Spanierman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of the work of Annie Gooding Sykes (1855–1931), a skilled watercolorist who worked in the impressionist idiom from the 1880s through the 1920s. Part of a group of talented women artists based in Cincinnati, Sykes created immediate and vibrant images of her surroundings, while also painting on travels and vacations. Described as an “indefatigable worker” whose devotion to art was “one of the beautiful things in her eventful life,” she was acclaimed for her jewel-like, light-filled compositions, in which she captured the aesthetic qualities of her subjects through an expressive use of color and form. The exhibition is accompanied by an online catalogue by Lisa N. Peters, available here: http://www.spanierman.com/PDF-catalogue-books/Annie-Gooding-Sykes-Watercolorist.pdf

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1855, Annie Sykes was inspired to become an artist by the example of her father, a silversmith and engraver, and her mother, a gifted needleworker. After gaining draftsmanship skills during her school days, she pursued formal training in Boston at the Lowell Institute and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Following her marriage in 1882 to Gerrit Sykes, she moved with her husband to Cincinnati, where he ran a school for boys and she furthered her studies at the Cincinnati Art Academy, receiving instruction from Frank Duveneck and Thomas Satterwhite Noble, among other teachers. Sykes occasionally worked in oil, but watercolor became her primary vehicle of expression. Whereas many of the women artists of her time did not continue to produce art when they started families, Sykes balanced the raising of her two children with a productive professional career; she actively contributed her works to exhibitions at prominent venues, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Art Club, and the New York Watercolor Club. She was also involved in the art life of Cincinnati, joining the Rookwood Pottery Club in 1887, serving as a charter member of the Woman’s Art Club in 1892, and regularly exhibiting at the Cincinnati Art Museum. She worked in Cincinnati as well as in such locales as Cape Ann, New Bedford, Nonquitt, Plymouth, and Quincy, Massachusetts (1890s–1910s); Cape Porpoise, Maine (beginning in 1901); Texas (1902); Bermuda (1913); Williamsburg, Virginia (ca. 1918); Ithaca, New York (1920–25); Barnston, Québec (1928); and Europe (1906 and 1909).

The exhibition demonstrates the versatility of Annie Sykes’s watercolor handling in which she expressed the salient qualities of her subjects, while creating unified arrangements that reveal an abstract sensibility. She was also an observant recorder of contemporary life, often creating decorative two-dimensional designs that capture the spirit of her era in the mode of Maurice Prendergast. In Afternoon Tea Party (ca. 1900), a woman in a hat who politely holds a teacup appears to be a visitor, and Sykes depicts her as an aesthetic form within a room filled with art objects, including a Japanese print and screen and blue-and-white-china. In Woman Reading under a Tree (1890s), she used flowing brushwork to describe both her subject and the tree above her, conveying the pleasure of combining the outdoors with reading. Sykes’s images of boats and harbors demonstrate her exploration of the range and possibilities of her medium, as she used a combination of transparent and opaque methods in Harbor Scene (ca. 1905–10) and Sailboat with Semaphore Flags (ca. 1905), incorporating the tone of her papers into her designs—she used this approach frequently in her art. Her oeuvre consists of many images of Cincinnati. During Armistice, she depicted the vibrant display of the flags of many nations hanging on the walls of the Cincinnati Art Museum in a work of ca. 1918, expressing the widespread patriotic mood of the nation. In a view of Mount Adams (1890s), she employed a vertical arrangement and a high horizon line, effectively flattening her composition to draw the viewer’s attention to the lively forms of the narrow buildings of Cincinnati rising against the hills—she used the Mount Adams incline as a means of dividing the arrangement. Sykes’s images of Burnet Woods, a public park established in 1872, echo the views by Prendergast of Central Park. Generalizing the forms of women and children in the park in a work from the 1910s, Sykes observed their gestures and attitudes.

Annie Sykes had a passion for flowers. She painted them in still life arrangements, but more often showed them in the outdoors, within her own garden and elsewhere. These images have often been associated with Childe Hassam’s views of Celia Thaxter’s garden on Appledore Island. Like Hassam, Sykes positioned the viewer in the midst of the blooms as in Foxgloves (1900s), focusing on their vivid patterns and rhythms. In Bermuda Town (1913), she contrasted the solidity of white houses along a coastline with the transparency of the water and sky. Her strong compositional eye is demonstrated in the way that she draws our gaze through the diagonals of sun-bleached rooftops to a tower that serves as the scene’s culmination point.

Annie Sykes is represented in public and private collections throughout the Midwest and the Northeastern United States. Important and solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Traxel & Maas Gallery, Cincinnati (1895); Cincinnati Art Museum (1908—two person exhibition, 1910—three person exhibition); Traxel’s Art Gallery, Cincinnati (1917); Appalachian Gallery, Morgantown, West Virginia (1989); Pattee Library at Pennsylvania State University (1990); and Spanierman Gallery, New York (1998).

Gallery Hours: Monday-Saturday 9:30-5:30