William A. Coffin

William Anderson Coffin was a many-sided man. That he was a charming and convincing painter, strongly sympathetic even with some of the poetic aspects of nature, every one knows who has seen his landscapes, simple in color and reflecting an atmosphere of quiet repose. But no one could exchange impressions with him at the Century dinner-table without quickly recognizing another set of qualities; keen interest in every-day affairs, humorous outlook on the incidents of life, practical common sense with a background of executive capacity. It was Coffin who remarked to a fellow-artist, on learning of his own election to the Century, “Now I shall be with people who speak my language”; and perhaps he meant more than his fellow-artist understood.

He was in fact a notable organizer in the artistic field; promoter of activities in the American Fine Arts Society and the National Academy of Design, art specialist of the George Washington centennial, and brilliantly successful art director of the Buffalo Exposition. Yet there was still another aspect to his versatile achievement. Coffin was the faithful and sympathetic friend of France, where he had studied with Bonnât almost in his boyhood days. A fellow student of that period and a fellow-Centurion of today recalls the immense success at a Paris students’ masquerade of the handsome young Billy Coffin as a conspirator from Madame Angot, commemorated in the contemporary pictures of the Vie Parisienne. Speaking French perfectly, and as great a favorite with Frenchmen as he was at Madame Harral’s table in the New York boarding-house, which years ago he frequented with Butler, Low and Beckwith, he threw himself after 1914 into the most arduous and incessant labor for the relief of French artists from the distress into which the tragedy of war had plunged them. The cross of the Legion of Honor which he wore was only faint expression of what he felt for France and France for him.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1926 Century Association Yearbook