Harley Perkins and the other members of 'The Boston Five' sought to broaden the collecting tastes in Boston and adopted watercolor as their preferred medium, capturing their subjects through loose, suggestive strokes and vibrant, blurred color blocks, as featured in Jug and Bowl of Apples. For more than a decade, they showed their work throughout the city at the Boston Art Club, Vose Galleries, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.

More information about this painting...

Born in Bakersfield, Vermont, Harley Manlius Perkins spent his adult life and career in Boston, Massachusetts, where he was a member of a modernist artist collective named ‘The Boston Five.’ Perkins was educated in the traditional Boston School of painting, studying at the Brigham Academy, the Massachusetts School of Art, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Despite his conservative arts education, Perkins formed ‘The Boston Five’ in the mid-1920s alongside Marion Monks Chase, Charles S. Hopkinson, Charles Hovey Pepper, and Carl Gordon Cutler.

During his career, Perkins also exhibited independently, with his work featured at prestigious venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Society of Independent Artists. An exhibition of his at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, inspired a writer for The American Magazine of Art to pen: “The most stimulating one-man show in Boston so far has been that of Harley Perkins. Mr. Perkins belongs to the modern school of painting but he has retained the fundamental virtues of composition and form which were acquired under the tutelage of the Museum School of Art. He has, however, discarded what were virtues in past generations of artists but non-essentials and mannerisms today. His work is done with a minimum of detail, and there is about nature as he sees it and paints it something vigorous and elemental that finds a counterpart in modern life and feeling.”[1]

Today, Perkins’ watercolors and oils can be found in public collections throughout the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine.

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[1] “Boston Notes.” The American Magazine of Art, Vol. XVII, No. 12, December, 1926, pp. 654-655.

Provenance:

Estate of Kathryn Nason

To Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts

To collection, Boston, Massachusetts

Labels:

1. Martha Richardson Fine Art, Boston, Massachusetts, with painting description
2. (old typed label under tape verso) Contemporary Artists Inc. / 71-73 The Arcade / Providence, Rhode Island / Group Water Color & Drawing Show / Opening May 31 through June / Delivery: May 26 at the Galleries / Still Life Water Color 150. / Harley Perkins Fenway Studios / 30 Ipswich St. Boston Mass.