Charles C. Svendsen’s studio, circa 1903 (Photo courtesy of Stephen Enzweiler)
This is the second of a two-part series on Cincinnati artist and religious painter, Charles C. Svendsen.
By Stephen Enzweiler
Special to NKyTribune
For the last four months of 1896, Cincinnati artist Charles C. Svendsen had been living in Holland and Belgium, working as the Commissioner of Fine Arts for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. His job had been to catalog and collect Dutch works of art, interview celebrated artists of the country, and report back on the Dutch and Belgian art scene. Now as Christmas approached, he had some time off. He decided to make an expedition to the Holy Land, where he hoped to tour and make detailed notes and sketches of the land and its people to use for his future religious art compositions. While it may seem absurd today for an artist to visit a distant land and expect historical accuracy two millennia after the fact, Svendsen expected just that, and was not the only painter to have had those expectations. William Holman Hunt, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and James Tissot had also gone there once for the very same purpose.
As it turns out, Svendsen probably met Tissot in 1894 as he neared the end of his studies in Paris. It was at an exhibition of Tissot’s religious drawings and watercolors at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Known for most of his life as a successful painter for Paris society, Tissot had a mystical experience and vision in 1885, which radically changed the direction of his life. He suddenly returned to his Catholic faith, and for the rest of his career, he lived a monastic lifestyle and obsessively painted scenes from the Bible, starting with more than 350 gouache paintings of the life of Jesus Christ.
”Apostles Cavern” by Svendsen (watercolor 1897) (Photo courtesy of Stephen Enzweiler)
Despite this unexpected transformation, the people of Paris received Tissot’s exhibition with great enthusiasm. Svendsen had never seen anything like it. Religious artists in the 19th century generally composed works in a visually symbolic narrative designed to teach the faith and inspire devotion. But Tissot’s paintings were composed in what critics came to call his ‘late narrative’ style. He composed scenes purely as visual narration: they were graphic, realistic, overflowing with action and detail and composed with historical accuracy in mind. Most of the historical detail came from sketches he made during expeditions to the Holy Land in 1886–87 and 1889. He went to great lengths to accurately record the actual landscapes of the holy sites and to compile drawings of local people with ‘representative’ appearance and dress for use in his paintings.
From the outset, Svendsen had always seen his mission as a religious painter not only as artistic but also as spiritual. Now like Tissot, William Holman Hunt and Jean-Léon Gérôme before him, it was Svendsen who sought this kind of historical reference for his work. So, he spent Christmas week 1896 in Bethlehem, touring, sketching, drawing, taking photographs, and making extensive notes. For his purposes, this field work proved invaluable, and he came to believe in the historical authenticity of what he saw and experienced. This authenticity would show itself later on, not only in the beautiful etchings he would produce of Bedouins, turbaned Arabs, peasants, and shepherds tending their sheep, but also in the faces, clothing and landscaped scenes of many of his church murals.
“Peasants Passing Homeward into Bethlehem” by Svendsen (Pen and Ink Wash 1899)(Photo courtesy of Stephen Enzweiler)
By mid-January, Svendsen was back in Antwerp. But he eventually returned to Jerusalem the following April to experience the Easter Festival and to continue his sketching. On that second trip, he was commissioned to paint two churches in Palestine: one was the Church of St. Joseph in Nazareth, said to be built over the traditional site of the saint’s carpentry workshop. The other was St. Savior’s Monastery in Jerusalem, which was the home church of the ‘Custodians of the Holy Land’, a Franciscan agency of the Catholic Church that administers and maintains 50 sacred sites in Israel, Jordan, and Syria. At some point, he also made a side trip to India, where he was commissioned to paint panels in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Dhaka in what is now Bangladesh.
When Svendsen finally returned to America in September 1897, he entered a more frenzied phase of his creative life. For the next ten years, he produced hundreds of etchings, paintings and watercolors taken from his Holy Land sketchbooks and notes. Subjects ranged from portraits of rugged Bedouins to Jewish men in conversation in the streets, pilgrims at the tomb of Christ, portraits of men and women in native dress, beggars, vistas of mountains and valleys, Turks in caravans, and more. Already a master etcher, he invented his own process of ‘color etching’, which gave the medium a new dimension in an era when color printing was rare and expensive.
He would exhibit these works successfully for the next 27 years, first beginning in Philadelphia in March 1899, followed that October by a critically acclaimed exhibition at the Detroit Museum of Art, then at the Art Institute of Chicago, in San Francisco, Kansas City, and Milwaukee. At the Royar Gallery in Los Angeles in 1913, Antony Anderson of the Los Angeles Times was especially impressed by the ‘color etchings’. He wrote that they possessed exceptional strength and beauty. “The etchings are printed with care and distinction, giving exquisite tonal qualities in the landscapes,” he went on to say. “There is poetry in the landscape studies, lyrical beauty as well as beauty of lines, tones and masses…”
“Plains of Palestine” by Svendsen in 1904 is considered one of the finest examples of his work during this period (Photo courtesy of Cincinnati Art Galleries)
A highpoint came in 1903, when Svendsen was awarded a Bronze Medal at the 1903 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, for his gouache painting, “Mt. Olivet Shepherd.” The sketches for the work had been made during his 1896 visit to Bethlehem and show a shepherd wrapped in a thick sheepskin coat tending his sheep on the slopes of Jerusalem’s famed Mount of Olives. Though recognized as fine art, at its essence it is a religious work that demonstrates a degree of technical execution, artistic expression and narrative few religious artists of his day could match. The shepherd stands watch over his sheep, gazes into the distance, his expression pensive, protective and yet devoted to his flock. He keeps watch for any sign of the wolf ready to scatter his sheep – the Good Shepherd in visual metaphor.
