An exhibit featuring two of James Carroll Beckwith's paintings is currently on display at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum Gallery located at 120 North Main Street. Beckwith was born in Hannibal in 1852.
The first painting is on loan to the Mark Twain Museum by Nora Creason and Don Metcalf who make their home in both Seattle and Hannibal. Nora and Don acquired the Beckwith painting from a dealer in England who specializes in 18th and 19th century European paintings. The painting is a portrait of Judy Fox, most likely a European socialite who commissioned Beckwith to paint her portrait. Beckwith inscribed the picture Judy Fox/A Bacchante.
Nora, a Hannibal native and also an artist has won many awards over the years. She and her husband are currently in the process of restoring numerous historic buildings in downtown Hannibal. Among them is the Laura Hawkins House built in 1897. This was the home of Judge Louis Hawkins. His mother, Laura Hawkins, Mark Twain's inspiration for the fictional character Becky Thatcher, died in this house in 1928.
The second painting is on loan from the Hannibal Free Public Library and is of Paul Du Chaillu, a popular but controversial African explorer, writer, and lecturer, who first attracted the world's attention by reporting his observations of live gorillas (the first by a Westerner) and pygmies following his return in 1859 from a four year expedition to Gabon in West Africa. In the same year Charles Darwin (1809-1882) published On the Origin of Species, which contained his earth-shaking theory on evolution, so Du Chaillu's accounts of manlike beasts captured the public's imagination and became the subject of international debate. Du Chaillu's first book, Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861), sold more than ten thousand copies in its first two years, earning the French-born naturalist enough royalties to return to Africa and further his lifelong career as an explorer. Over his lifetime, Du Chaillu wrote many more books including novels. Beckwith must have befriended the explorer, to whom he inscribed the portrait to in 1898.
"Beckwith's "Portrait of a Lady with a Mandolin" circa 1900 displays a midpoint in James Beckwith's painting career. Beckwith painted in two styles - the classical style of his earlier years and a more impressionistic style in the latter part of his career (late 1890's until his death in 1917). This painting marks a departure from the use of strong contrasts of light and dark modeling (chiaroscuro) to the use of relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes to express an impressionistic style that employs a lighter palette and emphasizes a more accurate depiction of light."
Further information regarding Beckwith can be found at the Hannibal History Museum at 217 North Main Street.
