Artists Find Traditional Style of Painting Is Popular Again

Thomas Dunlay’s struggle to learn the traditional techniques of painting led him to despair and thoughts of a career change 17 years ago. After all, no one was interested in Classical Realism, teachers were scarce and collectors even fewer.

But he stuck with traditional painting, training in the style of the once popular Boston School. And as cultural tastes turn from the unrestrained moods of Modernism to the craftsmanship of the traditional arts, Dunlay and other Boston School painters now are thriving.

The tall, husky 37-year-old artist’s earnings have reached six figures in recent years, and Dunlay’s paintings are selling faster than he can paint them.

Last year his “Winter Snowfall,” a familiar scene of Boston’s Public Garden at dusk, sold for $100,000. Now Dunlay has been commissioned by a former State Department official to paint the White House Rose Garden.

“Traditional painting has come back very, very strong. It is here to stay,” Dunlay said. “There is only one major problem: that is that so much of the craft and the language has been lost. Except for a handful of people in the world, it may be lost forever.”

The Boston School, considered to be the longest continuing style of traditional painting that survives today, brings together the sharp images of American Realism with the bright colors of Impressionism. About 40 painters around the nation and in Europe consider themselves Boston School painters, disciples of a tradition that developed here in the 19th Century.

The aims and values of the Boston School are evident in “Winter Snowfall,” a view of pedestrians in winter garb traversing the bridge over the Public Garden’s duck pond as the bridge’s lights bob against shadowy images of distant office buildings.

The often-reproduced painting hung for about a year in the exclusive St. Botolph Club before communications mogul David Mugar paid $100,000 for it last year. Dunlay said he receives calls every day from people wishing to purchase it.

“It became a kind of popular icon through these Christmas cards and reproductions and prints that were sold,” said William Coles, a noted Boston art historian.

At the outset of World War I, several major Boston School painters established the Guild of Boston Artists. The cooperative gallery proved to be one of the most successful in the city and is still operating.

Boston was a natural source of strong traditional painting, according to Coles. John Singer Sargent and John Singleton Copley, noted painters with ties to the European art community, made their homes here.

“Boston was always a center for painting from the 18th Century on. Major painters like Copley and Gilbert Stewart worked here and also worked in England so they had international connections and expertise,” Coles said.

At the end of the 18th Century the new values of the French School began to influence Boston painters studying abroad, but Coles said it was the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ establishment of a school in 1876 that entrenched Boston painters in European training.

The Boston School emphasized accurate drawing, which combined with the Impressionists’ use of color to produce a Realism that was more pleasing to the eye than the somber tones of other traditional styles, such as Renaissance painting. But from the Great Depression to World War II, traditional painting in the United States reached its nadir and modernism, with its disregard for form and line, grew in prominence.

“It had a very destructive effect because the whole traditional curriculum of the schools began to fall apart and the focus was really on self-expression rather than on training,” Coles said.

Dunlay was a victim of the art school rebellion. The traditional training he sought was unavailable when he entered the Massachusetts College of Art in 1969.

“At that point there was a real movement to suppress anything to do with traditional painting,” Dunlay said. “The teachers tried to ridicule me into leaving, quitting painting, because I wasn’t interested in ‘expressing myself’ in terms of modern attitudes.”

Frustrated by repeated confrontations with his instructors, Dunlay left the college and searched for a painter with whom to study. When he had nearly given up, he discovered a key figure in the transition from the old Boston School to today’s Boston School painters: R.H. Ives Gammell.

Gammell set up an atelier in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood when he foresaw the potential collapse of accurate drawing and traditional painting in the 1930s. Until his death in 1981 he had dozens of pupils, many of whom are working today in Minneapolis; Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and in other cities, including Florence, Italy.