John%20Whorf  (1903   -   1959)  Works

John Whorf (1903 -1959)

Watercolorist John Whorf was born in Massachusetts in 1903. At age 14, Whorf attended both the St. Botolph Studio and the Boston Museum School. He also took classes with Charles W. Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1918. Provincetown proved to have a great influence on Whorf as a beautiful landscape and a developing artist community. Whorf returned frequently to stay and paint before settling in Provincetown in 1937 with his wife.

At age 16, Whorf traveled to Europe and briefly enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, the Grand Chaumière, and the Académie Colarossi in Paris, where he became increasingly absorbed in watercolor rather than oil painting. In 1924, Grace Horne Gallery in Boston held Whof’s first solo exhibition. The show was a great success and his watercolors even attracted the interest of the legendary John Singer Sargent, who purchased one of Whorf’s pieces. Whorf’s work was featured in the 1938 Paris exhibition of American art presented by the Museum of Modern Art. He became a member of the National Academy of Design in 1947.

Whorf’s works can be found in such collections as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.     

Photo Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum