Paintings by Russell Cheney, November 13-December 11, 1933

Russell Cheney was an American Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and New England regionalist painter. He was born the youngest of eleven children on October 16, 1881 in Manchester, Connecticut to Knight Dexter Cheney and Ednah Dow Cheney. His grandfather John Cheney was an artist. He graduated from Yale University in 1904, where he was a member of the Skull and Bones secret society. He then studied art in New York City at the Art Students League with Kenyon Cox and George Bridgman until 1907. He went to Paris, France to study under Jean Paul Laurens at the Academie Julian. However, after his father’s death in 1908, he returned to the U.S. as well as the Art Students League. This time he studied under William Merritt Chase as well. In 1909, he was elected president of the League and in the same year exhibited a portrait at the Paris Salon. He resigned his post at the League after only a year but continued to take classes there, continuing private lessons with Chase. He exhibited at the Salon again in 1911 and took part in the Armory Show in 1913.

Cheney spent the summers between 1911 and 1914 painting in York and nearby Ogunquit, Maine. In 1912, he studied there with Charles Woodbury. His first American exhibition was shown at the Fourth Annual Exhibition of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts in 1914. Sadly, Cheney battled poor health and spent two years in a Colorado sanitorium. He soon decided to seek warmer climates for treatment and became active in California from 1916. He often painted in Santa Barbara where his sister lived.

His first New York exhibition was in Babcock Galleries 1922 and in the same year a catalog of his paintings was published. In 1929, a book authored by his longtime partner and lover F.O. Matthiesen was published with Cheney’s illustrations. Matthiesen was twenty years younger than Cheney, but was also a Yale graduate and member of Skull and Bones in 1923. Cheney was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and San Francisco Art Society with whom he exhibited from 1916 to 1918. He died in Kittery, Maine on July 12, 1945, where he was living at the time of this 1933 exhibition at the Legion of Honor.

Sources:
Artist biography. Paintings by Russell Cheney, November 13-December 11, 1933, Legion of Honor Exhibition Records, LH-ER. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Archives.
Hughes, Edan Milton, and Crocker Art Museum. Artists in California, 1786-1940. 3d ed. Sacramento, CA: Crocker Art Museum, 2002.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Cheney