Color Problems. Emily Noyes Vanderpoel

      Emily Noyes Vanderpoel with Gramercy Park neighbors. Courtesy Litchfield Historical Society.

      TO CAPTURE THE MUSIC OF LIGHT

      In the Hall of Honor of the Woman’s Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition hung a watercolor painting titled The Spirit of the 19th Century. It was among those awarded the fair’s highest jury commendation — a bronze medal designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens— and was the work of a 51-year-old artist named Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, the author of this fascinating book and creator of the prescient works of art held within. [1]

      Vanderpoel paints a scene overlooking an urban rail yard of intertwined tracks laid on raw wet earth reflecting a violet grey sky. On the tracks a trio of engines shuttle coal cars beneath a long iron bridge spanning the yard’s red brick walls. A single smokestack rises behind and telegraph poles carry wires off into the distance. The engines’ trail of swirling white steam fade to pink in the composition’s color harmony of red tones. [2]

      Accompanied in the Hall by the more conventional portraits, landscapes and allegorical figures painted by her fellow awardees, Vanderpoel’s unique expression of the terrible beauty of the industrial infrastructure driving the era yields a sliver of insight into an artist of whom many key traces have since been lost. Lost like traces of a painting titled Ypres which was said to have hung in the “National Art Museum” in Washington D.C. [3] Lost like a cache of her personal papers thought to be discarded by her grandson’s wife. [4]

      Scion of a prominent colonial family, and of a stern and industrious stock that was part of her character [5], Vanderpoel divided her time between New York City and Litchfield, Connecticut. A connoisseur and collector of a wide range of cultural artifacts, Vanderpoel was a proud Daughter of the American Revolution, and a generous local philanthropist. She was a champion of girls’ education, women’s means for advancement, and society’s knowledge and cultivation of traditional craft. [6]

      Widowed before the birth of her only son [7], Vanderpoel as an artist and author was active in New York’s creative community, centered around the American Fine Arts Building on West 57th Street. The building nurtured an interdisciplinary mix of organizations including the American Watercolor Society, and the break-off New York Watercolor Club — the first such co-ed association of its time, where she served as president. It also held the American Fine Arts Society, the influential Art Students League, and held exhibitions and events for the Architectural League and the National Academy of Design, among other organizations. The American Fine Arts Building was frequently a venue for lectures on fine art and applied arts and sciences, color science included [8]. In short, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel was a remarkably independent Victorian woman with great access and much more than Virginia Woolf’s requisite “money and a room of one’s own.”

      At the turn of the 20th century, Vanderpoel published Color Problems, a Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color, along with two other works: the 465-page first volume of Chronicles of a Pioneer School, and a set of charming and technically astute illustrations for the Tale of the Spinning Wheel by Cynthia Barney Buell [9]. She continued to author books and exhibit paintings into her last decade, before her death at the age of 96 [10]. Vanderpoel had a foot firmly in both centuries. She experienced the quickening of the 1800s into the speeding 1900s.

      The World’s Columbian Exposition, ushering in the new century, presented possibilities and means for the final distribution of the industrial revolution out of the factory and into homes, workshops, and classrooms, for the betterment of daily life. Her participation there seems to have inspired the long project of Color Problems. Vanderpoel would have been impressed by the advancements in science and technology, as well as the comprehensive displays of historical and contemporary fine arts found at the fair. Crafts from worlwide cultures were also on display at the Fair, which was attended by nearly a quarter of the nation’s population. It was there that she may have been introduced to the inventor and publisher of arts educational materials Milton Bradley, who was displaying his Color Machine, patented that same year [11]. Many informed hands would be needed to direct the technological and aesthetic promise of the coming century.

      Despite the future-oriented work in many of the Columbian Exposition’s displays, the architecture and planning of the greatly influential “White City”, as the campus was known, was itself a study in neoclassical Beaux Arts composition, an historical revival style that was on the rise in architecture and urban planning. In the fine and decorative arts, such historicism had already begun its long decline, amidst the nascent beginnings of new styles not yet precisely nameable. Developments that this book has become an important early example of.

      While Mr. Bradley’s work went on to educate future public school teachers about color and its science [12], Vanderpoel engaged her passion for craft production, the valuable work of women, the ornamental and the exotic. Her aim was to teach color to the non-artist and the non-arts-educator. It was intended for those in the practical arts and for the common citizen making things, especially women whose hands were being made idle by the rise of household technologies. [13] In this two-part book, she accomplished more than that.

      One won’t find a more concise summary of the contemporary technical literature on color than what is given in the first part of this book. However, in the creation of her own method to teach the practical observation and notation of color, Vanderpoel achieves a wholly original and thoroughly modern series of works: The 54 “Color Analyses” and the 15 freeform “Color Notes” we find in the book’s 117 color plates. The Analyses are observations mainly of inanimate decorative objects and are of a more interior nature, described in the chapter “Historic Color”, while the Notes are observations of more fleeting moments and natural phenomena outdoors, described in the chapter “Natural Color”.

      The freeform Notes might be said to be highly influenced by the works of the prolific art teacher and color theorist Mary Gartside, who was working at the transition of the 18th to 19th Centuries. Vanderpoel’s Notes are significantly different, however, in that they are not only illustrations of the production of effects of adjacent colors coming from theory, but are abstract paintings of observed scenic color.

      In the case of the unprecedented Color Analyses, Vanderpoel’s invention is a highly synthetic method. By careful observation of a part or whole of an object using a subjective framing device—the Color Isolation Card found in the in the back cover [14]— students are instructed to separate the object’s color from its form to appreciate colors and their adjacencies in and of themselves.