George Ames Aldrich: the city's impressionist

1872 – 1941 · South Bend from 1918 · the painter of the river factories

George Ames Aldrich (1872–1941): the best-known landscape painter of South Bend's art scene in the 1920s, and the record's standing lesson in how an artist's own publicity outruns his life. He was born George Eugene Aldrich on June 3, 1872 (one modern account gives 1871), at Worcester, Massachusetts. He studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1889–91, then painting at the Art Students League of New York — under John Twachtman, Kenyon Cox, Sidney Mowbray and William Merritt Chase — and in Paris at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi, under the spell of the Norwegian painter Fritz Thaulow. He was an etcher and illustrator in New York and Boston before he found his signature subject painting the canals and fishing villages of Normandy and Brittany in 1909–10.

The South Bend years: The standard biographical record has him moving to South Bend in 1918 — some accounts bring him west to Chicago first — and from here he painted the factories along the riverbanks, hung murals in the city's Oliver Hotel, exhibited regularly at the Art Institute of Chicago, and stood at the center of the South Bend art movement through the 1920s as a member of the Hoosier Salon. Google Arts & Culture, presenting his Bridge at Quimper, calls him one of Indiana's best-known landscape painters; Indiana Public Media's account calls him, in 2019, still one of the city's favorite sons. He died in Chicago on March 7, 1941.

The dispel: Aldrich promoted himself as a European master of thirty years' standing. The correction waited until the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University mounted the first exhibition of his work since his lifetime, in 2018, with the art historian Wendy Greenhouse's research published in her 2019 book The Art of George Ames Aldrich. Her findings: he was in and out of Europe for about six years in all, and there is no evidence he ever exhibited there. She names his style, without malice, decorative impressionism — and the painter, plainly, a fanciful self-promoter. The paintings, which the market and the museums had never entirely let go, stand on their own record.

Sources:

1. "Aldrich, George Ames," Who Was Who in American Art, as carried in the standard biographical record — the 1872 Worcester birth, the MIT, Art Students League and Paris training, the 1918 move to South Bend, the Oliver Hotel murals, the Art Institute of Chicago exhibitions and Hoosier Salon membership, and the March 7, 1941 death in Chicago.
2. Indiana Public Media, "Indiana Artist George Ames Aldrich Painted The Essence Of Things" (October 28, 2019) — the 1871 birth year as printed there, the factories on the riverbanks around South Bend, Wendy Greenhouse's findings on the European years and the absence of European exhibitions, and the Brauer Museum exhibition as the first since his lifetime.
3. Brauer Museum of Art / Wendy Greenhouse, The Art of George Ames Aldrich (2019) — the retrospective and the research behind it.
4. Google Arts & Culture, George Ames Aldrich, Bridge at Quimper — "one of Indiana's best-known landscape painters."