Ross, Frederick Webb (1885-1964)

Born in Shelbyville, IN, Ross was the son of German immigrants. He studied with William Forsyth—part of the so-called “Hoosier Group” of painters—then moved to New York in 1905 after receiving a scholarship to study at the Art Students League. By 1911 he had relocated to Paris, working at Académie Julian with Richard E. Miller and William-Adolphe Bouguereau at Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Returning to the US ahead of the Great War, Ross located near Washington Square and produced a combination of paintings, privately commissioned murals, and commercial illustration. In 1935 for the Treasury Relief Art Project, Ross installed a massive, 20’ x 20’ painted mural in the Terre Haute, IN courtroom depicting the signing of England’s Magna Carta. First displayed at the Vanderbilt Gallery in New York, the work was praised for the “gay medieval trappings of the nobles and their retainers” while maintaining, for the purposes of a courtroom, a “treatment most dignified and conservative throughout” (New York Sun 28 June 1934: 24). His “Playtime” painting at NDG borrows from murals their organization of bodies in space and a sense of event, even pageantry. In later years Ross became a devout Catholic and painted several more church murals (Pierce). 11 more images at FAP.

Source consulted: Mary Anne Pierce, “U.S. District Court Mural Arouses Curiosity Here,” Terre Haute Tribune 19 Mar. 1972: 26; “Brings Back Work He Painted Abroad,” Indianapolis Star 11 Feb. 1912: 32.

Works in the New Deal Collection at GVCA by Frederick Webb Ross:

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Playtime
Playtime

In subject matter if not in style, there are resemblances between this painting and Georges Seurat’s famous A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, but even more so William Blake’s “The Echoing Green.” Here the spirit seems exuberant as the painting’s colored balloons, due perhaps to its “American” setting and youthful subjects. A gently sloping parkland ends alongside a pond occupied by a pair of swans, delighting a young child tended by a watchful nurse. Boys and girls of all ages manifest their play at different stages of childhood, save for two pensive young women: one looks out across the water toward adulthood, the other muses upon the hill.

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