Charles Allen Winter is not to be confused with Charles Albert Winter, Jr. (1896-1967) or Charles William Winter (1918-1974).
Charles Allen Winter was born October 26, 1869 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, Alfred A. Winter, was born in in England. His mother, Fannie A. Ransley, was born in in New York. His father was a newspaper printer.
In 1884, at the age of fifteen, he began to study at the Cincinnati Art Academy, where his teachers were Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1907), Lewis Cass Lutz (1855-1893), and Vincent Nowottny (1854-1908).
In 1894 Charles Allen Winter won a three-year scholarship to study at the Academie Julian in Paris with William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) and Gabriel Ferrier (1847-1914). He also attended the Academie Colarossi in Paris, and studied for eight months in Rome in 1897. While in Europe his works were included in the Paris Salons of 1896 and 1898.
In 1898 he returned to America, where he taught portraiture for three years at the Saint Louis School of Fine Arts, where he met and fell in love with an art student, Alice Mary Beach (1877-1968). She was born on March 22, 1877 in Missouri to Edgar Rice Beach(1842-1930) and Francis E. White (1847-1926). Her parents had four children, Duane (b.1875), Alice (b.1877), Chester (b.1881), and Cyrus (b.1887). Her father was a newspaper editor.
In 1901 Charles A. Winter left St. Louis and moved to New York City, where he lived in his art studio at 53 East 59th Street. His neighbor was C. Clyde Squires.
In 1903 Alice Mary Beach came to NYC to study at the Art Students League with Joseph DeCamp (1858-1923) and George deForest Brush (1855-1941).
On February 15, 1904 Charles A. Winter married Alice Mary Beach in NYC.
In 1909 he and his wife joined an innovative artist colony in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where he painted colorful seascapes. They remained summer residents for the next twenty years. Their circle of friends included Robert Henri (1865-1929), George Bellows (1882-1925), John Sloan (1871-1951), Agnes Richmond (1870-1964), Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928), and Stuart Davis (1892-1964). Charles A. Winter and Alice Mary Beach Winter joined the Socialist Party and helped to found The Masses, a politically progressive magazine concerned with working class rights, Women's Rights, and unfettered artistic creativity.
From 1911 to 1916 Charles A. Winter and Alice Mary Beach Winter contributed illustrations to The Masses.
By 1916, as Europe was inflamed with the Great War, the editorial policy of The Masses was restricted to anti-war propaganda, which lead to an artist's strike, and the resignation of John Sloan, Charles A. Winter and Alice Mary Beach Winter.
Illustrations by Charles A. Winter were published in Scribner's, Collier's, Hearst's, Metropolitan, and Cosmopolitan.
In 1929 his New York City art studio was listed at 53 East 59th Street.
In 1931, during the Great Depression, he and his wife left NYC to become year-round residents in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he worked for the WPA, an enlightened government program that sponsored artists to create community projects. He painted murals of historical subjects for Gloucester City Hall Auditorium and Gloucester High School.
Charles Allen Winter died at the age of seventy-two in Massachusetts on September 23, 1942.
© David Saunders 2019 |
