Beatrice Van Ness

Beatrice Whitney Van Ness (1888–1981) was an American painter.

Born Beatrice Whitney in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Van Ness grew taking place in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. She entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1905 where she studied gone Frank Weston Benson, Bela Lyon Pratt, Philip Hale, and Edmund Charles Tarbell, among others. Formerly a pupil at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, she established a scholarship from that handing out in 1908 and joined its aptitude two years later. Around 1909 she took summer classes subsequently Charles H. Woodbury, who would go upon to become a mentor for many years. Whitney had an early deed with Odalisque, shown at the National Academy of Design in 1914, which won awards both there and at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and was unconventional bought by William Merritt Chase. In 1921 she founded the art department of Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, remaining upon its talent until 1949 and studying the application of child and adolescent behavior to education practice. She married businessman Carl N. Van Ness in 1915, and later than him summered in Ogunquit and North Haven, Maine; the couple had two daughters. he continued to act out closely behind Benson like in Maine Van Ness died in Brookline, Massachusetts.

One of her paintings, Summer Sunlight (1936), depicts an intimate, domestic scene that most likely occurred in her energy at her island home in Bartlett Harbor in North Haven, Maine subsequent to they spent the summer there. The painting depicts her older daughter who is in the center wearing a large hat, her nephew Winthrop Stearns who has his encourage to the viewer and her neighbor, Barbra Allen who has a tawny banana in her hand. The subject of the painting, however, is the competent sunlight that pervades throughout the painting. in regards to the composition, forms are echoed throughout. A shard of yellowish-brown that cuts into the rim of the umbrella is echoed in the shard of cloud that cuts into the same umbrella and is repeated in the barely visible triangular sail. The blue in Allen's bathing encounter is repeated in a brighter declare in the triangle of oceanic blue at the upper left corner. The beige umbrella withhold serves as an telecaster to the composition and moreover isolates the youthful man from the women's half of the painting. The ascending improvement of heads from right to left and the parallel slanting of the edge of the umbrella are the most pronounced diagonals that allow the scene motion.

Another of her paintings, Woman in Bathing Suit (1930), is a painting of a female figure in a landscape. It is the basis in the 1920s and 30s of the Boston School changing their compositions of American Impressionism by modernizing them in regards to design and attitude. Van Ness retained the outdoor, sunlit figure in the same way as a competent palette that was found in American Impressionism, with her friend and researcher Frank Benson for example, while decreasing descriptive detail, representational volume and the emotional assimilation of the viewer in order to experiment more like design and color. The intense, brilliant, vibrating colors is matched by the easy structure of the large schematic shapes. This creates an effect of chromatic lushness, a mesh of yellows, blues, and purples that are jolted by the stripe of red loose through the bottom of the canvas.

The Beaver Country Day School has founded the Beatrice Van Ness Society in the painter's memory, and her papers are held by the Archives of American Art. A portrait by her of Bela Lyon Pratt is in the store of the National Academy of Design; her performance is furthermore owned by the National Museum of Women in the Arts.