, and gave him his first introduction into the art world. Under their guidance, he would learn to sculpt the human figure, from memory, with accuracy. He was now free to break away from strictly literal interpretations of his subject matters, and to create sculpture as he thought it "should be. In the aftermath of WWI De Lue moved to Europe, where he spent several years developing his craft in Paris and Lyon. Here he worked for the Italian sculptor Alfredo Pina, and was influenced by the works of the romantic sculptor Emile Antoine Bourdelle (both were former students of Rodin).

Returning to New York determined to make a living through the practice of his art, De Lue found work as an assistant to British portrait sculptor Bryant Baker, with whom he honed his skills on a wide range of projects from 1923-1938. During these years, De Lue was known as a "sculptor's sculptor," known behind the scenes in the art world as a master of anatomy and often completing the anatomical portions of Baker's commissions. By the late 1930's, he had developed his mature style, and his own career began to flower.

“His sculpture demonstrates artistic links to both Greco-Roman and late Renaissance sculptors,” writes Jonathan L. Fairbanks, Emeritus Curator of American Figurative Sculpture Catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “He emulated the exuberant gestures and energetic composition such as those found at Pergamum. The mature Michelangelo especially inspired De Lue to compose his figures with mannerist proportions, emphasized with highly articulated musculature. However, by combining these older influences with the ideas and techniques acquired during his stay in Europe… De Lue developed his own synthesis. As he admitted, 'Although my work is traditional, it is a tradition of my own’.” The same may be said of his drawings, which exhibit similar design theories.

De Lue was president of the National Sculpture Society (1945-1947), a Guggenheim fellow (1943-1944), and in 1964 received the Harry Herring Medal and Golden Plate Award from the National Sculpture Society and National academy of Achievement, respectively. In its use of national symbolism, classical mythology, and the personification of spiritual ideas, his work, though squarely within the figurative tradition, possesses a depth of meaning beyond the sheerly literal. A leader of the traditionalists in controversies pitting them against modernists for commissions, museum shows, and critical recognition, he outlived his bitterest foes to gain new recognition and new audiences. His exquisite craft, special vision, and artistic dedication have made him one of the greatest of American traditionalists, whose monumental and commemorative sculptures are appreciated by all who hunger for masterful craftsmanship and classical values in art.

For additional information see D. Roger Howlett, The Sculpture of Donald DeLue : Gods, Prophets, and Heroes

For information on De Lue's drypoint prints, see www.raisonne.org

Frank Weston Benson was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1862. Along with a distinguished class that included Edmund Tarbell, Philip Little, Robert Reid, Walter Griffin and Joseph Lindon Smith, he studied at the School of Drawing and Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He produced his first etching, “Salem Harbor,” as the frontispiece for the school magazine he helped to edit. Benson soon turned his focus to painting, eventually becoming a well-established and wealthy painter. He produced somber New England oil portraits as well as popular impressionistic oils and watercolor scenes of women and children. Both of these categories mentioned varied greatly from his later print work subjects of waterfowl and hunting. Benson achieved prominence as a founding member of the Ten American Painters Group, and also as head of the painting department at the MFA school. Notably, the artist assumed the latter position only eight years after graduating from the same institution.

Despite his active involvement in the New England painting scene, Benson’s early painting success is often overshadowed by his later print work. At age 50, Benson turned to etching, while at the height of his painting popularity. His first experimental exhibition in the Guild of Boston Artist’s Show created instant demand for more prints. The most celebrated subjects in this first show were waterfowl and hunters. This success undoubtedly formed a direction for Benson’s work, as most of his print subjects fell in those categories. The artist helped to establish sporting prints as a popular American genre with his insightful, observant prints. In the thirty years following his print exhibition, 1912 – 1942, Benson created over 350 etchings and drypoints of such individuality, force, and quality that he ranks as one of the most important American artists of his generation.

