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Ben Solowey

Ben Solowey was born in Warsaw, Poland, on August 29, 1900, the youngest of seven children of Abraham and Celia Solowey. In 1907 the family moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, where the father, a superior leather craftsman, was a bootmaker to the Court of St. Petersburg. By 1914 the Russian political and social climate had worsened, and the family moved once again, this time to Philadelphia.

Even as a child in Poland and Russia, Solowey had a compulsion to draw. Years later his family delighted in recalling their mother's shock at the discovery of her young son in the act of sketching the Venus de Milo. Despite family ambivalence toward his early interest in art, at the age of fifteen he enrolled in Philadelphia's Spring Garden Institute, and also studied at the Graphic Sketch Club. In 1919 Solowey was awarded first prize, a three-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, for a work in an exhibition at the Graphic Sketch Club. At the academy he studied under Hugh Breckenridge and Henry McCarter, among others, and won many awards, including the prestigious Ramborger Prize in 1921. The judges were Edward Redfield and Alice Kent Stoddard.

When Solowey was asked in 1939 about influences in his work, he pointed to the French: "Through Delacroix, Courbet, the Impressionists and the Moderns, the French injected fresh air into painting." By 1924, with his artistic temperament already fully formed by his years of study, he took a job as a ship's steward and crossed the ocean to visit London, Paris, and Switzerland, and to see the work of the great French impressionist and modernist painters. He also visited the house and garden of Auguste Rodin (who had died several years earlier), walking, literally, in the steps of the great sculptor. Solowey recalled this moving experience later, when he turned his own hand to sculpture. After eight months in Europe, he returned to Philadelphia for a short period before moving to New York in 1928.

While he lived in New York his work was accepted for exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Academy of Design, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago. In New York lie met Rae Landis, daughter of Moses and Gertrude Landis of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and married her in 1930. She became his primary model and muse. During the years from 1929 to 1942 Solowey made a name for himself through his striking charcoal portraits of performing arts luminaries, some of which were commissioned by the New York Times and the Herald-Tribune.

In 1936 the Soloweys found a farm in the country, thirty-four acres in Bedminster, Bucks County. In 1942, at the height of substantial acclaim for both his paintings and his theater work, Solowey left the comforts of Fifth Avenue permanently for the countryside of Bucks County and set about restoring the farmhouse, which, for the first seven years, was without electricity and running water. He handled everything from cabinetmaking to plumbing, from electrical work to masonry, tile setting, wood finishing, carpentry, roofing, and gardening, and he furnished it with his own re-creations of classic furniture he had admired in museums. He also transformed the barn into a spacious studio, and in the quiet of his newly created sanctuary produced portraits, nudes, rural landscapes, and still lifes, and made the frames in which some of his oils were mounted. The barn, filled with his artwork, stands to this day.

In 1966 Solowey suffered a massive heart attack. While he had to restrict some activities, his twelve remaining years were among his most productive as an artist. He recommitted himself to his work and made full use of each day. After he died in May 1978, while trimming a hedge on his farm, his wife, Rae, insisted that his studio remain intact for the public to enjoy.

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

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