But Svendsen was also still producing church art on a large scale. His skill as a fresco artist and muralist was well known from his days under Johann Schmitt. He stayed busy with a constant flow of commissions from churches all across the Midwest until at least 1920. In all, he managed to paint an estimated 79 churches in the United States alone. Among the churches in Cincinnati were St. William, St. Andrew, Holy Cross, St. Theresa Home chapel, and St. Stanislaus. There was Church of the Good Shepherd in Toledo, Sacred Heart Church in Dayton, Ohio, Byzantine frescoes in the crypts and catacombs of Mt. St. Sepulchre in Washington, D.C., frescos in St. Benignus, Greenfield, Ohio, and Our Lady of Sorrows in Ashtabula, Ohio. One priest this writer interviewed in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati still remembers Svendsen’s elaborate frescoed ceiling at the chapel of Mount St. Mary Seminary in Norwood (now the Holy Spirit Center) where the interviewee had been a seminarian in 1964. The chapel ceiling was eventually covered over in the years following Vatican II, and his frescoes were thought to be lost.
Only two church buildings in Northern Kentucky were known to have been painted by Svendsen, both no longer existing. One was St. Patrick’s, which stood at the corner of Philadelphia and Elm Streets in Covington. Two murals decorated the wall behind the main altar, one depicting the crucifixion, the other the Assumption of Mary. The second church was the old St. Stephen’s, which stood at 9th & Saratoga Streetsin Newport. A large, elegant fresco titled “Queen of Saints” decorated the man ceiling, with smaller frescos of praying angels adorning the sanctuary.
The only known images of the two frescos painted by Svendsen in 1903 in the old St. Stephen’s Church in Newport (Photo courtesy of Stephen Enzweiler)
Like most artists, Svendsen did not operate in a vacuum. Along with many other fine artists of his day, he was a member of several arts organizations, and exhibited frequently with the Cincinnati Art Club. He circulated freely among his fellow artists, many of whom had been close, personal friends for years. Henry F. Farny, Clement J. Barnhorn and Leon Lippert were counted among his closest friends. Did he know Frank Duveneck? “Oh yes, very well,” Svendsen once told Times Star art critic Henry Humphreys in 1957. “Frank was about 35 when I met him. We were both retouching church murals and ‘Stations’ across the river. His fist teacher, Johann Schmitt, was quite an artist, German born…flowing mane, and fine moustaches, you know.”
Perhaps Svendsen’s crowning – and still best surviving – achievement is the massive murals that decorate the apse of St Francis Xavier Church on Sycamore Street in Cincinnati. Popular today as a romantic setting for weddings, it took three years for him to complete the two main murals behind the altar. The commission came just after he had returned from Munich in 1921, and it became his last major church work. Yet, it endures as the finest example of his religious art and may be considered his masterpiece. The two large panels above the main altar were at that time among the largest religious murals in the country, measuring 30 x 60 feet. On the left is the Jesuit-themed ‘The Vision of St. Ignatius’, and on the right is ‘The Vision of St. Francis Xavier’. The side panels depicting ministering angels were subsequently added by Svendsen in 1937.
In the summer of 1925, he and his wife traveled to Colorado with the idea of producing material as an effort for one more significant exhibition. By now, Svendsen was 53 years old. Much of this painting was done at Rocky Mountain National Park, but by the time he returned home in October, he had painted over 400 canvases. These were the basis of an exhibition in January 1927 at Closson’s Galleries of Cincinnati. “Many of the large and important canvases have elaborate compositions and pictorially have breadth and dignity,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. The paintings themselves were recognized as exceptionally ambitious, often “overpowering,” with vistas and views of mountain landscapes that “are almost metallic in the summer light.” His work was well received by both critics and the public. “Mr. Svendsen has commanded his views,” one critic concluded, “and it is this fact which is the most impressive about his work.”
Washington Park and Music Hall by Charles C. Svendsen (Etching ca. 1900) (Photo courtesy of Philip Enzweiler)
After Closson’s, Svendsen seemed to know his time as a mainstream artist in Cincinnati was drawing to a close. He was nearing 60. After this he stopped exhibiting entirely. He retired to his home on Elberon Avenue in Price Hill and devoted his remaining years to painting for his own pleasure. During his last quarter century, he produced volumes of landscapes, made mainly during visits to his wife’s hometown of Franklin, Kentucky. Even in old age, he remained as energetic as ever. “Svendsen is only 86,” wrote Times Star critic Henry Humphreys on a visit to his home in 1957. “If he stays as healthy and energetic as the day I saw him in his painting-crammed studio, he’ll pass the century mark with no effort at all.”
But Svendsen fell ill only a year after that interview and died on November 25, 1959. After his funeral, his executors opened his house and found room after room filled with canvases stacked in rows against the walls. His studio upstairs was similarly crammed with hundreds of canvases, watercolors, etchings, and drawings of every subject and variety from every era of his life. And after the estate sale, much of Svendsen’s work simply disappeared, with only bits and pieces showing up here and there in modern times in auction houses and online.
But lack of availability may be a sign that much of Charles C. Svendsen’s finest work is kept secure in the many museums and collections throughout the country. He was the first artist to receive distinction of being represented at Chicago’s Vanderpoel Memorial Museum, and his painting “Woman of Dachau” is in the collection of the Taft Museum. His work also may be found in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Stephen Enzweiler is a writer and journalist. He has been a columnist for the Kentucky Enquirer, the Oxford Citizen, and was a senior editor at Y’all Magazine. He is the author of “Oxford in the Civil War: Battle for a Vanquished Land (2010). Mr. Enzweiler is working on a forthcoming biography on artist Charles C. Svendsen.
