Edward Henry Potthast (American painter) 1857 - 1927
A Cincinnati native, Edward Potthast studied art in his hometown before traveling to Europe in 1881 to study at the Royal Academy in Munich. Five years later, he continued his studies at the Academie Julien in Paris. A visit in 1889 to the artists' colony in Grez, France, where he met the painters Robert Vonnoh and Roderic O'Conor, had a tremendous impact upon Potthast, converting him irrevocably to an impressionist aesthetic. Returning to Cincinnati that year, he moved to New York in 1895. He began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design two years later, became an Associate in 1897, and a full academician in 1906. Potthast is best known for his scenes of people on holiday, frolicking at the beach. Generally undated, they range in locale from Ogunquit and Monhegan Island in Maine to Gloucester and Rockport in Massachusetts, to New York's Coney Island and Far Rockaway. A catalogue for Potthast's March 1920 exhibition at the J. W. S. Young Gallery noted that the artist had only recently begun to exhibit beach scenes. Indeed in the exhibition records of the National Academy of Design, titles of his works allusive to summertime beachgoing begin to appear only around 1914. In 1916, Potthast submitted a painting entitled Water Nymphs - possibly the present example - for exhibition at the National Academy, and again that same year at the Detroit Institute of Arts. A particularly fresh and enchanting composition, Water Nymphs may consequently be among Potthast's earlier beach scenes. Praising the joyous aspect of Potthast's nudes, John Wilson has noted that despite his early studies of the subject in this country and abroad, "it is only late in his life that Potthast discovered a vehicle for bringing the nude figure into his art." [John Wilson, Edward Henry Potthast: American Impressionist, New York: Gerald Peters Gallery, 1998, pp. 15-16]
