Genre
CHARLES CALEB WARD (1831–1896)
Hide and Seek, 1880
Watercolor on paper, 11 5/8 x 9 3/4 in.
Signed and dated (at lower right): Charles C. Ward / 1880
EX COLL.: private collection, Upper Montclair, New Jersey, before 1960–2001, and by descent, 2001–07; to [Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 2007]; to private collection, 2007 until the present
Ward’s years in New York were his most active as a professional artist. He exhibited often at New York venues, including the National Academy of Design, the American Society of Painters in Water Colors, the Century Association, and the Brooklyn Art Association. He also sent works to the Union League Club, Philadelphia; the Cincinnati Academy, Ohio; the Utica Art Association, New York; and the Louisville Industrial Exposition, Kentucky.
Though our knowledge today of Ward’s activity and oeuvre is fragmentary, he was held in high esteem in his own time. William H. Gerdts has noted that Ward “was among the finest genre specialists of the mid-century, and one whose work has been somewhat neglected, as much because of its rarity as for any other reason” (19th Century American Painting from the Collection of Henry Melville Fuller, exhib. cat. [Manchester, New Hampshire: Currier Gallery of Art, 1971), p. 9). Indeed, Ward specialized in genre scenes, mostly of children and Native Americans, both in oil and watercolor. Ward was especially renowned for his small-format genre paintings, and it was said of his work that “his pictures were small in size, but so finely and beautifully executed that they would always bear close scrutiny with a powerful glass” (David Russell Jack, Acadiensis VI [1906], p. 97).
Executed in 1880, Hide and Seek was probably created while Ward was still living in New York. It is one of Ward’s typically small, gem-like genre pieces, and as with many of these the artist manages to combine both a humorous and sentimental subject with a variety of masterful details that subtly enrich the composition.