My father enjoyed venturing an opinion in tones of mock-Victorian high purpose, and I remember him once going off, during a show at the Society of Illustrators, about the difference between working in oil and working in watercolor. An oil painting could be created over a long period of time; could be treated like a stage set; could accommodate second opinions and be revised. In some ways, it was like a movie. A watercolor was a performance, created in the moment: paper wet, vision fresh. “You can’t lie with watercolor,” my father explained. He was himself an artist and illustrator, and watercolor was the medium he liked best.
That moment from decades ago came to mind recently as I took in the vibrant work of Adam Van Doren at the Childs Gallery, in Boston—watercolor paintings of this city of brick and autumn, where I’ve lived for many years.
Van Doren’s subject is the built environment: The gates of Harvard. The town houses of Back Bay. Steeples and bridges and mansard roofs. Boston is a place Van Doren returns to time and again to capture with his brush, mostly working outdoors—as he does in Venice, Rome, Paris, and New York. His studio, with large, north-facing windows overlooking West 57th Street in Manhattan, once belonged to the American Impressionist painter Childe Hassam.
Van Doren came from a family of words. Grandfather Mark was the prominent literary critic and poet; father John was the editor of Britannica’s Great Ideas Today. But Mira, his mother, was an artist, and Adam’s strengths were visual.
He began drawing as a child and always had one eye on a life in fine art. But as an undergraduate at Columbia—“an image of the struggling artist always in the back of my head,” he recalls—he decided to train as an architect. The program, run by Robert A. M. Stern, required students to submit formal watercolor renderings in a Beaux-Arts style: presentation drawings, sections, elevations. This was a time, before computers, when architects had to know how to draw.
After working at several firms, Van Doren turned to watercolor full time, and with a focus on historic buildings. In New York, he was invited to join the Painting Group, a distinguished circle founded in the 1950s by the caricaturist David Levine (an accomplished watercolor painter) and the portraitist Aaron Shikler (best known for his depiction of John F. Kennedy—arms folded, head bowed in thought). The group met once a week to paint and talk. In time, Van Doren’s reputation grew. He has published books (An Artist in Venice and An Artist in Rome, among others) and teaches today at Yale.
J. M. W. Turner, John Singer Sargent, Paul Signac, Maurice Prendergast, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth: In his personal pantheon of watercolorists, Van Doren reserves a place for each of these. He admires the confident way O’Keeffe put down pigment (“Many watercolorists are too timid”) and the ability of Wyeth to explore ever more deeply what was in front of him (“He must have drawn or painted a single building a thousand times in different light and times of day”). As for Sargent: “I love the way he crops. He obviously loved architecture. He didn’t paint a building full scale. That was because he worked outdoors, which tends to make you look up in a certain way and focus on a certain section of a building. You can’t step back a million miles to see the whole thing.”
Van Doren, too, trains his eye on the smaller details, the part rather than the whole—which is why he sets up his easel outside older buildings, with their riot of gables and ovals and arches and columns. “I think the Seagram Building is a beautiful building,” he explains, “but I’m not sure I’d be excited about painting it.”
“Bricks of Boston: Watercolors by Adam Van Doren” is on at the Childs Gallery, in Boston, until February 9
Cullen Murphy is an editor at large at The Atlantic and the author of several books, including God’s Jury and Cartoon County
