C.K. Chatterton (1880–1973) was an American artist whose oils, watercolors, and gouaches, painted in realist style, showed the houses and streets of villages, towns, and harbors of upstate New York and the Maine coast. Critics said his work possessed directness and candor as well as an ability to capture the play and pattern of light. One of them praised his "power to find in narrow streets with trolley cars and railway culverts something stimulating in design and warm with a sense of human living." His paintings were, another wrote, "smiling without falsification of sentimentality."
Chatterton trained at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri, Walter Appleton Clark, and others. Among his fellow students, Edward Hopper and Gifford Beal became studio mates and friends. He was professor of art at Vassar College for many years. There he taught live drawing along with the more usual techniques of landscape and portraiture in oil and watercolor.
Early life and training
Chatterton was raised in Newburgh, New York, where he attended local public schools through his high school graduation in 1897. While he was in the elementary grades he obtained grudging approval from his father to attend art classes taught by the artist, Lydia Edgar, in nearby Middletown on the understanding that he would draw and paint as a hobby. Shortly after approving the classes Chatterton's father died of consumption, leaving an estate large enough to support the remaining family members. On graduating from high school Chatterton decided he would train to be a professional illustrator. In 1900 he enrolled in the New York School of Art where Howard Chandler Christy and Walter Appleton Clark taught classes in illustration. He chose that school partly because, like Lydia Edgar's, its approach was based on working from life. After studying illustration for two years Chatterton began to study painting in watercolor and oil. He said he made the change when his friend and fellow student, Edward Hopper, told him "Chat, it's time you started to paint." At first Chatterton's painting instructors William Merritt Chase, Frank DuMond, Luis Mora, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. Things changed dramatically in 1902 when Robert Henri took DuMond's place and introduced an approach to art that was entirely new to Chatterton. Where before the emphasis had been on visual accuracy in drawing, the new emphasis was on emotional spontaneity. Chatterton said that to Henri "the idea and the emotion were all-important, the manner of conveying them negligible." To a meticulous craftsman like Chatterton this was a revolutionary idea. He said, "To those of us who were technically clever, this was baffling and occasionally galling," but he nonetheless adopted the method as his own. In addition to Hopper, his fellow students at this time included George Bellows, Gifford Beal, Edward Hopper, Guy Pène du Bois, and Rockwell Kent.
Leaving the New York School in 1904, Chatterton returned to Newburgh where he lived with his widowed mother and worked out of a studio that he shared with Gifford Beal. Together the two men painted local street and harbor scenes while earning money by making commercial art for local businesses.
Career in art
Unlike most professional artists of his time Chatterton rarely contributed works to group exhibitions in commercial galleries. In 1908 a painting of his called "Snow Clad Town" appeared first in a juried group exhibition at the National Academy of Design and later as part of a traveling exposition held in Argentina and Chile. This painting can be seen at left. When, in 1910, Robert Henri began to arrange group shows in New York's MacDowell Club, Chatterton included his paintings along with those of others of Henri's former students. When a painting of his called "A Peep at the Side Show" was included in an exhibition by the American Watercolor Society in 1912, the critic for the New York Herald described it in detail and said it was "a good picture of a not uncommon scene in the rural districts in spring and summer." He showed again at New York Watercolor Club in 1913 and the following year won a prize for best watercolor shown in an exhibition at New York's Salmagundi Club.