Delaware artist William D. White studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and briefly studied with Brandywine School artist Gayle Porter Hoskins, a student of renowned First State illustrator, Howard Pyle.
During the span of his decade’s long career, White created illustrations for magazines and landscape paintings in the regional style of important artists like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton.
During the depression, William D. White was the only Delaware artist to receive a Treasury Relief Art Project commission, part of the New Deal Federal Art project which employed artists to create murals in public buildings.
Yet, even with all these noteworthy accomplishments, William D. White remains, for the most part, unknown.
Dover’s Biggs Museum of American Art curator Ryan Grover says William D. White needs to be rescued from obscurity. To that end, the art institution has been working in earnest for two years to launch a White retrospective with the help of Middletown artist and educator Nancy Carol Willis, the author of a new biography on the little known Wilmington native. The lack of notoriety they contend, has nothing to do with White’s talent. Grover says there are many reasons why an artist might fall into obscurity and in White’s case, the curator says the artist did not seek out public attention or acclaim.
Nancy Carol Willis grew up in the same neighborhood as William D. White. She says he was a beloved figure to the many kids he encouraged to draw and paint at his home in North Wilmington. Willis believes there are a several reasons White isn’t as known as some of his contemporaries including his rejection of the Brandywine tradition which she says he called phony since many artists used models and staged their paintings.
Grover says White had a distinct point of view.
“There’s a kind of an interesting nuance to him because he really does bring social realism into an industry that really didn't have a lot of it,” he notes. “And for that reason, in terms of the Brandywine tradition of illustration, people like Frank Schoonover and Howard Pyle, he really stands out as something pretty unique and something that’s really, I think, worthy of taking a really close examination of.”
White never married and retreated to his family home which burned to the ground in 1942. The artist then built and adobe -like structure without electricity over the basement of the property. A fan of poet and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, White chose to live a life of volunteer poverty and was looked after by friends and neighbors.
White’s art work was varied but curator Ryan Grover says the bulk of his career was built on illustration.
White was an artistic champion of the working class and worked for trade magazines including for the Hercules Company in Wilmington. Grover says White’s foray into mines, subway tunnels and domains of the working class can be viewed as somewhat of a window into a bygone era.
One of the images White created for Hercules is part of the exhibition, “ Night Shift on Broad Street.” Grover says the artist’s depiction of laborers is typical William D. White.
“The way that he treats them in these paintings, he really sort of elevates them to almost this sort of religious idealism,” says the curator. “He places the figures directly in front of the picture plane, they are dead center, you can see every little nuance about them and they are glorious, they are powerful, they are strong, strong characters.”
“William D. White: Vision and Voice” is now on view at the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover.
The exhibition will be accompanied by several programs including a symposium on the Art of Illustration March 28th, featuring speakers from the Delaware Art Museum, The Brandywine River Museum and the Norman Rockwell Museum. Information is available at the Bigg's museum website.
This piece is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
