George Hallowell 

(1871-1926)

On my very first visit to Vose Gallery in early 1966, I saw a haunting painting hanging over a doorway depicting a logging scene in blues, violets, and other hallucinatory colors. It was by George Hallowell, whose name and painting I never forgot (while every other painting hanging in the gallery long ago slipped from memory). It was probably twenty-five years before I saw another one. This is an artist whom John Singer Sargent called “the painter with the greatest power and promise in America.” Sargent owned eight examples of Hallowell’s work, and in 1922, when Sargent arrived in Boston, he immediately went to the Grace Horne Gallery to view a Hallowell exhibition. It took until 1996 before a retrospective exhibition of this artist’s work was held at the Danforth Museum. In 1918 a review of Hallowell’s work appeared in the Boston Transcript and referred to his landscapes as “more poignant, pungent, odd, and powerful sensation than the ordinary and average landscape of other painters… nobody nowadays is at once so imaginative and so utterly real.” Perhaps an insight into his remarkable color choice is his cousin was Maxfield Parrish. Gradually I’d see examples turn up in New England auctions, but I continued to lose out to Tom Veilleux, an upstate Maine dealer. Collectors quickly determine that certain dealers have certain artists they simply will chase at auction, almost regardless of price. After years of trying to obtain a representative example of this elusive artist, I succeeded at Skinners in 2004 with this quintessential example of a logging image, reminiscent of the first piece I’d seen at Vose Gallery. Months later, in a conversation with Tom Veilleux, I asked him about this piece and why he did not pound me again. “I’m not buying them any longer. I had one collector buy them, and they’re full up.” Interesting, I thought; then he told me who the collector was: Mrs. Stephen King.