Harry W. Watrous

When Harry Watrous died he had been a member of the Century for nearly fifty years, having been elected in 1891. In all that period there never was a more clubbable Centurion. His friends will remember his laugh, about which there was something peculiarly engaging. He was always lovable, with his humor, his never-failing generosity in camaraderie. Watrous had charm and it was the more potent because he gave no thought to its cultivation but was simply and spontaneously his delightful self. How selfless that self was is particularly marked in the record of his long relation to the National Academy. He was successively its secretary, its vice-president, and finally its president, and his influence was invaluable in the councils of the institution. He came to be a kind of symbol of the Academy. Varnishing Day at its exhibitions was unthinkable without his presence. He was a good official but he was a better one because he knew how to be unofficial.

There was fun in him, as he showed when he turned loose an imitation sea serpent in the waters of Lake George, beside which he made his summer home. Also he had courage. Once burglars invaded his house at the Lake around two o’clock in the morning. Watrous awakened, played his flashlight on the intruders, cried “Throw up your hands!” and promptly shot one of the pair. He could be a man of action. Yet he spent his long life—dying at eighty-three—as one of the most patient and deliberate of craftsmen. Bonnat and Boulanger trained him in Paris and he formed a polished style in harmony with the French tradition. He painted genre for years, touching it with sentiment and showing that he was not afraid of the subject picture, the picture telling a story. Then in his later time he abandoned his familiar themes, and, with greater breadth, painted the Madonna and Child from old polychromatic statuettes. He made these religious pictures the best of his career, painting them with a fine technique and with genuine feeling. He won prizes and other honors, those befitting a competent and devoted painter. But he will be remembered as a man, too, a characteristically friendly and attaching Centurion.

Geoffrey Parsons
1940 Century Memorials