Frank Weston Benson was born to George and Elisabeth Frost Poole Benson at 46 Washington Square, Salem, Massachusetts. Varying light and the ever-changing sweep of water were his constant companions in youth. He spent his childhood exploring the nearby beaches, wharves, marshes, and woods, learning to make the detailed observations he would practice throughout his long and productive life.
Rail, one of the earliest known Benson paintings, was completed when he was sixteen. Despit his age, Benson displayed an exceptional grasp of light and its effects.
Benson made his first etching,Salem Harbor, while he was at the Museum School in Boston, where he was the editor of the student art magazine. Dissatisfied with his early efforts, he abandoned etching for thirty years.
Benson created Paris Parade while he was at the Académie Julian in Paris. This small oil painting, an experiment with light, reveals his future mastery and foretells his involvement with impressionism. During a summer of painting in a garret room at the Grand Hotel in Concarneau, Benson became engaged to Ellen Peirson, the daughter of Salem friends. They married three years later, after Benson felt that his career was established.
Portrait of Margaret Washburn, which required twenty-six sittings, marked the beginning of numerous commissions from judges, college presidents, and businessmen, as well as friends and members of Benson's family.
Frank Benson returned to his alma mater, the Museum School in Boston, where he taught until 1913. He and former classmate and artist Edmund Tarbell developed the school into one of the preeminent art schools in the country.
Moving toward plein or open-air work, Benson produced many canvases of the New Hampshire countryside, including the Mt. Monadnock region, Newcastle seascapes and boats moored in Portsmouth harbor.
Benson and nine other artists, discontented with the growing conservatism and declining standards of the Society of American Artists, formed a separate group known as "The Ten," experimenting with impressionism and mounting their own exhibitions.
The Sisters marks the beginning of Benson's mature impressionist period. Highly touted by critics and judges, it won awards and unanimous praise. Few artists of that era had been able to capture the effects of sunlight as well as Benson had.
The Benson family began summering on North Haven Island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, where Benson gained increasing renown for his plein- air works.
The great fire of Salem destroyed Benson's daughter Eleanor's home and some of his work
My Daughter Elisabeth is a good example of Benson's attention to composition. Note the arrangement of light and dark, the placement of diagonals that keep the eye moving, and Elisabeth as focal point.
Benson became seriously interested in still-life painting at this point in his life. Over the next twenty-four years, he completed more than thirty still lifes in both oil and watercolor, combining flowers from his gardens with porcelain pieces and textiles seen in his larger works. Nasturtiums in a Vase is a typical example of his use of flowers and objects d'art.
A masterful depiction of indoor illumination, Reflections is Benson's last-known interior. He portrayed his daughter Elisabeth in a beautifully reflective mandarin coat surrounded by decorative elements important to the composition.
In preparation for salmon fishing in Canada, Benson took his son George's advice and brought along watercolors and paper. the perfect medium for depicting the sporting life he loved. He painted more than 600 watercolors, reaching his peak in the 1920s and 1930s.
As he grew older, Benson turned once again to birds as a favored subject. Great White Herons displays not only his eye for composition but his keen knowledge of birds, as each bird is depicted in a different position of flight.
In Casting for Salmon, a spare composition featuring a lone fisherman, Benson demonstrated his skills as an etcher. It bears strong parallels to the work of the Japanese artists. Benson made 359 etchings, most of them of waterfowl.
Benson dies in his Salem home on Chestnut Street