EDMUND ARCHER 1904-1986 Richmond Virginia USA - Video

Edmund Minor Archer (28 September 1904–13 July 1986), painter, was born in Richmond, the youngest of three children, all sons, of William Wharton Archer, sometime editor of the Richmond State, and Rosalie Harrison Pleasants Archer, both members of families long associated with the cultural life of the city. His oldest brother, Adair Pleasants Archer, founded the Little Theater League of Richmond, and after his death from influenza in 1918, their mother served as president of the theater group for many years.
Ned Archer, as he was known, began studying art at the age of eight under Nora Houston at the Richmond Art Club's Saturday morning school. After the club closed its doors in 1916, Archer continued to study with Houston and with Adèle Clark, another distinguished Richmond art teacher, in a Saturday class sponsored by the Virginia League of Fine Arts. Houston later recalled that Archer possessed a natural artistic talent but was more interested in the study of humanity than of formal composition. He remained a pupil of Houston and Clark until 1918. After graduating in 1921 from Saint Christopher's School in Richmond, he spent the summer studying with Charles W. Hawthorne at Provincetown, Massachusetts. Archer attended the University of Virginia for the 1921–1922 academic year and studied art history under Fiske Kimball.
Thus prepared, Archer entered the Art Students League in New York City, where his teachers included Kenneth Hayes Miller, Allen Tucker, and Boardman Robinson. In 1923 and 1924 the league purchased paintings by Archer of a nude and of three heads for its permanent collection. In the summer of 1924, while copying from works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Archer received his first portrait commission from a stranger who had seen and admired his work. He served on the board of the Art Students League in 1924 and 1925. In the latter year he traveled to Paris, where he maintained a studio and attended the Academie Colarossi, and to Italy, where he made a special study of the frescoes of Raphael at the Vatican and of Piero della Francesca in Arezzo.
In 1926 Archer returned to Richmond and devoted the next four years to painting. For part of that time he occupied the studio of sculptor Edward Virginius Valentine. While in Richmond he completed a number of portraits and other studies of African Americans. For his Colored Cellist Practicing, he persuaded the sexton at Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Church to pose.
Archer held his first one-man show in 1929 at the Pancoast Gallery in Boston, which helped establish him in the art world. Among the fifteen paintings of African Americans that comprised the exhibition, Show Girl, depicting a dancer from a musical revue standing before a curtain, received the third William A. Clarke Prize of $1,000 and the 1930 bronze medal in the Corcoran Gallery of Art's biennial exhibition. In 1930 Archer was appointed assistant curator of the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which opened in April 1931. His arrangement with the museum allowed him time to paint, which he always considered his major pursuit in life. During the ensuing three decades his works appeared in exhibitions at major American galleries and were also purchased by many private collectors.
Archer often returned to Richmond in the summers to paint, and his work received appreciative recognition in Virginia. His Brick Carrier won second prize in 1936 at the fifth annual exhibition of Work of Virginia Artists at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Archer served as a juror for the following year's show. In 1938 the Virginia Museum included his Groundsmen and Linemen in its first biennial exhibition of contemporary American painters. Later that year, from 13 November through 3 December, the museum honored him with a one-man show in its Virginia Artist Series. Notable among the fifteen works exhibited was Waiting for the Departure, a study of three African American women at an open window, used as the cover illustration for the show's catalog. Neither obvious nor sentimental, the painting is an authoritatively composed dramatization of black life as the artist saw it.