page_title: Harry Watrous
section_title: The H.W. Watrous Collection of Palettes
hierarchical_section_title: Harry Watrous / The H.W. Watrous Collection of Palettes
caption_attribution_description: English: Signed palettes of artists Thomas Moran and Harry Watrous, from the H.W. Watrous Collection of Palettes, c. 1908&#91;1&#93;
context_page_description: Harry Willson Watrous was an American artist who received an academic education in France. His paintings included genre scenes, stylized figural works, landscapes, nocturnes, portraits, and still lifes. His 1913 painting The Drop Sinister has been called the first known portrait of an American interracial family. He is perhaps best known for his enigmatic paintings of sophisticated women, often darkly dressed and seen in profile.
context_section_description: Beginning in the 1890s, Watrous collected the palettes of other painters, each signed by the artist. His collection came to include palettes from Ralph Blakelock, William Merritt Chase, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, George Inness, Francis Davis Millet (who died on the Titanic), Thomas Moran, Elihu Vedder, and Watrous himself.
  The H.W. Watrous Collection of 100 palettes was reproduced in color over two pages in the book Cosmo Collection, published in 1908 and reprinted in 1910. Both editions included a facsimile letter in which (surprisingly for such a conservative realist painter) Watrous's appreciation of the palettes as works of art and expressions of the artist's psyche foreshadows theories of abstract expressionism:
  It was never my intention to take the public into my confidence and allow it a glimpse of this collection during my life, after which it would probably go to the National Academy of Design. I gathered these palettes as a pleasant remembrance of the many years I lived among and worked with the signers, each having some association connected with it. But…I have seriously considered your request and concluded to accede to it and to permit the reproduction for exhibition as works of art, as one might a collection of beautiful pictures, and also to dispel the illusion that there is something mysterious and secret in an artist's choice of materials, and that our palettes should be as carefully guarded as the component parts of a patent medicine, or the plans of a war balloon.
  In examining this collection, you will notice the individuality in the setting of the colors, some with the white in the center, some with it on the end, with the reds, yellows, greens, and blues grouped in entirely different manners (like the changes in a kaleidoscope), but always beautiful and harmonious. It also shows the simplicity of the artist's choice of colors, and how an hundred or more painters will take the same palette and work an entirely different color scheme, the dry and hard, the rich and mellow, the sparkling and somber, each proclaiming the master in brain and brush. Some of these palettes have been "Studio Gods" and have been used for years, some for the painting of a single picture, and some have never been used, but have been "set" for me, and on each is the signature used by the painter in signing a picture. For they are pictures, and in living with them I see the painters and what they love to paint, though many of the hands that held these palettes will never again clasp mine on earth.
  In 1911 this "remarkable collection" was displayed at the Union League Club in New York, where "the wall which they covered was a riot of color." A posthumous exhibit of works by Ralph Blakelock at the Dudensing Gallery in New York in 1922 included Blakelock's palette, loaned by Watrous.
  The state and current location of the palette collection are unknown.
caption: Signed palettes of Thomas Moran and Harry Watrous.
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