Vintage Festival
Blashfield, Edwin Howland, American painter, 1848-1936
c. 1890
oil on canvas
Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1975

You see I am such a very old timer and came into contact with other old-timers. They were loveable men. William Morris Hunt, in April 1866 said to me, “Go straight to Paris. All you learn here you’ll have to unlearn.”

Edwin H. Blashfield

Blashfield was among the many other aspiring American artists, including Thomas Eakins, who made his way to Paris in the mid-1860s to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts). The art education program offered at the Ecole (also known as the French Academy) and several other European institutions was far more rigorous than courses in painting and sculpture offered in the United States at the time.
No matter hew much we wanted to paint, we must draw for a year first. for two years if we had the time and if the shallowness of our purses did not prevent our remaining in even inexpensive Paris.

As Blashfield’s quote indicates, the foundation of the academic program was drawing. Students spent their first few years drawing from casts and live models, then they progressed to making small oil sketches and a compositional study. They would undertake the production of a major oil painting after four years of study.

In a program like the French Academy’s, the student’s choice of a teacher was critical, for it expressed the student’s goals related to the type of work he or she hoped to create. Furthermore, the teacher’s philosophy and working methods would set the tone for the student’s development as a mature artist. Late in his life Blashfield remembered,
In Paris, in 1867, we trotted along wearing blinders, not turning our eyes from side to side, but fixing them on the master, in our first kindergarten of art, and before our vision was strong enough to bear looking upon more than one thing at a time.

Vintage Festival, executed in Paris as the inscription indicates, owes a great debt to one of Blashfield’s two most important teachers, Jean-Leon Gérôme (1824-1904), for its subject matter and style. At the time that Blashfield studied with Gérome, the teacher was best known for his scenes of everyday life in ancient Rome. Critics praised him for the accuracy of the details of his paintings and for his ability to create compositions that were dramatic and lively yet accessible. The hallmarks of his style-clearly rendered forms and naturalistic color served to convey in a direct manner the action depicted in the painting.

Late in life Blashfieid concluded that the flamboyant technique, such as the vigorous brushwork made popular by Impressionists, may capture immediate attention. As an ends to a means, however, it was an empty achievement . Lasting interest in a work of art was the concurrence of solid form, dynamic composition and engaging subject matter.
The skillful manipulation of pigment is a capacity to be struggled for and to be proud of when obtained; it makes the surface of the canvas attract at once. But if the canvas is to be made vital looking and lastingly solid as well as attractive, behind and under the lively manipulation of pigment there must be construction and knowledge, the fruit of hard work.

Blashfield’s career as a mature artist was devoted to the revitalization of mural painting for it offered an opportunity to create historical paintings in a realistic style that could be enjoyed by a broad public. These ideas were shared by a number of artists, including Kenyon Cox and Howard Pyle. The Delaware Art Museum was founded with the acquisition of a collection of Howard Pyle’s work. A gallery nearby displays a selection of them. Vintage Festival is a work that reveals the rigorous European academic training that prepared Blashfield well for his future endeavors.