{"id":497,"date":"2020-07-23T20:39:39","date_gmt":"2020-07-23T20:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.williamaharper.com\/?p=497"},"modified":"2021-08-22T15:44:21","modified_gmt":"2021-08-22T15:44:21","slug":"first-trip-to-europe-last-updated-july-23-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.williamaharper.com\/first-trip-to-europe-last-updated-july-23-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"First Trip to Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
First\nTrip to Europe<\/strong> \u2013\nlast updated July 23, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n Following the conclusion of the 1902-03\nschool year in Houston, Harper left teaching and departed for Cornwall, England,\nlocated in the southwestern most part of England. \nWilliam Wendt was at that time painting in St. Ives, Cornwall, having\narrived in May of 1903.[1]<\/a> Wendt had been briefly a student at the AIC,\nand was at that time an independent artist in Chicago. He would go on to become one of California\u2019s\nmost well-known impressionist painters. He\nwas also, as noted earlier, one of Harper\u2019s mentors. Not much information is available about\nHarper\u2019s time in Cornwall in 1903, but one, and possibly two, of Harper\u2019s three\npaintings accepted for the January 28 \u2013 February 28, 1904 Exhibition of Works\nby Chicago Artists were paintings done in Cornwall. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On a prior trip to St. Ives in 1898,\nWendt had taken classes with an important landscape painter and instructor,\nJohn Noble Barlow, RBA ROI RWA (1860-1917). Barlow also had a connection with\nanother of Harper\u2019s mentors, Charles Francis Browne. Wendt described Barlow in a 1898 letter as \u201ca\nformer colleague of C. F. Browne\u201d[2]<\/a>, the two having likely met\nas fellow students at the Acad\u00e9mie Julian in Paris where Barlow studied from\n1887-89.[3]<\/a> Browne attended in 1887.[4]<\/a> A photograph reproduced in\nThe Siren, Issue No. 14, October 2017, p. 9, shows five artists in smocks\nand toques sitting against a wall, two of whom where Browne and Barlow. With these connections to St. Ives, it is\nhardly surprising that Harper chose to study and paint in Cornwall. He may also have been a student of Barlow\u2019s,\nalthough that would have been on his later trip to Cornwall in 1904 since\nBarlow was out of the country in the summer of 1903.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n By the fall of 1903, Harper was in Paris. Since no correspondence or other papers of Harper appear to have survived, what is known of his time is Paris comes from two sources: 1. the letters of Albert Henry Krehbiel, a close friend of Harper\u2019s from the AIC, and 2. a 1904 photograph of a class at the Acad\u00e9mie Julian<\/a> from the Krehbiel files.[6]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n