Charles W. Ward (American, 1900-1962) Antique Expressionist Still Life with Bag and Potatoes, Signed (c. 1930, Oil on Canvas)
Antique Expressionist Still Life with Bag and Potatoes, Signed (c. 1930, Oil on Canvas). Dark still life with bag and potatoes with an overall blue tone. Signed and stamped by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts en verso. In fair condition with wear to edges.
Size: 18 x 24 in
Mr. Ward received his early education in Trenton, New Jersey, and in 1916 he began taking mechanical drawing courses in the evening at the School of Industrial Arts there, while working in a watch factory during the day, an arrangement which he maintained until 1917. In that year, he went to work on a full-time basis for the American Steel and Wire Company in Trenton, where he mastered the machinist trade, remaining with this company until 1924. For a period during the latter part of those years, he also attended the School of Industrial Arts in Trenton, and from 1924 until 1926, he was at the school on a full-time basis, graduating from the Day Fine Arts course in 1926. During the summer of 1924, he took a manual arts course at Rutgers College.
From 1926 until 1931, Mr. Ward was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, at which he studied painting and sculpture. There he won the Thompson Prize for Composition; the Lea Award for Draughtsmanship; and, in 1930, the Cresson European Traveling Scholarship, which enabled him to go abroad and study in Great Britain, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland.
From 1931 until his death in 1962, Mr. Ward devoted his time exclusively to painting, with the exception of the years 1942-1945 during World War II, when he returned to the American Steel and Wire Company in Trenton, New Jersey, as a machinist. He had lived in Carversville, Pennsylvania, since 1932, and maintained a studio there for thirty years.
His versatile talent encompassed portrait, mural and landscapes, in watercolors and oils. He also did lithography, etchings and pastel drawings. Among the foremost artists in the Bucks County area of Pennsylvania, he drew his inspiration from the surrounding scene there, and from painting trips to Mexico, the first in 1939, and the second, with his family, in 1954.
His mural work began in 1935, when he executed his "Progress of Industry" mural in the Trenton, New Jersey, Post Office, as the nation's first Post Office mural under the Public Works of Art Project. In 1937 he completed two others in the same building, entitled "Rural Delivery", and "The Second Battle of Trenton". Later large works were "Cotton Picking", in the Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, Post Office, and two murals (now lost) which adorn the walls of the Bucks County Playhouse Inn, at New Hope, Pennsylvania. - Anna E. Karlberg
