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Game of Checkers
Checkers Artist Harold Mathews Brett
Harold Mathews Brett
1880-1955
Middleboro, Massachusetts
Checkers Game
- Brett was a landscape and portrait painter as well as illustrator for books and magazines.
- He favoured ink drawings, oil and watercolour paintings and mixed/multi-media in his illustrations and is known for his illustrations and paintings of nostalgic New England scenes.
- The artist grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, and studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under Philip Hale and Frank Benson and then moved to New York to study at the Art Students League with Walter Appleton Clark, H. Siddons Mowbray and Kenyon Cox.
- In 1906, after he had acquired his basic training, Brett journeyed to Wilmington, Delaware, to study further under the famous illustrator Howard Pyle and soon created illustrations for the magazine, Harpers Weekly, as well as other national magazines.
- Though Harold favoured illustration, he also painted simple genre scenes centred around daily human activity such as in the painting ‘Checkers Game’, which realistically depicted a moment in time where a group of men were heavily involved in a good game at the checkerboard in a country store or warehouse setting.
- The checkers players were depicted in a conversation over the next checkers move and although Brett did paint portraits, his characters in this every day scene bore a cartoon look.
- With time he moved to Chatham on Cape Cod and for several years was associated with the Fenway School of Illustration in Boston and while living in New England, Brett worked primarily as an illustrator, creating unique scenes and images for Colliers, Ladies Home Journal and Country Gentleman.
- Harold also designed illustrations for Lucretia Hales,'The Peterkin Papers' and several books by the Cape author, Joseph C. Lincoln.
- As the artist particularly liked to create New England subjects with an historical setting, several of his works reflected this simple, nostalgic theme in a realistic, representational fashion.
- Brett eventually specialized in portraiture and he painted a series of portraits of Cape Cod sea captains, who were depicted in a simple, straightforward manner.
- It would appear that his art represented the way he saw his subjects and the manner in which he’d like the rest of the world to visualize them, for his male characters were usually seen as composed and serious, and the woman were viewed as genteel and charming.
- Their images evoked a nostalgic feeling for a familiar, yet different, less complex period in history.
- Brett's artistic renderings of local Cape scenes held the greatest appeal due to the simplicity and quaintness of the paintings and although they were created during the 1930’s and 1940’s, they did not reflect the influence of Impressionism that was popular in this period.
- His illustrations were definitely the most moving and effective of his art and the viewer could easily identify with the affection that he recalled a specific place and time; moreover, one could imagine the artist lingering in front of his seascape or landscape scenes, absorbing the charm of that moment in time.
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CHECKERS CHEST
Two Player