The summer of 1883, Kenyon’s first year in France, he joined many of other American painters of the Academie Julian along the famed Brittany coast of France, where they formed a small colony.¹ The earliest of Kenyon’s sketchbooks to survive is from this era and contains pencil sketches of Pont-Aven and Concarneau.

The medieval walled town of Concarneau is one of the most photographed in Brittany, a popular resort and one of France’s largest fishing ports. An artist’s haven populated by notables such as Robert Wylie in the 1860s, the town still has a creative atmosphere as does nearby Pont-Aven, where Gauguin once had a studio. Pont-Aven is a vibrant and charming destination peppered with art galleries, shops and restaurants. A boat trip leads to the nearby seabird sanctuaries of Iles des Glénan.

A delightful notation of a bit of local color from this sketchbook depicts a menhir surmounted by a cross with a great barrel set at its base and Breton peasants standing about. It is a summary sketch with a minimum of linear shading that contains hints of the sure and decisive character of his later drawings.

In another sketchbook, which is not dated but stylistically must date from this first year in Europe, is a more finished sketch that places him in Normandy.² It depicts what must have been one of his artist companions taking his ease at the edge of a cliff and is a charming vignette of the art student’s life. He reclines with his head resting on his painting kit and his bowler hat tilted to shade his eyes; the grandeur of the scene is not seen but felt by the young man and only hinted at in this drawing. No painting has been attempted; instead one is left with the impression that the trek to the motif was arduous enough to cause him to forget his original purpose and be at one with the breezes that carry the gulls and the fragrances of the seaside.

That both sketchbooks contain drawings executed in Venice and Normandy means that Kenyon’s first year in Europe was a very full one. His landscape drawings vary greatly from minimal notations to carefully detailed pencil or ink drawings. The figure drawings in the small sketchbooks are clearly life studies of the academic sort, but it is easy to see that his affinity was with what he experienced on his travels.

 

An oil sketch from 1884 gives a stronger indication of Kenyon’s sensitivity for the significance of the modest. Thinly but surely painted on a small wood panel, it depicts two crosses in the churchyard at Nizon, Finistere.³ He isolated two tipsy crosses, each one catching the light that falls on it in a different way, causing the taller to read as a bright positive, whereas the shorter one is duller and more recessive. It is a suggestive image, for the two crosses lean against one another with their arms interlocked much as two lovers might as they stroll through the countryside with the sun at their backs. It is a touchingly poignant image sensitively done; however, the symbolism contained in this painting is rare in Kenyon’s work.

Kenyon, like so many others before him, traveled to Venice and was enchanted by this floating world. He did not, however, seem to have any of his predecessors in mind when he painted his small studies. Venice is a view, not of the Grand Canal, but of a modest peninsula with fishing boats moored along the quay.⁴ Unpainted primed canvas is evident in the foreground water and especially to the left, where the side of one of the buildings is left devoid of paint and defined by its red tile roof and soft purple shaded side that carries two green shutters.

The focus of the painting is the bright thickly painted facade to the right of center. Pinks and yellows with touches of green, blue, and purple laid on with the palette knife effect a sparkling light-drenched area. Painting swiftly with rather broad brushstrokes and palette knife, Kenyon was obliged to omit a great deal of the detail emphasizing the formal relationships of these geometric forms in terms of planes. Buildings, of course, lend themselves to this, but he carried it into the touches that make up the water and the clouds as well.

 

Kenyon’s Farm at Night with Sheep, another painting from the 1880s, is an indication of the artist’s sensitivity to the subtleties of a situation that is just the opposite of bright sunlight. Three houses of obvious Breton pattern and a shepherd with his flock are illuminated by the cool light of the moon. The mood is evocative; yet fascinating touches catch the eye and give it an intriguing balance. The complexity of the shadow of one chimney as it plays on the bland wall of the neighboring house and the warm pink and yellow glow of the open window give the center of the painting an irregular focus. The sheep and shepherd at the lower left heading along the road toward the house at the far end of the perspective, a lone star shimmering in the slate blue sky, and to the far right under the eave of the thatched hut touches of bright red as if the light contained within it seeps out of a chink to be tinted by the thatch, all serve to enliven one’s interest in the perimeter of the composition while being intimately linked to the whole.

Somewhere between this cool painting and Venice would exist Kenyon’s lost 1889 Salon entry entitled A Foggy Morning, Venice.

Notes

1. Many of the students of the Academie Julian spent their summers in Brittany. Later in the 1880s a group of young French painters from this Academie went to Brittany and came to be known as the Nabis. For the Americans the aforementioned catalogue by David Sellin is illuminating. (See note 22, page 21 above.)
2. This undated sketchbook bears a label from a Providence, Rhode Island, supplier and notes on the inside cover the artist’s name and “Steamship Abyssinia;” no doubt the ship that took him to Europe. Also noted is “Atelier Boulanger and Lefebvre, Atelier Julian, Rue St. Denis’” These bits of information would tend to indicate that it was a notebook Kenyon brought with him from the United States on his first trip, for otherwise there would have been no need to note the location of the Academie Julian.
3. This painting has oil sketches of cows on the reverse with the further notation “Nizon churchyard, Finistere.” It is worth noting that several years after this Gauguin would choose the Calvary at Nizon as the basis of one of his paintings (The Calvary-Green Christ, 1889, oil on canvas, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Brussels).
4. This painting is a study for a finished painting of the same size in a private collection.

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