Biography
Charles Anton Kaeselau was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1881. He worked first as a lithographer, then in 1900 went to England to study at the Kensington School of Art in London. After this training, he attended the Académie Julien in Paris. In 1908 he emigrated to the United States.
Kaeselau attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1911-1915, while undertaking private studies with Joaquín y Sorolla and Charles W. Hawthorne. Sorolla was a brilliant painter of portraits and landscapes. His monumental murals on the "Visions of Spain" can be seen today at the Hispanic Society of America in New York. Charles W. Hawthorne was a portraitist and genre painter, notable for having founded the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899.
Kaeselau taught painting and composition at the Child Walker School of Art and the Stuart School of Design in Boston. He exhibited in a show of former students of the Art Institute in 1918, listing his residence as New York. In 1919 he married Marguerite Benjamin, an illustrator. The couple had two children. One became an architect and the owner of a construction company; the other had a career in film and television in Hollywood.
Kaeselau exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1921 and settled in Provincetown, MA the following year, establishing his own art school there. Over time his work was exhibited at the Art Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Whitney Museum, as well as in traveling exhibits overseas.
In 1923 Kaeselau was named Acting Director of the Provincetown Art Association, becoming their Director in 1924. He exhibited in the Swedish-American exhibition in Gothenburg in 1923 and the Copley Society exhibition in Boston in 1924. He was part of the group known as the "Provincetown Artists" throughout the 1930s and completed two Post Office murals - one in Lebanon, NH (1939), and another in Concord, MA (1941).
Kaeselau continued to work in Provincetown until his death in 1972.
Critical Analysis
Kaeselau's art included portraits, winter landscapes and especially marine paintings, executed in either oil of watercolor. It is interesting to compare Kaeselau's work with that of his early teachers, Joaquín y Sorolla and Charles W. Hawthorne. Kaeselau's Lebanon, NH mural, for example, is a pleasant and placid rural landscape. The landforms in this painting resemble Hawthorne's "Lynmouth Cliffs" paintings. A notable difference is Kaeselau's imaginative use of color for the fields in the foreground, which provides a lively tone to this otherwise very quiet composition.
Comparisons with Sorolla are harder to make. Kaeselau's mural for Concord is, not surprisingly, a depiction of the famous battle at the North Bridge. He shows the British troops lined up, as they unwisely did in the battle, and facing the ragged-looking Minutemen. But there is a heroic figure with a sword and a gorgeous horse - probably a nod to Colonel James Barrett, who led the militiamen at Concord. But Barrett was, at the time of the battle, not the dashing young man depicted in the mural, and his contributions to the engagement were mostly strategic. In any case, Kaeselau presents a composition that depicts heroism in battle, with a nod toward the tragedy of war in the form of a wounded Minuteman in the foreground.
Joaquín y Sorolla also had a painting that depicted a military engagement. His painting "The death of Pedro Velarde y Santillán during the defence of the Monteleon Artillery Barracks," which hangs in the Prado, is one of the most graphic and chilling depictions of military action ever painted. The composition of Sorolla's painting differs from that of Kaeselau's mural, although the settings are not too dissimilar. But Kaeselau's painting is formal and rather quiet for the action being shown, while Sorolla's work is violent and gut-wrenching. The result is that, taken side by side, the Sorolla painting drags the viewer into the thick of a horrible conflict, while the Kaewelau painting appears as mere decoration.
Another point of comparison with Sorolla might be in Kaeselau's love of marine settings. Sorolla was an absolute master in his rendering of water, and there are many Sorolla paintings with beach scenes of unparalleled beauty. Kaeselau also liked to paint water, using a darker palette and never matching the utter luminosity of Sorolla's works. But Kaeselau's marine paintings are compelling in their own right.
Murals
- Concord, Massachusetts - Post Office: Battle at the Bridge
- Lebanon, New Hampshire - Post Office: Rural New Hampshire
References
- Biography of Charles Anton Kaeselau (1889-1972) (Artprice).
- Charles Anton Kaeselau (Wikipedia (Swedish)).
- Charles Anton Kaeselau (Feel the Art).
- Charles Anton Kaeselau (Smithsonian American Art Museum).
- Charles Kaeselau (ask ART).
- Allen French, Historic Concord: A Handbook of Its Story and Its Memorials, With the Story of the Lexington Fight. The Riverside Press , Cambridge, MA (1942). Facsimile edition.
- Search results for "kaeselau" (Provincetown Art Association and Museum).