Patterson, Claude A[llan] (1887-1973)

Born in Monmouth, IL, Patterson’s practice of art required entrepreneurship throughout his life. The son of a printer, he financed his study at Monmouth College by working summers on the railroad in nearby Des Moines, then in 1913 teaching art lessons (Des Moines Register 15 July 1913: 9). He went on to receive further training at the Cummings School of Art (University of Iowa), the Philadelphia School of Design, and a masters in fine arts at Harvard University. At the same time, however, he continued to teach at far-flung locations: the Cummings School (Iowa), Northern State Teachers College (South Dakota), Tulane University, and at the Universities of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin (Des Moines Register 13 Sept. 1925: 10). His professional life, in other words, was contingent; alongside notices of his teaching posts are mentions of threatened cuts to art programs. His NDG paintings most likely date to a period when he lived in New York for about a decade, perhaps teaching at Columbia University. For most of his life Patterson’s horizon remained regional; he often won prizes at the Iowa Art Salon—where he exhibited for 25 consecutive years—and the Des Moines Womens Club exhibitions.

Works in the New Deal Collection at GVCA by Claude Patterson:

Featured
High in the Tree Tops
High in the Tree Tops

We’re asked to adopt a perspective almost never accessible to humans: near the top of a tree, at close proximity to parrots. A light wash of cloudy white and blue in the background encloses the birds; their distinctive colors echo those of the tree’s leaftips and berries. An earlier New Deal Gallery inventory speculates that this is a rubber tree, and it does appear to be a Ficus of some variety. Patterson’s watercolor bears resemblance in its design to his Orioles: a simplified canopy to better frame the birds, an emphasis upon their bright colors, and a use of foreshortening to bunch several birds closer together.

Highwater
Highwater

Given its light greens and the implied blossoms of field flowers, Patterson’s landscape may be set during springtime, in which case the lake pictured here still would be filled with meltwater. His fresh, pastel-shaded scene celebrates nature with any traces of the human carefully cropped out of visible range.

Midsummer Day
Midsummer Day

From the edge of a lake or slow-moving river, we look across to see several houses built at water’s edge. Using a palette similar to his other New Deal Gallery paintings, Patterson depicts a freshness normally associated with springtime: there appear to be yellow flowers in bloom along the shoreline, and mountains in the distance show no traces of snow.

November Scene
November Scene

The center of this landscape is a tree with gold and yellow leaves, a few just turning to orange. Nearby bushes already have dropped their leaves, allowing for views across a pond or river to the other shore, and mountains in the far distance. Everything except the foreground is painted in hues of blue, white, and green—the better to set off the blaze of color in front of us.

Orioles
Orioles

This group of individuals from the blackbird family each perches on a distinct branch, looking in a different direction, and in physical space likely at some distance from the others. Yet Patterson telescopes his composition so as to render them tightly clustered together. The birds are framed by the branches and flowers of what is apparently a cherry tree, blossoming in early spring to perhaps welcome them back.

Sea Life
Sea Life

We behold at least a dozen distinct plants and animals as a flattened tapestry whose weave isn’t simply metaphorical: the warp of vertical plants and rising bubbles is complemented by a weft of horizontal “currents” visualized for the painting. Although it’s quite likely most viewers would know such sea life only through the glass of an aquarium, Patterson effaces all traces of artifice in the service of an even deeper one: a blue-shifted, underwater world.

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