Joseph DeCamp 1858-1923
Joseph Rodefer DeCamp was a significant figure in the Boston School at the turn of the twentieth century, and one of three Boston painters—along with Edmund Tarbell and Frank W. Benson—to be a member of the Ten American Painters, with whom DeCamp exhibited from 1898 until the organization’s demise in 1918.1 Working in a stylistic range that encompassed the influences of old masters, including Jan Vermeer and Diego Velázquez, and Impressionism, DeCamp created many portraits of distinguished men and fashionable women, as well as images of pensive female subjects. In addition, he rendered landscapes, still lifes, and nudes. Among the prominent artists of the day, DeCamp was acclaimed for his technical mastery, consisting of firm draftsmanship, well-constructed compositions, and refined brushwork.
Born in Cincinnati in 1858, DeCamp began to study art at age fifteen, enrolling at the McMicken School of Design, where he received instruction from the portrait and figure painter Thomas S. Noble. In the following year, he attended a night class at the Ohio Mechanics Institute, taught by fellow Cincinnati artist, Frank Duveneck, while studying full-time at the McMicken School. After a brief teaching assignment at a girls’ school in Chillicothe, Ohio, DeCamp departed in 1878 for Munich. There he enrolled at the Munich Royal Academy, training under Wilhelm von Diez, who advocated experimental approaches and instilled in him a respect for technique. DeCamp also pursued further studies with Duveneck in Munich and spent time in the artists’ colony in the Bavarian town of Polling. On his return to Cincinnati in 1882, DeCamp made a stop in London in order to visit with James McNeill Whistler. Subsequently he helped establish the School of Design at Western Reserve University in Cleveland (now Case Western Reserve University).
He continued his teaching career after returning to Boston in 1884. There he obtained a teaching position at Wellesley College. From 1885 to 1889, he was the instructor of antique drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. From 1889 through 1999, he taught at Boston’s Cowles Art School. He also gave summer classes, first at Oyster Bay, Long Island, and thereafter in Gloucester, Massachusetts, through 1903. After his marriage in 1892 to Edith Franklin Baker of Medford, Massachusetts, DeCamp settled with his family in Medford, while maintaining a Boston studio. The couple had four children. After 1905, the DeCamp family summered in Maine.
In 1897 and 1898, DeCamp was instrumental in the founding of the Ten American Painters. Throughout the organization’s twenty years, he contributed figural works, portraits, and occasionally landscapes. Like Tarbell and other Boston School painters, DeCamp turned for inspiration to the quiet genre scenes rendered by Dutch seventeenth-century artists. Of these, he was especially enamored of the work of Vermeer, as is seen in his depictions of figures within subtly lit interiors.
DeCamp suffered a great loss when the fire that broke out in Boston’s Harcourt Building on November 11, 1904, destroyed the contents of his studio. DeCamp continued to work until the end of his life. His death occurred due to peritonitis. He died in Boca Raton, Florida, where his daughter Sally and her husband had taken him to recuperate from two operations at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.