A watercolorist, who specialized in coastal scenes, George Henry Clements grew up on his family's plantation near Opelousas, Louisiana, and worked as a clerk for the New Orleans Cotton Exchange before turning to painting in 1880. He began his formal art training at the Union Art League in New York City.

By 1881 he was in Paris. He spent a year at the Academie Julian and another at the Academie Colarossi. Clements also painted in the French countryside, and in Switzerland and Italy. He returned to America in 1887 and opened a studio in Boston. After the turn of the century, he settled in New York City, returning frequently to the South to find landscape subjects in the Carolinas, and the coastal regions of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Until about 1890, Clements' subjects were primarily portraits, and narrative and figure paintings. During the decade, he adopted an impressionist style and turned to marine and nautical views. Sailboats on Lake Pontchartrain and shrimp boats on the Mississippi were early motifs, and throughout his career he was drawn to sites from which he could admire boats, not only sailboats, but also luxury craft and industrial ships.

In 1901, he visited Charleston, South Carolina. His visit coincides with the opening of The Charleston Exposition, organized to stimulate trade through the city's harbor, where traffic had declined since the Civil War. While nothing is known about his stay, the visit is recorded in Sailboats, Charleston 1901. Other compositions of the early 1900s, such as Low Tide, Coastal Scene and Sailboats, have more generalized titles and settings.

Clements rarely dated his watercolors, and his style has no definitive chronology. His work is characterized by lively brushwork, and a concern for atmospheric effects.

Though Clements also painted at Cape Cod and Santa Barbara, his reputation became inextricably linked to southern subjects. He exhibited often and widely, and institutions such as the Cincinnati Museum of Art acquired his work.

Nancy Rivard Shaw

Sources
George Henry Clements. www.askart.com/biography

Delehanty, Randolph. Art in the American South: Works from the Ogden Collection. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from the Hicklin Galleries, LLC

A painter, George Henry Clements was born in Sacramento, California in 1854. After studying for 15 years in Paris, Clements returned to a studio in New York City, and later lived in Boston and New Orleans.

During the 1920s, he was active with the Santa Barbara Art Association, He died in Oberlin, Louisiana on December 16, 1935.

Member: Boston and New York Water Color Clubs.

Exhibition: Cincinnati Museum, 1925 (portrait of Duveneck).

Literature
AAA 1933; WWAA 1938 (obit).