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Kenyon Cox (1856-1919) was one of the best-known artists and critics in the country in the early 20th century. He began his artistic training early in his native Cincinnati, although he rejected the McMicken School of Design as too provincial for his interests. At the age of 21 he convinced his parents to send him to Paris where he remained for 5 years, studying in the private ateliers of Carolus-Duran, Julian, and Gérôme and attending the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Cox was committed to academic tradition and a serious student of classical art. He firmly rejected the radical movements then stirring in Paris in favor of craftsmanship and a reverence for old masters. He believed that artists should be part of a continuum of art historical tradition, building on the work of their forbearers rather than departing from them.
It was in Paris that he started writing critical reviews for newspapers, a sideline that was expanded upon his return to the States where he settled in New York. He became a well- known muralist and illustrator, as well as a painter, teacher, lecturer, and critic. Always idealistic and firm in his beliefs, he defended traditional art from his perspective as a well-trained academic artist and keen observer of nature and art. Following the Armory Show of 1913, his voice as well as those of Royal Cortissoz and Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., were virtually the lone defenders of academic art in America. See, Wayne H. Morgan, Kenyon Cox, 1856-1919: A Life in American Art: Kent, Ohio and London, England, 1994.
The sitter, William James Morton, MD (1846-1920), graduated from Harvard College in 1867 and received an MD in 1872. Like his father, William T.G. Morton, who performed what is said to be the first successful demonstration of ether as an anesthetic in 1846, William James Morton became a medical researcher as well as physician, specializing in the new science of electricity and x-rays. From 1881-1885 he was Professor of Mental Diseases and Diseases of the Nervous System at the University of Vermont. The present picture is directly from the collection of the New York Academy of Medicine, where it was gifted by Morton's widow. |
