Charles Salis Kaelin

Flowering Tree Backyard Impressionist Landscape

Described as an artist whose "love of nature amounted to a passion," Charles Salis Kaelin was one of the earliest American exponents of Divisionism. Kaelin was born in Cincinnati in 1858, the son of a Swiss lithographer. Following in his father's footsteps, he entered a local lithographic firm at the age of sixteen. In the fall of 1877, he enrolled in evening classes at the McMicken School of Design (later known as the Art Academy of Cincinnati), where he was taught by Thomas Satterwhite Noble. During the summer or fall of 1878 Kaelin supplemented his studies at the McMicken by taking additional instruction from John Henry Twachtman, who had just returned to Cincinnati after sojourns in Munich and Venice. Not surprisingly, Twachtman's emphasis on landscape themes and his sketchy, Munich-inspired style appealed to Kaelin's own penchant for nature and subjective expression, much more so than Noble's preoccupation with academic portraiture and genre themes. Kaelin traveled to New York City in 1879, enrolling in classes at the Art Students League. He continued to live there throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, working as a lithographer and painting during his spare time. Returning to Cincinnati in 1892, he joined the prestigious Strobridge Lithographic Company, as a designer of theater posters, calendars and other forms of advertising art. In the years ahead, he took many sketching trips throughout southern Ohio and Kentucky. Working exclusively in pastel, a medium in which he excelled, he portrayed the countryside in a delicate, poetic manner, reminiscent of Twachtman. His earliest critical recognition came in 1899, when the Cincinnati Art Museum organized an important solo exhibition devoted exclusively to his pastels. At the urging of his friend and fellow artist, Frank Duveneck, Kaelin made his first trip to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1900. Inspired by the clear, brilliant light of the region, as well as by the rugged coastlines and pine forests that typified the area, Kaelin continued to make seasonal visits to the North Shore for well over a decade. After coming into contact with several of the American Impressionists who painted in Gloucester, such as Twachtman, Theodore Wendel, and Childe Hassam, he abandoned his earlier, tonal manner and took a greater interest in light and color. At the same time, he also began to employ a divisionist technique, associated with European Post-Impressionism, in which long, emphatic strokes of crayon were tightly woven together to create an overall tapestry of line and color. Contemporary critics spoke frequently of the "daring" and "experimental" nature of his work. In 1916, Kaelin relinquished his lucrative career as a lithographer and settled permanently in Rockport, the smaller of the two principal towns on Cape Ann. In the years ahead, he spent his time rendering the sun-dappled harbor and the nearby woodland forests, working in both pastel and oil.