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, such as The Guitar Player, 1908 and The Blue Cup, 1909 (both Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). While often employing a varied and free handling, DeCamp’s perceptive observation of light effects reveals the technical control he attained during his years in Boston. As the critic Arthur Hoeber wrote, “None of the modern painters, either in this country or in Europe, is better equipped technically than is Joseph De Camp. . . how profound is his knowledge of the workshop, and how at ease he is as far as the mere rendering of surfaces, textures and forms may be seen by a glance at any, even the least important, of his canvases.”2 DeCamp often used an Impressionist method for outdoor imagery, including landscapes such as The Little Hotel, 1903 (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia) and figural works such as The Hammock, ca. 1895 (Terra Foundation for American Art), depicting his wife Edith and children Sally and Ted. 

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.

In the 1890s, DeCamp’s best known paintings consisted of poetic renderings of the nude. At the first and second exhibitions of the Ten American Painters, in 1898 and 1899 respectively, he showed the beautifully composed Magdalen, ca. 1896 and Woman Drying Her Hair, 1898 (fig. 1) (both, Cincinnati Art Museum), and he sent the latter to the

Paris International Exposition in 1900. However, DeCamp’s work was quite diverse during the decade, consisting of portraiture, figure subjects, and landscapes. After the turn of the twentieth century, he continued to render many types of imagery, but he began to gravitate to portraits of men.3 In the era, portraiture was revived as an artistic form rather

than a means of primarily producing a likeness. Whereas many artists for whom portraiture was central, such as William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent, focused on female subjects, DeCamp developed male portraiture as his specialty, studying his subjects closely while bringing out a sense of their character and internal lives. A 1924 review in the Boston Globe of DeCamp’s memorial exhibition at the St. Botolph Club reported that the artist “knew men and man psychology.”4 

DeCamp actively fulfilled the many commissions he received for male portraiture. He rendered his subjects typically in formal rather than casual poses. According to Donald Moffat, his son in law and biographer, he depicted many of his men in the “same studio chair, a comfortable roomy affair with curved mahogany arms.”5 His most acclaimed portrait is his full-length standing image of President Theodore Roosevelt (fig. 2), which was commissioned in 1908 by the Harvard University class of 1880, to which Roosevelt had belonged. With few exceptions, DeCamp’s male subjects face forward in the direction of the viewer, even if they are on an angle to the picture plane. The artist

portrayed them against neutral backgrounds, at times including a few furniture or still life items to provide a sense of context. Despite the posed nature of DeCamp’s images, he rendered his subjects naturalistically, showing them at ease and engaged in thought. He achieved this aim through a process that he explained in the form of advice in 1909 to

other painters: “Put your canvas up near your sitter, sit down in the most comfortable chair you have, put your watch on the table, and sit for ten solid minutes just looking and deciding things. Then get on your feet and go to work. Deliberately paint some one in fact you have seen. You’ll be astonished to see how fast you’ll get ahead.”6 DeCamp was motivated by his view that a “portrait should portray not the painter, but the subject.”7 

As stated by Moffat, DeCamp’s images of successful men “seem to impart a sense of aristocratic dignity, like the portraits of those tycoons of another era, the Venetian Doges and merchants.”8 Nonetheless, Moffat notes that DeCamp found his greatest stimulus in depicting his friends, including the artists John Leslie Breck, 1892 (St. Botolph Club) and Frank Duveneck, 1911–12 (Cincinnati Art Museum) (fig. 3), the composer George Chadwick, 1916 (unlocated), the actor John Drew, 1917 (charcoal, Players Club, New York), and the lawyer Benjamin Kimball, ca. 1904 (Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire).

 While the present work is yet another male portrait by DeCamp, it is a highly unusual work in the artist’s oeuvre. Instead of a figure within an atmospheric space, DeCamp used an uptilted perspective and cropped the work for a more abstract image in which the figure is integral to the composition. Throughout the painting, DeCamp used painterly brushwork, suggestive of that of Sargent (who was an admirer of his work). As in his portrait of Roosevelt, which he unified with a range of gray tonalities. here he employed subdued whites to create a harmonious arrangement in the manner of Whistler. His treatment of the bed linen with subtle gradations of light and shadow in the folds is similar to that in the aforementioned Woman Drying Her Hair (fig. 1). The work depicts the figure in white bed clothes lying on a bed with white bed sheets, his head on a large pillow with a white pillowcase. Beside him the downy covers fill the upper register of the composition. In the foreground, DeCamp used a light umber to depict a table, cropped at4 the work’s lower edge, that appears pressed up against the bed, while a blanket over the end of the bed is in a similar umber hue. On the table, DeCamp depicted still life elements, consisting of what appears to be the man's meal. Served bedside, these consist of two bottles (a green one, with a white label, presumably for wine and a green-tinted transparent one, with a stopper, presumably for water), three plates (a small one with butter—a knife resting on its side—a larger one, possibly with a piece of fish, and a medium-sized one, possibly with bread), a half-filled wine glass, and a small teapot or pitcher.

