Charles Hawthorne

Charles W. Hawthorne was born January 8, 1872 in Lodi, IL the son of a sea captain and grew up in a humble setting in Richmond, Maine, where he played cornet in the town band and cut ice on the river. He went to NYC in 1890 to study at the National Academy and the Arts Student League with George deForest Brush, Siddons Mowray and Frank Vincent Dumond, and worked on the NY docks and in the Lamb glass factory to support himself. In the summer of 1896 he studied in Shinnecock with William Merritt Chase, where he met Ethel Marion Campbell, the future Mrs. Hawthorne. In 1897, he became Chase’s assistant and lived in a beach shack watching and painting fishermen. He started the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown in 1899 (which he directed until his death) because he was fascinated with the sea, ships and the Portuguese fishermen. He was a leading member of the Provincetown community and he founded the Provincetown Art Association, was a member of The Beachcombers Club, The National Academy (ANA, NA), Salmagundi Club, National Arts Club, Lotus Club, Artists Fund Society,Players, Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, American Watercolor Society, Portrait Painters and the National Institute of Arts & Letters.  Awards:  PAFA (1915, 1923), NAD (1904, 1906, 1911, 1924, 1926 and gold 1914, 1915); Salmagundi Club (1914); Carnegie Institute (1908, 1925); Buenos Aires Expo. (1910); Pan-Pacific Expo. (1915); Newport AA (1928); Art Institute of Chicago (1917); Concord AA (1922, 1925); Philadelphia Expo. (1923), Corcoran Gallery (1923, 1926); Sesqui-Centennial, Philadelphia (1923).

Hawthorne’s first solo exhibit was at the Clausen Galleries in 1902, the year The Red Gown was painted, and he had many solo shows at The Macbeth Gallery in New York City. In 1961 the Chrysler Art Museum (then in Provincetown) and the Univ. of Connecticut Museum of Art (1968 Storrs) gave Hawthorne Retrospectives. 

Represented in: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery; Syracuse Museum of Fine Art; Museum of Fine Arts; Worcester Museum; Buffalo Fine Art Academy; Detroit Art Institute; Cincinnati Art Museum; Chicago Art Institute; Peabody Institute, Baltimore;  Herron Art Institute; Houston Museum of Fine Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; New Britain Museum, CT; Dayton Art Institute; NAD; NAC; & more.

Hawthorne is best known for his portraits and interior genres.