HARRY LEITH-ROSS: WOODSTOCK & NEW HOPE LANDSCAPE PAINTER

By Bruce Weber

This month's post focuses on the artist Harry-Leith Ross, whose painting Snowfall is featured in the exhibition In the Open Air: The Art Students League's Woodstock School of Landscape Painting and Its Impact, on view through December 13th at the Woodstock School of Art.

There are two programs in November relating to the exhibition at the Woodstock School of Art. On Saturday November 8th at 2 p.m. there is the panel discussion, An Anniversary Celebration of Woodstock and the Art Students League of New York, which includes artists Bruce Dorfman, Paula Nelson, and Richard Pantell, and for which I am serving as moderator. On Sunday November 30th at 2 p.m. I will be giving part 2 of my gallery talk on the exhibition.

Peter A. Juley & Son

Harry Leith-Ross, c. 1930

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Harry Leith-Ross (who was nick-named Tony) was born in the British colony of Mauritius - an island located in the Indian Ocean off the coast of South Africa and east of Madagascar. He spent his formative years attending schools in Scotland and England in preparation for a career in business or government service. His interest in becoming an artist evolved, and while studying engineering at the University of Birmingham he honed his drawing skills.

Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915)

Pinks in the Breakers, c. 1875-1885

Rijksmuseum 

Leith-Ross spent several years in New Mexico and Colorado before travelling to Paris in about 1908 to study painting at the Academie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens. From there he moved to England, where he studied landscape painting in Cornwall with Stanhope Forbes. The work of Leith-Ross’s uncle Henrik Willem Mesdag, a leading member of the late 19th century Hague School in Holland, was an important early influence.

Harry Leith-Ross (1886-1973)

Grey Woods, Woodstock, c. 1913

Private Collection

In 1913, Leith-Ross moved to New York City, where he studied painting with C. Y. Turner at the National Academy of Design. His experience sketching in Central Park and studying landscape paintings in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art motivated him to devote his full attention to becoming a landscape painter. In the summer of 1913 he become a student of John F. Carlson at the Art Students League’s Woodstock School of Landscape Painting, and a private student of Birge Harrison, who led the school from its start in 1906 through 1911, before passing the leadership along to his former assistant.

John Folinsbee (1892-1972)

Harry Leith-Ross Painting Outdoors, 1913

Private Collection

John Folinsbee (1892-1972)

Untitled (Woodstock), 1912

Priavte Collection

Leith-Ross became close friends with fellow Carlson and Harrison student John Folinsbee. During the course of his study in Woodstock Folinsbee created a painting of Leith-Ross sketching outdoors, and later painted Leith-Ross’s diploma portrait for the National Academy of Design. In 1913, they shared a barn studio in Woodstock, and the following year they lived and shared a studio in Harrison’s home. Leith-Ross later related that “under the guidance of John Carlson and Birge Harrison [my work and that of John Folinsbee] developed in technical knowledge and assurance. We spent a winter with Mr. and Mrs. Harrison in their lovely home in the Catskills and it was then that both John Folinsbee and I had our work accepted in the national exhibitions.”(1)

Harry Leith-Ross (1886-1973)

Winter Night, c. 1913

Woodstock Artists Association and Museum

[Painting donated by family of

Woodstock artist Zulma Steele]

Leith-Ross remained close to Harrison for decades. Harrison helped him learn how to encapsulate the spirit and poetic feeling of a place, as well as that of each season.

In his early works he followed Harrison’s example in favoring the transitional times of dawn or dusk (preferring grey days to bright days), and in rendering the most subtle and muted color harmonies. Carlson strongly influenced Leith-Ross’s design sense and favoring of a rich impasto. He sometimes adopted Carlson’s stylistic practice of placing dark trees in the foregrounds of his compositions, where they throw everything into sharp relief.

Harry Leith-Ross (1886-1973)

Shultis’s Mill, c. 1922

Private Collection

Harry Leith-Ross (1886-1973)

Snowfall, 1923

Collection of Elizabeth Mow

Harry Leith-Ross (1886-1973)

Canal Barge, c. 1935

National Academy of Design

In kinship with Harrison and Carlson, Leith-Ross discovered beauty along country roads and on neighboring farms. Eventually he developed a major interest in picturing buildings, bridges, boats and barges, which he painted from interesting and unexpected angles, including from below or off center. Leith-Ross envisioned his compositional designs in terms of lines, circles, triangles, rectangles and helixes, which he employed to focus or direct the viewers eye, such as in his painting Canal Barge, which he donated to the National Academy of Design in New York in fulfillment of his election as a full Academician.

Details of Wetterau Map

of Artists Houses of Woodstock, 1926

[Includes House of Harry Leith-Ross on Lower Byrdcliffe Road]

After serving in the United States Army in World War I, Leith-Ross returned to Woodstock. He was intimately involved with the founding of the Woodstock Art Association in 1919 and was also active as a founding member and teacher at the Rockport Art Association in Cape Cod

from 1919-1925, when he rented out his Woodstock house during the summer months. Following his service in the army he purchased an old red barn on Lower Byrdcliffe Road, and built a home on the property. The house was a short walking distance to those of artists Eugene

Speicher, George Bellows, and Charles Rosen.

Prior to America’s entrance into the first World War, Birge Harrison encouraged Leith-Ross and John Follinsbee to spend time in the art colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where they eventually resettled. Harrison had a second home in the town, near his son-in-law, the landscape painter Robert Spencer. Harrison invited Leith-Ross to spend the winter of 1914 at his home in New Hope, and over the next two decades he made frequent visits to the town. In 1934 he covered Folinsbee’s private teaching duties in New Hope, and the experience helped encourage him to move there the following year.

Harry Leith-Ross (1886-1973)

The Bridge at New Hope, c. 1936-1940

Private Collection

Harry Leith-Ross (1886-1973)

Nightfall on Union Street, n.d.

Watercolor on paper

Private Collection

Leith-Ross now devoted his attention to painting landscapes of the scenic Delaware Valley, and became an integral member of the New Hope art community. He adopted a a bolder nd more vibrant palette, emphasized sparkling, jewel-like tonalities, and employed broken brushwork and a rich thick impasto, while continuing to be highly creative in his use and placement of line. Eventually the artist assimilated some of the formal and coloristic ideas of the modern school. As he remarked “So well insulated was I by my training and by the conservative New England atmosphere that the new ideas in Art which were being felt throughout the world left little impression on me. It was not until the later thirties that I began to assimilate some of the ideas of the modern movement. The reading of Sheldon Cheney’s A World History of Art [of 1946] showed me how much I had to learn and helped me break away somewhat from the representational tradition in which I had been steeped.”(1)

John Folinsbee (1892-1972)

Harry Leith-Ross, 1928

National Academy of Design

Harry Leith-Ross passed away in 1973 in a Pineville, Pennsylvania nursing home, having lost his eyesight a few years before.

(1) Harry Leith-Ross, "Formative Years," The Delaware Valley Colony (September 1946), p. 10. The standard study of the artist work is Erika Jaeger-Smith, Poetry in Design: The Art of Harry Leith-Ross (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Leith-Ross's participation

in the battles between the more traditional and radical artists in Woodstock in the course of the early 1920s is noted in my article "In Quest of Harmony: The Founding and Early Yeats of the Woodstock Artists Association," The Hudson River Valley Review, vol. 36, no. 1 (Autumn 2019),

p. 17.