Label
2024, “Endangered Art: Reclaiming a Legacy”
Charles Hawthorne was a renowned American painter and founder of the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. There, he painted frontal portraits of locals in a stylized form of realism: figures emerge from dark backgrounds, their features flattened and simplified. Wildflowers exemplifies this style.
The face of the young girl in Wildflowers was damaged around 1980 while the painting hung in an office on Washburn campus. Workers accidentally dripped paint on the work and attempted to clean it with turpentine, which created significant damage. Conservators cleaned grime from the painting, reversed waves and dents in the surface, and in-painted the areas of damage and paint deterioration.