The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 10

Although painting tiles was important to the Club’s formation, they were only a small part of their overall output. Members also made excursions to Long Island and up the Hudson River to sketch and paint—the works completed during these trips document the first plein-air painting organization in the young nation. Their first journey, with stops at Captree and Shelter Island, was organized by Laffan, a writer and passenger agent for the Long Island Railroad. The following year, they sailed up the Hudson to Lake Champlain on the the group’s decade-long existence, A Book of the Tile Club, lavishly illustrated and written by Francis Hop- kinson Smith and Earl Shinn. Of the many art clubs that were organized in the late nineteenth century, the scholar Ronald Pisano aptly describes the Tile Club as “perhaps the smallest, one of the shortest lived, and most definitely the least understood.” 2 The mysteries of the Tilers are perhaps what makes them the most intriguing. Thanks to the perseverance of Mr. Pisano and the collector and au- summer excursion was in 1881, when Club members traveled to Port Jefferson, a small harbor village on the high-spirited nature of this fascinating group of artists and writers. John C. Earle, and in 1880, they took the tugboat P. B. Casket to northern Long Island. The fourth and final Long Island’s north shore. These four lively trips were both sponsored by and reported in Scribner’s Monthly and The Century magazine. Their exaggerated stories intrigued readers, some of whom began to explore thor D. Frederick Baker, who had the drive and vision for this exhibition, I, too, have become captivated by Ann Glasscock, Guest Curator, Chazen Museum of Art the areas traversed by Tile Club members. Several art colonies and plein-air organizations were also estab- lished as a result—including William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock Summer School on Long Island. After the Club’s last summer trip, they settled into their new headquarters in the lower levels of Abbey’s and Alfred Parsons’ studio at 58 1/2 West Tenth Street. From the street, members negotiated a discreet pas- sage to its entrance. From there, Tilers walked into a rich interior designed by Stanford White—deep red curtains and paintings hung on the redwood-paneled walls, two large white-tiled fireplaces were positioned at either end, and a grand piano and miscellaneous furniture and bric-a-brac filled the room. White also designed what might be considered a culmination of 4 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting 1. Francis Hopkinson Smith, The Novels, Stories and Sketches of F. Hopkinson Smith, Vol. 7 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 163. 2. Ronald G. Pisano, “Decorative Age or Decorative Craze? The Art and Antics of the Tile Club (1877–1887).” In The Tile Club and the Aesthetic Movement in America, edited by Elaine M. Stainton, 11–67 (New York: H. N. Abrams in association with the Museum at Stony Brook, 2000), 12. Right detail: Alfred William Parsons, (English, 1847–1920), Wixford, Stratford, Warwickshire, ca. 1900.