Starkweather Catalogue

WILLIAM E. B. STARKWEATHER
MAINE AND THE MARITIME PROVINCES OF CANADA
ANTHONY PANZERA
“The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has past,
and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.
Life if well spent is long.”
R 1174 [1]
Leonardo wrote these words as a way of describing the ebb and flow
of generations, the helter-skelter of life, as though we as humans
are all spinning tops, occasionally bumping into one another and
then spinning off in opposite, undetermined directions. It is this
existential component of life that is totally unexplainable and
unpredictable.
Thus it was that almost concurrently with my appointment to a
teaching post at Hunter College in 1969, William E. B. Starkweather
quietly passed away at a nursing home in New Haven, Connecticut,
two days before his 90 th birthday. I of course knew nothing about
Starkweather, or he of me. He began teaching at Hunter College in
1936 and retired in 1948. Shortly after I began at Hunter, I met a
graduating senior, Peter Falotico, whose father passed on to him a
body of work acquired at auction. It was a portfolio of watercolors
and oils by William Starkweather, many of them works of Eastport,
Maine and the Maritime Provinces of Canada. It was due to the
confluence of these totally coincidental events that this exhibition,
the latest in a series of Starkweather exhibitions, was born.
WILLIAM EDWARD BLOOMFIELD STARKWEATHER
William E. B. Starkweather lived a full, rich and prolific life. [2]
He was an accomplished artist, museum curator, lecturer, author,
[1] Richter, Jean Paul, The Literary Works of Leonardo Da Vinci, Unabridged
ed. first published in London, 1883, 3rd ed. New York: Phaidon Publishers,
1970, vol. ii, p. 244, R 1174.
and beloved teacher. He was also an itinerant traveler – visiting
Bermuda, Mexico, Italy, France, and Spain and eventually finding
his way to Eastport, Maine and the Maritime Provinces. There, he
would return again and again to visually record the craggy coasts,
surging seas and dramatic vistas.
While details of Starkweather’s early years are sketchy, he is thought
to have been born on May 16, 1879, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His
father died some four or five years later, in 1883 or 1884, and his
mother, along with William and his sister, immigrated to the United
States, settling in New Haven, Connecticut. Soon after the family
arrived, Mrs. Bloomfield also died and the children were placed
in an orphanage, from which they were adopted by John Henry
and Hannah Elizabeth Starkweather of Winchester, Connecticut,
and raised in New Haven. Starkweather attended high school in
New Haven, where he apparently developed his artistic bent, and
following graduation, in 1897, he decided to enroll at the Art Students
League in New York, New York. According to a recorded interview
with him, his adoptive parents did not offer encouragement, either
morally or financially, for his artistic endeavors. Despite their lack of
support, he managed to make his own way and was soon immersed
in his studies at the League.
Starkweather studied with Kenyon Cox, one of the founders of the
school, J. Carroll Beckwith and John Henry Twachtman. From Cox,
who followed the rigorous and disciplined approach taught in the
[2] All of the biographical information on Starkweather’s life stems from
my research completed at the Hispanic Society of America and elsewhere,
for the exhibition of his work held at Hunter College in 1988 entitled,
William E.B. Starkweather, 1879-1969, The Travel Pictures, and from the thesis
of Tracy Myers submitted in partial fulfillment of the Master of Arts
Degree from Hunter College, 1990, entitled, Bright Light and Bitter Wind:
A study of William Starkweather.
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