Charles W. Ward (1900-1962)

Ward in His Studio

Biography

Charles William Ward was born in Trenton, NJ in 1900, the son of a machinist. At age 14 he took a job in a watch factory. Two years later he began taking night classes at the School of Industrial Arts in Trenton, while working in the watch factory during the day. By 1917 he had a full-time job as a machinist at American Steel and Wire Company, where he worked from 1917-1924.

In the summer of 1924 Ward attended a manual arts course at Rutgers College, and he enrolled in the School of Industrial Arts from 1924-1926. Graduating from their Fine Arts course in 1926, he studied painting and sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1926-1931. His teachers there included the Impressionist painter Daniel Garber and the muralist George Harding. At the Academy he won prizes for composition and draughtsmanship and, in 1930, the Cresson European Traveling Scholarship, that enabled him to study in countries across the continent.

Except for an interlude in World War II, Ward worked full-time as a painter from 1931 until his death in 1962. He had a studio in Carversville, PA where he lived from 1932-1962. His first one-man show was at Croyne & Lowndes Gallery in New York, followed by many other one-man and group exhibitions. For 25 years he exhibited at the Phillips Mill Art Show in New Hope, PA.

Within two weeks of the inauguration of Public Works of Art Project, Ward was hired to create a mural for the Trenton Post Office. His work "Progress and Industry" was installed in 1935 as the first federal Post Office mural. Ward completed two other murals for the Trenton Post Office in 1937, "Rural Delivery" and "The Second Battle of Trenton." He complete one more Post Office mural, "Cotton Pickers," for Roanoke Rapids, NC in 1938. Later murals for the Bucks County Playhouse Inn in New Hope, PA were subsequently lost.

Ward spent several months on a painting trip to Mexico in 1939, after which he proposed to Anna Elizabeth Karlberg. She turned him down initially, after which he rampaged through his studio and destroyed dozens of his canvases. Eventually Anna relented, and the couple was married in 1942. They had two daughters, Kristina Maria (b.1943), who became a musician, and Mary Ellen (b.1945), who became an artist.

During World War II Ward returned to his machinist job at American Steel and Wire Company (1942-1945). In 1954 he took his family on another painting trip to Mexico. He was featured on the cover of the Bucks County Traveler in 1958. And he taught life class and advanced painting in part-time positions at the School of Industrial Arts and Trenton Junior College from 1959 until his death in 1962.

Ward had several posthumous retrospectives - in New Hope, PA (1963), Doylestown, PA (1979), Buckingham, PA (1998), Bedminster, PA (2004), and Trenton, NJ (2007).

Industry (1933)
Snowy Fields (1939)
Goldie Peacock's House (1935)

Critical Analysis

Charles Ward was a regionalist who spent his entire career in Carversville, Bucks County, PA. When he visited Mexico, one of the charms he found in the country was a village that reminded him of Carversville. His artist output included portraits, murals and landscapes, done in watercolors and oils. He also worked at lithography, etching and pastel drawings.

Ward's murals are remarkable for several reasons. First, as noted above, his Trenton mural "Progress of Industry" was the first of the federal Post Office murals. His murals showed a strong influence of his mentor, George Harding. He tended to outline his figures and then fill in his colors. This created a collage-like effect in some of his work, with an assortment of images not quite melded together in the overall work. That said, his compositions were strong, and his murals are almost an archetype of what we think of as a New Deal mural.

Second, given Ward's experience as a machinist, his industrial scenes show a real feel for what he is showing. He was not one of those artists who visited a site, took a few sketches, and tried to put together a composite of what he had seen. Rather, his years of experience helped him to create coherent images of the factory environment as a whole.

Finally, there is a characteristic of Ward's work, not uncommon among Depression Era muralists - his keen sympathy for the social conditions under which the people he dispicted were toiling. Note, also that the scenes he painted were typically racially integrated, a fact that disturbed his audience in Roanoke Rapids, NC, some of whom desired that he should cut out portions of his mural for the Post Office there. Fortunately, Ward prevailed, and the mural was installed as he had painted it. Nonetheless, even today, some lawyers in the law office that has purchased the old Post Office building remain visibly uncomfortable with the scene of hard-working black women in the cotton fields of North Carolina.

Murals

References

  1. Biography of Charles W. Ward (1900-1962) (Charles W. Ward). Biography by his wife, Anna E. Karlberg Ward.
  2. Charles W. Ward (Bucks County Artists Database).
  3. Charles William Ward (askART).
  4. New Look at New Deal Murals, The Artful Blogger December 2 (2009).