“There has never been, nor perhaps will there ever be, an artist who so accurately portrayed ruffed grouse, woodcock, pheasant, quail and turkey in each of their individual environments along with sportsmen in pursuit of these game birds,” declared the Reverend William E. Lewis during a eulogy at the memorial service in 1969 for Aiden Lassell Ripley. The artist, who not only achieved legendary status during his lifetime, but even more so after his passing, is clearly recognized as a one of the premier masters of American sporting art, joining such others as Frank Benson, Ogden Pleissner and Roland Clark.
To celebrate Ripley’s achievements and further entrench his recognition in the annals of American art history, a new informative and lavishly illustrated book, The Art of Aiden Lassell Ripley, has recently been released. Penned by sporting art and decoy authority, dealer, author and auctioneer Stephen B. O’Brien Jr, along with Julie Carlson Wildfeuer, the tome has quickly become recognized as the most comprehensive effort to date on the artist.
The book has been released in conjunction with a well-received prior exhibition, “Aiden Lassell Ripley (1896‱969): A Retrospective,” presented at the Cape Cod Museum of Art (CCMA) in 2008. An elaborate effort †and one that comes from O’Brien’s heart †the book chronicles the “artist’s progression and growth, from his early award-winning and acclaimed rise as an Impressionist to his accurate and detailed depictions that continue to shape sporting art today,” writes the author.
The impetus for the book began innocently with the “occasion of meeting Ellie and Richard Cuda eight years ago,” whose “collection of Ripley works formed the basis for the exhibition [at CCMA] that this book is a compendium to,” said O’Brien. The Cudas also contributed heavily to the effort, with the foreword written by Richard and the appearance of more than 20 Ripley works of art from their collection illustrated.
“Anticipation, followed by the thrill of the catch, fuels the fly fisherman to wade cool waters for hours on end. The experience of the hunter includes a similar measure of excitement&†It was this sporting life that was so expertly expressed in the art of Aiden Lassell Ripley,” exclaimed Cuda. The words used to describe the artist by Cuda exude both the passion and excitement of not only a sportsman, but also a collector of sporting art.
Born on December 31, 1896, in Wakefield, a region of Massachusetts where Ripley would remain for virtually the entirety of his life, the young man displayed a variety of artistic talents at an early age. First musically, as an accomplished pianist and tuba player, and then his talent for drawing began to dominate his activities by the age of 8 or 9 years. As a teenager, he studied for a period of time at one of the distinguished art schools in Boston, the Fenway School of Illustration. His art career, however, was interrupted by World War I and his enlistment in the US Army in 1917.
Ripley served in France in field artillery divisions and saw heavy combat in the infamous battles at Marne and Argonne. His musical talents surfaced once again and he served out his career in the armed services as a tuba player in General John Pershing’s band. Pershing, once a conductor of the New York Symphony, believed bands were essential for troop morale. Likely adhering to the general’s ideology, Ripley remained with the band in the European theater until 1919, long after his original outfit had rotated back home to New England.
Upon his return, Ripley found the Fenway School had closed its doors, so he continued his studies at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. Rich in culture in the late Nineteenth Century, Boston was home to many of the leading artists of the day, including John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast, as well as up-and-coming artists, such as Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson.
It was at the museum school that Ripley’s loose Impressionistic style came into its own as he studied under Phillip Hale and the man that would become his friend and mentor, Benson. It was here, the authors surmise, that Ripley was provided a “firm background in draftsmanship, figure drawing and skillfully balanced compositions, as well as a grasp of the Impressionists’ practice of keen, quick observations of tonalities and light effects on objects.”
In 1924, Ripley was awarded a Paige traveling scholarship by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which took the young and impressionable artist to Europe and North Africa. Initially using oils, Ripley quickly turned to watercolors “for the medium’s facility in capturing a scene quickly and for its relative ease of mobility.” His brushwork of the period reflected the Boston School’s loose and fluid styles, as noted in “Venice Scene,” a colorful watercolor on paper measuring 14 by 18 inches.
