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Neighbors, 1947, oil on Masonite, signed lower right, 36 x 30 inches, plague reads: “American XX Century Ethel Robertson Gath “Neighbors” Katherine Rhoades Memorial Fund, 1947 The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,” exhibited: The Twenty-Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Southern States Art League, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, March 28 – April 23, 1947, no. 13 (Prize - The Woodward Award Fund); literature (non exhaustive sample): 1) Preview at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Richmond News Leader, March 28, 1947 (illustrated); 2) Southern Artists Hold Joint Show in Virginia, The Art Digest, vol 21, issue 14, April 15, 1947; and 3) Prizes and Reconstruction in the South, Art News, vol. 46, issue 3, May, 1947; presented in the original frame
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About the Painting
Neighbors is typical of the American Scene paintings for which Ethel Robertson Gath was best known. “I am never at a loss for subject matter,” she reflected. “I do not look for something to paint, nor do I feel that I have to ‘go away’ to find the right spot. I am surrounded with subject matter in my everyday life, waiting to be painted.” The homespun narrative quality of Gath’s paintings were accessible and popular. One critic noted, “I am sure my readers will find something of interest . . . in Ethel Gath’s careful drawing of familiar household and street scenes . . . ,” while another noted, her compositions “afford[ed] the pleasures of recognition to a high degree.” Although Gath considered herself a realistic and conservative painter, her simplified, edited forms in Neighbors take on a modernist quality as buildings, hanging laundry, a car, and people all carefully composed with rakish foreshortened angles form well designed patterns of color, light and shadow, elevating the work beyond the typical genre scene of the period. Neighbors is an excellent example of Gath’s painting from the prime of her career when she consistently won awards, including at the Society of Washington Artists and the Washington DC Art Fair. A jury, which included Reginald Marsh, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Lamar Dodd, selected Ethel Robertson Gath’s Neighbors for The Woodward Award Fund prize at The Twenty-Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Southern States League at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1947, and The Art Digest mentioned the work as one of the “many good, professionally executed paintings” in the exhibition. In 1948, the year after she completed Neighbors, Gath was honored with a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery.
About the Artist
Born in Flint, Michigan, Gath was a well-recognized American Scene painter, who worked principally in her home state and in Washington, DC. She excelled at capturing the commonplace. Gath started drawing as a child, but did not seriously pursue art until the 1930s when she studied at the Flint Institute of Art with Jaroslav Brozik. After moving to Washington, DC, Gath continued her studies at the Corcoran School of Art with Richard Lahey, Eugen Weisz, Heinz Warneke, and Pegger Bacon, an artist who clearly impacted Gath’s spare almost naïve approach to paint handling. Although her art career started later in life, by 1948, she had already exhibited in twenty-two different galleries and venues, including the Flint Art Institute, the Detroit Art Institute, Rockefeller Center (NY), Detroit’s Scarab Club, the Society of Washington Artists, the Corcoran Gallery (Washington DC), the National Academy of Design (NY), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond), the Swope Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution (with the American Artists’ Professional League), and the Boston Society of Independent Artists among others. From these exhibitions, Gath won thirteen awards and was honored with four solo exhibitions. Gath was a member of the Society of Washington Artists and an executive committee member of the Washington DC Art Fair. Gath is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.
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