Charcoal on Paper

Lovely portrait of an older gentleman done in charcoal by renowned artist Everett Spruce circa 1928. Signed and dated in upper right corner. Dimensions are without a frame.

Everett Franklin Spruce was an artist and teacher who grew up in Arkansas and worked in the state periodically in the 1920s and 1930s. Spruce is considered the most prominent painter to emerge from a group of Texas regionalists in the 1930s. He was highly influenced by his boyhood in the Ozarks, and his paintings always reflected his love of the land and of nature. Everett Spruce was born in Holland (Faulkner County), near Conway (Faulkner County), on December 25, 1907 (some references list 1908). He was the first of six children born to William Everett Spruce and Fanny May (McCarty) Spruce. His father, who was of Irish descent, was a farmer. Despite his father’s disapproval, Spruce enrolled at the DAI, where he studied under Olin Travis and Thomas Stell. While studying at the DAI (1926–1929), Spruce lived in the basement, worked as a janitor, and taught classes for children. During his residency at the DAI, Spruce met Alice Virginia Kramer, a Dallasite of German descent. They exhibited together in Dallas occasionally and, in 1927 and 1928, went to Arkansas to participate in the Travis Ozark Summer Art School held in Cass (Franklin County). Spruce and Kramer were married in Dallas on February 18, 1934; they had twin daughters and two sons. In 1931, Spruce took a position with the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (DMFA) as a gallery assistant. He worked during the day and painted nights and weekends. He was promoted to registrar in 1936, and then to assistant director, before leaving the DMFA in 1940. In 1932, Spruce was included in a select group of Texas artists as part of the “Exhibition of Nine Artists Under the Age of Thirty” at the Dallas Public Art Gallery. After this exhibition, Spruce was grouped with several other Dallas regionalists known as the “Dallas Nine,” including Alexandre Hogue and Jerry Bywaters. He began to exhibit his work across the country. In 1940, Spruce accepted a position as instructor in life drawing and creative design at the University of Texas at Austin. He became a full professor and, from 1949 to 1951, served as chairman of the art department. He retired as professor emeritus in 1974. Although many of his early paintings were based on scenes in the Ozarks, for the majority of his career, Spruce concentrated on the landscape of his adopted state of Texas. He worked primarily in the Hill Country, Big Bend Area, Gulf Coast, and West Texas. He primarily used a style known as expressionism. As an expressionist, he sought to capture not an exact likeness of his subject but rather to evoke his feelings in response to a specific scene. He also incorporated elements of cubism and surrealism in some works and experimented briefly with nonobjective abstraction. Spruce’s early work was about form, and later work focused more on color.

H 8 in. x W 7.25 in. x D .25 in.