Ambrose McCarthy Patterson: life and works

Ambrose McCarthy Patterson (29 June 1877 – 26 December 1966) was a painter and printmaker.

Patterson was born in Daylesford, Victoria. He studied at the Melbourne Art School below E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker, at the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne and continued his studies in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian under Lucien Simon, André Lhote and Maxime Maufra. In Paris he became a buddy of compatriot Nellie Melba, the famous soprano; Patterson’s brother, Tom, was married to Melba’s sister, Belle. Through Melba’s influence, he was skilled to continue his studies in the sky of John Singer Sargent. He became portion of the Paris arts scene and exhibited at the first Salon d’Automne exhibitions. He had five paintings at the 1905 Paris Salon at which Henri Matisse and the fauves amazed the art world.

He arrived in Hawaii in 1916 on a stopover from Sidney to New York, and arranged to stay later than a Parisian friend living in Honolulu. During the next 18 months, Patterson made block prints and paintings past particular immersion in Kilauea. His art was included in the Hawaiian Society of Artists Annual in 1917. He left for California in 1918 and approved in Seattle. At the 1918 Spring Annual of the San Francisco Art Association (SFAA) his wood block prints were said to be “especially fine in color.” That summer his art was firm a one-man exhibition at the SFAA galleries and he contributed three color prints (The Steeple Chase, The Bull Fight, and The Long Beach) to the Seventh Annual of the California Society of Etchers.

By September 1918 Patterson had moved to Seattle to doing as a freelance artist, perhaps inborn the first advanced artist in that city, and that slip his art was unconditional a solo feint at the Seattle Fine Arts Society, the first of many exhibitions in Washington State. In 1919 he standard the University of Washington School of Painting and Design. Patterson married painter and former student Viola Hansen in 1922, and the two became major figures of the arts in the Pacific Northwest region. Patterson taught until his retirement in 1947. He died in Seattle in 1966 neglect an impressive record of awards conventional and exhibitions across the United States, including the: Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the World’s Fairs in San Francisco and New York City.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery (Australia) (Canberra), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum are in the middle of the public collections holding works by Ambrose McCarthy Patterson.