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Harriet Randall Lumis

Lumis was born on May 29, 1870, in Salem Connecticut, and died on April 6, 1953, in Springfield, Massachusetts. She was in Connecticut steadily, 1870-92; and periodically, 1892-1933.

Although Harriet Randall Lumis lived most of her adult life in Springfield, Massachusetts, she considered Connecticut second home. She was born and grew up in the state, her birthplace the country village of Salem, near Norwich. The interest she showed in sketching from nature when she first attended school at Bacon Academy in Colchester was encouraged by her father. But when she was a boarding student at the Connecticut Literary Institution at Suffield in the early 1880s, she reluctantly chose not to enroll in art courses: "To be sure I was filled with a great desire to paint the atrocious flower pieces . . . but my family thought music the most fitting medium.' Her family by then had moved to a farm a little north of Colchester, in Hebron. In 1892 Harriet Randall was married to Fred Williams Lumis, a native of Norwich, who had just settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he would become an architect and the city's building commissioner. It was there that her art career began.

In 1883 the Lumises enrolled in an evening drawing class sponsored by the Springfield school system. The training was academic but the experience developed Harriet Lumis's early interest in art into a total commitment. She had several instructors in Springfield - among them Mary Hubbard, James Hall, Roswell Gleason Shurleff, and Willis S. Adams - all academic draftsmen or tonalist painters. In 1910, at forty years old, and again in 1911, she went to Mianus in Cos Cob to study with Leonard Ochtman in the New York Summer School. Ochtman, something of a tonalist himself, nonetheless shared with Cos Cob artists such as Twachtman and Hassam a desire to depict specific locales in a subtle, intimate way. Lumis began to share those attitudes. She developed an interest in American Impressionism.

Once she committed herself to Impressionism - just at the time that it was essentially over as a force in American art - she remained fiercely loyal to its ideas and style for the rest of her long life. In 1949 she would help found an Academic Artists' Association in Springfield to support realistic art against what she called modernist "propaganda."

In 1913 Lumis began to participate in the exhibitions of the fairly young Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts and she soon became an active member. She was stimulated by the professional contacts with artists such as Charles Noel Flagg, Henry C. White, and Guy Wiggins. Presumably her strong interest in the Connecticut-Academy led her to help form a similiar group in Springfield in 1919, the Springfield Art League.

Lumis won more recognition in the 1920s. She was elected to the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1921. In 1925 she won her first major prize - in a Connecticut Academy annual. She was fifty-five years old. Her training had been limited and had come late, and her exhibition activity had been essentially local. Springfield commercial galleries had, however, shown her work with that of artists such as Charles H. Davis, Bruce Crane, and Birge Harrison. Her reputation had grown slowly but steadily. Her style, never static, had become personal.

Lumis continued her training (at the Breckinridge Summer School of Art, Gloucester, Massachusetts) and she increased her participation in exhibitions, including those at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Women's National Exposition in St. Louis (1926). The Chicago department store Carson, Pirie Scott began to sell her art. She had several one-woman exhibitions at the Casper Rand Art Museum in Westfield, Massachusetts.

After her husband died in 1938, Lumis taught landscape panting until her own death in 1953, because she needed the income. Despite developments in American art in the 1940s, she taught only American Impressionism, because she still believed so completely in its ideals. Throughout her career, she painted near her home or on the Massachusetts shore, but she often visited family and friends in Connecticut, and when she was in the state she painted local scenes. Richard H. Love, who organized a major retrospective of her work in 1977, says that a significant part of Lumis's work was done n the state that had been her girlhood home.

Further reading:
Harriet Randall Lumis, 1870-195.1; An American Impressionist. (Exh. cat., R. H. Love Galleries, Chicago, 1977).

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton

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