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A Basket of Chips ings, paintings, and sketches on my studio walls. I advertised for pupils by placing examples of my work in store windows, with a card attached announcing the opening of my art schoolll I was eager to begin, and confident, though the comforting knowledge that no one had been able to make enough to keep a studio going in Salt Lake City, was ever before me. What was going to be my fate? I went into the game to win from the first, and I did win. I soon had a good class of pupils. The first day that I opened up, my old friend, John Hafen,l' brought a young man to see my work. This young man bought my picture of "Grapes," and paid twenty dollars down for it.13 11 One of Harwood's earliest students was Herman H. Haag (1871-1875), who later established a creditable local reputation as a painter. Originally from Stuttgart, Germany, Haag, an L. D. S. convert, traveled all the way to Salt Lake City to be advised by Harwood and others to study art in Paris. Harwood thought Haag had exceptional talent when the teenager took lessons from him in Utah, and Haag proved it by taking a prize in composition at the Julian Academy in France where he had gone to study. He won "over 40 competitors" not even a year after his arrival in France. Haag returned to Utah in the early nineties and was hired at the University of Utah by the Art Department in 1873. Haag brought a new and solid talent to the University of Utah staff. However, on October 12, 1875, the young man died just before his twenty-fourth birthday. Olpin, Dic~iomq~, 105. I3 John Hafen (1856-1710) originally came to Utah with his family from Switzerland at the age of six. In 1862 Dr. Karl Maeser organized the Twentieth Ward Academy or Seminary "upon the solicitation of a group of prominent men such as . . . Charles R. Savage, and with the approval of Brigham Young." Drawing was included in the curriculum and John Hafen became one of the early students. After he married in 1879, Hafen left Salt Lake to open a photographic gallery first in American Fork and then in Springville. Specializing in the en- largement of "historical photos," he and his large family (eventually there were ten children) struggled along until an awareness of the need for "modern French" murals in the Salt Lake Temple occurred to church leaders in the late eighties. Olpin, Dictionnry, 106-7; see 72-74, 106-12, and 173-74 for more information on Hafen. 13 Grnpes is the same painting as Bmch of Grnpes or Glnpe S&y. The extent to which Harwood's talents impressed many fellow Utah artists, artists-to- be, and patrons can be exemplified by a remembrance in the writings of the Coal- ville, Utah, painter/photographer, George Beard (1855-1744). "The living artist I think is the greatest of all [is J. T. Harwood] . . . . [He] is one of the greatest landscape painters, has painted more and better pictures than any other artist." When one thinks of Harwood in his later phase, the image of an im- pressionist, or post-impressionist, scene most often comes to mind. Yet, there are many other Harwood landscapes, particularly early ones, and it could be that 28 |
