Caleb Arnold Slade

Caleb Arnold Slade (American, 1882-1961)

Caleb Arnold Slade was born in Acushmet, Massachusetts, in 1882. After graduating from Brown University in 1904, he first studied art at the Art Student’s League in New York City with Louis Loab, Frank Dumond and others, while he supported himself by drawing illustrations. By the end of 1905, he established a cosmopolitan studio on Paris’s Left Bank and diligently studied with Jean Paul Laurens, Bashet, Schommer and others, while painting in Paris, Moret, Brittany, Holland and Venice.

Philip Hale wrote on November 16, 1909 (Boston Transcript), "One hears a good deal of the influence of Matisse on the younger American artists in Paris, but there is no hint of this in Mr. Slade’s work. Rather, the things are done straight from the shoulder--very directly painted, in short, and with no particular mannerism." The Boston Monitor (11/13/09) said Slade’s work "is frank and fearless…full of jolly color…enthusiasm and confidence….".

Earlier in November, 1908, the New York Herald observed that Slade "succeeds in the rendering of the pale blues and greens familiar to Paris and its rivers." In March of 1912 Slade had a sell-out one-man exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Club, and by 1920 he was renowned for his sea and landscapes painted executed in France, Italy, and America. Slade became famous, too, for his canvases depicting soldiers returning and leaving for battle in France during the onset of World War I, his work being reproduced in The Literary Digest, Woman’s Home Companion and the United States newspapers.

In 1918, Slade was sent to Chateau-sur-Seine under secret order to study and construct camouflage for the U.S. troops, and by the end of the war he was commissioned to paint the portraits of V.P. Dases, Senator Borah, Admiral Moffatt, and General Frank T. Hines. The Boston Traveler reported on March 15, 1912, Slade’s canvases have stamped him as a painter who possesses the deepest imagination united with the keenest of understanding and mastery."

Slade was a member of the Philadelphia, Boston and Paris Art Clubs, the Allied Artists, Les Artists Indépendent in Paris, and he is represented in the collections of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Liverpool’s Walker Exhibition, London’s Royal Albert Hall, the Paris Salon, the Royal Society of Artists, and many others. He died in Truro, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod) in 1961.

[Taken from the internet web site of Comenos Fine Arts, Boston, www.comenosfinearts.com, 2/7/2000 --jag]