There is no sign of this painting in known sources on DeCamp. Its provenance is unknown and its subject has yet to be identified. The perspective is suggestive of that of someone on the opposite side of the table, on the same level as the man in the bed. Whether DeCamp created it on the spot or from drawings and photographs, the work captures moment in time. With his left hand, the man in the image listlessly pulls at a piece of his top sheet, his right hand limp across his chest, suggesting physical weakness perhaps as a result of illness, while he gazes with intent interest at the artist and viewer. The contrast between the alert individual and his prone physical position make this image particularlly intriguing. It could be among a tradition of images of individuals convalescing, such as those of Edgar Degas (fig. 4) and Edvard Munch.9 As to the work’s dating, one point of reference is his painting The Seamstress, 1916 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) (fig. 5), in which he used a similar palette of muted whites, although illuminating the scene with atmospheric luminosity streaming through the window into the interior space. 

Perhaps DeCamp gave the work to the subject, which may explain why it does not appear to have been recorded or exhibited. The man’s oval-shaped face is quite distinctive, featuring arched eyebrows, a narrow, pointed nose, a carefully groomed mustache with curled ends, and a trimmed beard. The man’s pupils appear turned in the artist’s direction, suggesting that he and DeCamp are in conversation with each other. That areas of the painting are unresolved, such as the suggestion of other items on the table at the left, support the idea that DeCamp created the work as a personal memento rather than one he intended to exhibit. The closest example to it in DeCamp’s work is an image of one of his daughters as an infant (fig. 6). It consists of an intimate view of a baby lying perpendicular to the composition and swathed in white sheets like those in the present painting, her head similarly on a large pillow. DeCamp had three daughters: Sally, born in 1892, Lydia in 1896, and Pauline in 1899. Thus, the infant portrait could date from any of these years. DeCamp also depicted his wife Edith in bed, similarly covered by white bedsheets (fig. 7). She rests against another large white pillow. The slats on the bed’s headboard may be the same as those in the painting by DeCamp of his daughter. 

What seems most likely from the stylistic aspects of the present work is that DeCamp intended it as a personal image of a friend, which gave him a license to depart from his carefully finished style in depictions of distinguished men. In a more sensitive and poetic portrayal, of the type often reserved for images of women, DeCamp broke from the5

gendered lines that so often differentiated male and female portraiture in American art of the era.

The portrait’s informality is suggested in DeCamp’s signature (fig. 8). Unlike many artists, he often signed works on their upper rather than their lower registers. He did so in this work, which is signed on the upper right. However, instead of his typical signature on paintings, which consists of capital block letters, he used a cursive style. He used his cursive signature in drawings and letters (fig. 9) and to sign his name below a 1918 photograph of him in the Macbeth Gallery papers at the Archives of American Art (fig. 10).

Lisa N. Peters, PhD

1 The main published source on DeCamp is Laurene Buckley, Joseph DeCamp: Master Painter of

the Boston School (New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1995). Of significance as well to scholarship on the

artist is the biographical essay by the artist’s son-in-law Donald Moffat, “Joseph Rodefer DeCamp,

1858–1923,” unpublished typescript, Donald Moffat research material on Joseph DeCamp, [ca.

1957], Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Note that the artist’s last

name is spelled both De Camp and DeCamp. The latter was used by Moffat, and thus appears the

most common.

2 Arthur Hoeber, “DeCamp, A Master of Technique,” Arts and Decoration 1 (April 1911), 248.

3 DeCamp’s commissioned male portraits include depictions of Fairman Rogers, a civil engineer,

educator and equestrian (1903, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts); Robert Apthorp Boit, a

lawyer and real estate developer (1904, unlocated); Albert Hayden Chatfield, a Cincinnati

businessman (1905, Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, Maine); Frederick

Forchheimer, a Cincinnati physician and teacher (1905, Cincinnati Medical Heritage Center,

University of Cincinnati); Benjamin Kimball, a prominent business and political figure in New

Hampshire (ca. 1905); Horace Howard Furness, a Philadelphia scholar (1906, Pennsylvania

Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Colonel Myron M. Parker (ca. 1907, unlocated); Frederick

Cheever Shattuck, a Boston physician (1912, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts);

Lewis Parkhurst (1918, Hood Museum, Hanover, New Hampshire; and Sir General Arthur William

Currie, a senior officer in the Canadian Army who fought in World War I (1920, Smithsonian

American Art Museum, Washington, DC).

4 “Show Paintings of Joseph R. De Camp,” Boston Globe, January 16, 1924, p. 13.

5 Moffat, p. 7.

6 Moffat, p. 7.

7 Moffat, p. 9.

8 Moffat, p. 7.

9 See Edgar Degas, The Convalescent, ca. 1872–87, oil on canvas, 25 7/8 × 19 5/8 in., Getty

Museum, Los Angeles; Edvard Munch, The Sick Child, 1907, oil on 875, canvas, 1187 × 1210 mm,

Tate Britain, London. Other images of this subject include James Tissot, The Convalescent, 1876,

oil on canvas, 75.4 × 98.4 cm, Sheffield Museums, United Kingdom and and Lilian Westcott Hale,

Convalescent, 1906, oil on canvas, 30 3/16 × 22, Sheldon Museum, Burlington, Vermont.