Returning in 1926, Ripley’s first solo show featuring the watercolors executed in Europe was presented at the Guild of Boston Artists. In 1928, the artist was awarded the Logan Purchase Prize and Medal presented by the International Watercolor Society at its exhibition in Chicago, and the following year he formed a group of artists called “The Six,” who intended to “uphold the older standards of painting from which so many have been slipping away.” Exhibiting at the Copley Gallery in Boston, the group included other standout watercolorists, such as John Whorf.
It was about this time that Ripley began to look to a fresh subject matter †game birds and hunting scenes, something with which he was quite familiar as a lifelong sportsman. A meeting with John C. Philips, a Boston philanthropist and conservationist, resulted in a commission for artwork and cover work for Phillips’s books, A Sportsman’s Scrapbook from 1928 and their follow-up book published in 1933.
Times were good for the artist; commissions were received on a regular basis and illustration work was plentiful.
“As fast as Ripley’s star rose, it came crashing down with the stock market collapse in the fall of 1929,” write O’Brien and Wildfeuer. The Great Depression had diminished demand for old school artistic product, such as portraiture, and it was at this time that Ripley began to focus his attention on illustration work.
During lean times, Ripley supplemented his income by teaching drawing at the Harvard School of Architecture with longtime friend Hermann Dudley Murphy. He also took on some local Works Progress Administration projects, including a series of murals for the Winchester Public Library and the Lexington Post Office. A 6-by-12-foot-long mural at the post office from 1934 depicts “The Ride of Paul Revere,” while a 10-by-20-foot mural at the library from the same year depicts Pilgrims purchasing land from the Indians.
A highly successful guild show that was devoted to sporting art in the 1930s featured a good deal of Ripley’s work. “Despite the economic climate, the exhibit was a resounding success and marked a turning point in Ripley’s career,” noted O’Brien
Ripley’s continued efforts met with immediate success and his sporting art paintings were soon in high demand from wealthy Southern plantation owners that provided posh upland hunts catered toward wealthy Northern sportsmen. A close friend of Eugene Connett, Ripley also created numerous covers for Derrydale Press and he illustrated numerous sporting books.
Magazine covers and artwork for associated articles also became a mainstay of Ripley’s business, with his artwork featured in Esquire, Life, Field and Stream and Boys’ Life . Ripley followed in the footsteps of his early mentor, Benson, when one of his drypoint illustrations, “American Widgeon,” was chosen as the Federal Duck Stamp in 1942.
Ripley painted the world he saw and loved, from “Aunt Alice,” a highly charismatic elderly black woman on a South Carolina plantation who was said to have been born a slave, to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower hunting at the plantation of then-Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey. Paintings were also commissioned for the lodges of the plantations and many decorate their walls today. “Covey in the Goldenrod,” depicting seven grouse taking flight, 1946, is a superb example of Ripley’s work from the collection of Sunny Hill Plantation.
“Covey Rise at Goose Pond,” 1942, is a larger watercolor at 20 by 28 inches, depicting guides on horseback and a dog handler looking on as a client takes aim at birds on the rise. Classic Ripley, the painting’s crisp lines are delineated by dappled areas of sunlight and shade amid the fall scene. It remains in the collection of Groton Plantation.
The Art of Aiden Lassell Ripley is illustrated with more than 200 superb paintings and associated materials that crisscross his lifelong career. Informative and entertaining text chronicles Ripley’s life in chapters such as “Life & Work,” another devoted to his “Illustrations & Murals,” then “Sporting Art, Scenes of the South,” and culminating with the recounting of the “Paul Revere Series,” a group of 14 oils depicting the life and times of Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere. Ripley spent more than four years researching and executing the oils, commissioned by the Paul Revere Life Insurance Company in 1959.
“He used his brush to gain fame and recognition, but also to understand and take in the world around him,” write the authors of one of America’s premier sporting artists. The Art of Aiden Lassell Ripley is priced at $75 and is published by Stephen O’Brien Jr Fine Arts, LLC, 268 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116. For information, 617-536-0536 or www.americansportingart.com .
