Earl Stetson Crawford Sold at Auction Prices

Painter, Etcher, Wall painter, Glass painter, Porträtmaler, b. 1877 - d. 1965

Earl Stetson Crawford (1877-1965): Earl Stetson Crawford was born into a prominent Philadelphia family, the grandson of hat-maker, John B. Stetson. At the turn of the 19th century, he joined a stream of aspiring American artists heading to Paris and enrolled in the newly-opened Academie Carmen of Early Modernist James McNeill Whistler. The eccentric Whistler thought enough of Crawford’s abilities to appoint him “monitor” of his art class, but when Crawford returned to the U.S., he was not to follow his teacher in challenging the canons of conventional art.

Crawford made a career for himself as a popular Gilded Age portrait painter, muralist, and illustrator, providing the floral festoons for ingenue studies by Howard Chandler Christy in publications like The Christy Girl (1906) and Lovely Lady (1910). As one contemporary reviewer observed, Crawford’s “dominant art note is the decorative.”

The year 1923 marking a turning point in Crawford’s life. He moved with his wife, Brenetta, an accomplished painter of miniatures, to the south of France, where the couple lived until the outbreak of World War II forced them to return to the U.S. The Gilded Age critic had already noted a certain “mystic and symbolist” element in Crawford’s art. It is tempting to see his return to the continent of Van Eyck, Memling, and Holbein, whose paintings he had so admired in his student years, as a sign that this side of his artistic temperament was coming to the fore.

Crawford, the ex-patriot artist, devoted himself almost exclusively to etchings, which he considered the purest form of printmaking. He abandoned the high society studies of his New York period for the simpler fare of European peasant life and provincial folk festivals. Religious themes appeared more often in his work. The Crawford drawings and etchings in the Sacred Art Pilgrim collection date from the early 1950s, when the artist had settled in Pasadena, California.