Harriet Randall Lumis (1870-1953)
"I never drew or painted anything in my life until I was married." — Harriet Randall Lumis
Harriet Randall Lumis (1870–1953) was an American Impressionist landscape painter celebrated for her luminous depictions of the New England coast and countryside. A founding member of the Academic Artists Association, she remained devoted to representational painting throughout a career that spanned tonalism to high-keyed impressionism.
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"Forest Scene" -
Deerfield Valley
Harriet Randall Lumis was born in 1870 in Salem, Connecticut and grew up there. Nearby was Old Lyme, a thriving Art Colony at that time which had an early influence on her. Lumis moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1892, where she began her formal art studies. Starting in 1910 Lumis studied in Cos Cob, Connecticut. It was there that she met the artists John H. Twachtman and Childe Hassam, who introduced her to the color and technique of the French Impressionists.
Lumis refined her Impressionist style of painting in Gloucester, Massachusets, during the 1920s under the instruction of Hugh Breckenridge at his summer art school. There she began painting in plein air, and she returned to the area summer after summer to paint. The decade of the 1920s was extraordinarily successful for Lumis; she was elected to the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1921 and, by 1924, the National Academy of Design exhibited her paintings which won numerous prizes and awards.
Toward the end of her career, Lumis taught landscape painting while continuing to paint beautiful pictures of New England, including Gloucester and Rockport. These works received much recognition, becoming her most famous paintings, and were included in many exhibitions, including shows at the prestigious National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Buffalo Society of Artists, the Connecticut Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Providence Society of Artists.
From 1938 until her death in 1953, Lumis taught new generations of students in her Springfield studio. In 1949, Lumis was a founding member of the American Artists Association. Works by Lumis are in the collections of the Florence Griswold Museum (Old Lyme, Connecticut); the Butler Institute of American Art (Youngstown, Ohio); the Mattatuck Museum (Waterbury, Connecticut); and the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum (Springfield, Massachusetts).