International studio (60.1916/1917)

Fanciful Drawings of Frederick J. IFaugh

Copyright by Charles Scribner’s Sons
IN THE CLAN OF MUNES BY FREDERICK J. WAUGH


SOME REMARKABLE FANCIFUL
DRAWINGS OF FREDERICK J.
WAUGH
BY J. B. CARRINGTON
Of the American artists who have won fame as
painters of the sea none have shown greater mas-
tery of wave forms, of the effect of storms in mid-
ocean, the break of great waters on rocky shores,
than Frederick J. Waugh. He has been known
for years as primarily a marine painter and his
sea pictures have been seen and admired and
bought in the exhibitions throughout this country
and England. One of his canvases that thou-
sands have admired is in the famous Hearn col-
lection in the Metropolitan Museum, New York,
The Roaring Forties. It is a scene way off-shore
in deep water where the winds have stirred the
profound depths. The heave and immense power
and weight of great ocean waves are expressed
with wonderful fidelity.
Many who have known Waugh only by his sea
pictures have from time to time been surprised by
his adventures into other fields. Several years
ago visitors to the National Academy Exhibition
on Fifth-seventh Street were confronted by a
large picture in the place of honour on the north

wall of the Vanderbilt Gallery called The Bucca-
neers. It was startling in its bigness, dramatic
action and vividness of colour. The foreground
showed the deck of a vessel being boarded by a
villainous crew of pirates, costumed in brilliant
hues, and “armed to the teeth” with cutlasses
and pistols. In the background was the heaving
sea with another big captured vessel. This pic-
ture was awarded the Thomas B. Clarke prize.
In 1915 Waugh again surprised his friends by
sending to the Academy a figure painting that he
called The Blue Cascade, a fanciful arrangement
of nude figures against a background of falling
water.
Waugh’s father was an artist and it was but
natural that the boy should in due time follow in
his father’s footsteps, not as a painter of portraits,
however, but with very different purposes. Waugh
says, as a boy he was always dreaming, always
living in his fancies, but that his chief interest was
in natural history with an especial fondness for
reptiles. He spent a number of years in London
painting, and during the Boer War drew war pic-
tures for the London weeklies. It was during
these London years that he began to try his hand
at writing fairy-tales, and drawing The Whikkies,
a race of little people born of his imagination.