Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum February 15, 2003 to September 12, 2004 Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Art Museum logo
A Word from P&G - Overview of Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Painters and the Big Picture - discusses how Cincinnati Artists fit into a larger art historical perspective The Works from The P&G Collection - themed galleries of the works in the show Index by Artist Name - a list of all the artists represented in the show and the works they completed Go back to the Cincinnati Art Museum Home page
Theodore Wendel (1857–1932)
Upper Ipswich, ca. 1897–1917
oil on canvas
25 x 36 in.

The son of a rural shopkeeper, Wendel landed in Cincinnati to begin his career as an artist at age seventeen. One of the famous “Duveneck Boys” who followed their teacher to Italy, he eventually abandoned his training in the dark Munich School style for a much lighter, Impressionist mode. Painting in Giverny, France, from 1886 to 1888, he met Claude Monet, a leading Impressionist, which only strengthened his new artistic outlook.

When his wife inherited a large farm at Ipswich, Massachusetts, Wendel began to paint the rolling hills surrounding their new home. In this view called Upper Ipswich, Wendel’s Impressionist technique is apparent in the loose texture of the snowy foreground, the hazy trees in the background, and the warm glow of the evening light. Of the artist a reviewer once noted, “His temperament is especially sensitive to the refinements of light and color in out-door nature, which he paints with a tenderness and subtlety peculiarly of his own.”