William Abbott Cheever was a lifelong New Englander. He was born in Andover, Massachusetts, taught for a period in Andover and was buried there. As a graduate student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he studied fresco painting with Alexandre Jacovleff. After winning several competitions he was commissioned to do portraits and illustrations. He studied in England in 1936-7 with the award of a Paige Traveling Scholarship, and then taught for many years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and at the Phillips Academy in Andover. Later in life he took commercial jobs in New Hampshire with the Nashua Corporation in Nashua, New Hampshire and the Hermsdorf Co. in Manchester, New Hampshire. In the early 1940s Cheever completed three Post Office murals. He returned to this art form in 1974, when he painted two scenes of Native American life for a McDonald's restaurant in Hooksett, New Hampshire. The Mcdonald's restaurant is no more, but the murals have been restored and preserved in the Council Chambers of the Hooksett Municipal Building.Frances RichFarnum's Sawmill
Critical Analysis
Cheever's style appears somewhat more reserved than that of his mentor Jacovleff. One reviewer characterized his style as "a blend of the sophisticated and the primitve". His mural subjects were all historical in nature, but that could have been as much a product of the taste of the federal government as of Cheever himself. What he was best known for were his portraits of famous New Englanders, which seem to have captured the spirit of the sitters as much as their images. His portrait of Harvard scholar James Haughton Woods shows an introspective man with eyes focused on the distance. By contrast, his portrait of the sculptor Frances Rich shows a woman seemingly poised to leap out of the picture frame!
