Edwin H. Blashfield

The description which every one who knew him gives of Edwin Howland Blashfield is of a great gentleman. Over the quality of his art and its place in American artistic history, some of the critics differ, but his character and personality were wholeheartedly recognized by everybody. Blashfield’s personal instinct was illustrated when the recent depression began, with its tragic influence on the art community. To an intimate friend in the profession, Blashfield expressed regret for his own plan for absence from the country, which had been arranged when everything was hopeful; then he asked how much he ought to leave behind for relief of his fellow-artists who would have nowhere else to look. What he left was a substantial part of his own professional income.

No Centurion of the past two decades will fail to visualize, as one of his own personal reminiscences, the interesting fellow-member who occasionally (for his was first vice-president of the Club during eleven years before 1922) would take the chair at monthly meetings when President Root was absent. Everybody knew that, next to John La Farge, Blashfield was the chief of our mural painters, yet everybody liked him more for his personality than for his artistic achievement. In his own painting, Blashfield’s conceptions were of the traditional order. He was far from a “new-school innovator”; but in his mural pictures the beauty of color, the delicacy of drawing, the clear conception of what the subject of composition called for, gave pleasure to lovers of the great artistic past; more, possibly, than to yearners after present-day eccentric experiment. To the Century, that tall figure with the dignified bearing, the kindly eyes, the flowing moustache and the reticent yet easy conversation, will always be the reminiscent picture.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1937 Century Association Yearbook