Anders Zorn, the celebrated painter and print-maker, rose from humble beginnings to become a celebrated member of the European and American upper classes. Zorn was born out of wedlock to a German brewer and a Swedish peasant woman. He was reared in the rural Swedish province of Dalarna and although he later traveled extensively and took pride in his upper-class status, he never felt at home until he settled again in his native town of Mora in 1896. In 1893, on his first trip to America, Zorn visited New York City en route to the Columbian World Exhibition in Chicago (also known as Chicago’s World Fair). The self-made artist subscribed to American values and immediately felt welcome in America. Zorn wrote about America in his memoirs:“I get on well in America and with Americans. Their frank, straightforward manner suits my nature. I’ve never really been able to stand our urban Europeans’ ceremonious style and artificial customs. When I first came out of Dalarna, I quickly learned that everything I knew and valued was considered nothing, and that one should never tell the truth about things in polite society. . . . But the only rules of conduct that were so severely impressed on me by my grandfather from my earliest childhood were not so tricky; faithfulness, being true to one’s word, honesty, and punctuality, virtues I discovered were unnecessary in the cities of Europe. . . . Why was I more than other foreigners during [my first visit to America] closest to the elite of America and introduced in all the clubs? Everywhere I go, I ascribe this to my grandfather, the splendid old Mora peasant who raised me until I was twelve. . . . Over there [in America], when they say "He’s all-right," all doors open to the foreigner, which Europeans cannot understand. Openness, honesty, straightforwardness, punctuality, these things are included in the testimonial ‘He’s all-right.’”

While at the Chicago World’s Fair, Zorn established lasting relationships with many friends and patrons, including Charles Deering, Mrs. Potter Palmer, and Isabella Stewart Gardner. According to a popular story recounted in Carrell Shaw’s essay in Anders Zorn Rediscovered, Mrs. Gardner, captivated by Zorn’s painting Interior of an Omnibus in Paris, turned to a man nearby and asked if it was for sale or if he knew of the artist. That man was Anders Zorn and Mrs. Gardner replied, “Yourself, indeed! Well, I feel sure we shall soon be enemies . .. or else very, very fast friends. You shall come today for tea.” This chance meeting initiated a long friendship and patron relationship. In addition to the Omnibus oil painting, Zorn’s outstanding portrait of Mrs. Gardner at the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, and an impressive collection of Zorn prints are currently on view at The Gardner Museum in Boston. In November of 1893, the Frederick Keppel Gallery on East 16th Street in New York City held the first American exhibition of Zorn’s work and ignited Zorn’s popularity in this country. As evidence of his influence in America, Zorn portrayed three Presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland and William Taft.

Not only did Zorn love America, but also America loved him, and continues to do so. The artist was one of the most actively collected printmakers of the early 20th Century, fetching extremely high prices at auction and was often ranked among the world’s most highly-esteemed printmakers. In 1920, a Zorn print from a well-known New York collection brought $3,900, compared to a premium Rembrandt at the same sale that sold for $3,100. In 1928, the Boston Herald published an article highlighting the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s acquisition of a collection of 110 Zorn etchings. However, by the 1950s the artist’s prints were largely neglected. With the help of Childs Gallery, the demand for Zorn’s prints has increased steadily since that time. In the early 1970s, the Gallery acquired the Therese Lownes Noble collection of prints and the Frederick Shaeffer collection of prints, each of which had substantial holdings in Zorn. This allowed the gallery to maintain and to continue to acquire a substantial inventory of the artist’s work and in 1974 Childs devoted its first print letter to the artist. The Gallery’s commitment to Zorn was demonstrated by the 1980 exhibition, “Anders Zorn 1860-1921: An Exhibition of 75 Prints” and another show in 1984. The President of Childs Gallery, D. Roger Howlett, encouraged Elizabeth Broun in her groundbreaking 1979 Zorn exhibition at the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas. That exhibition and the extensive catalogue that accompanied it, rekindled interest in Zorn and was followed in 1993 by “Swedish Impressionism’s Boston Champion: Anders Zorn and Isabella Stewart Gardner” at the Gardner Museum and a Fogg Museum at Harvard University’s exhibition.

Childs Gallery continues its strong interest in offering the best of the etchings of Anders Zorn.