Horace Day

Horace Talmage Day
Pick-up Game, Chapel St., Charleston, SC
Born	Horace Talmage Day July 3, 1909 Amoy (Xiamen), China
Died	March 24, 1984 Alexandria, Virginia
Nationality	American
Education	Kimon Nicolaides, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Boardman Robinson
Known for	Painting
Movement	American Scene, Regionalism

Horace Day (3 July 1909 – 24 March 1984), also Horace Talmage Day, was an American a painter of the American scene who came to maturity during the Thirties and was active as a painter over the next 50 years. He traveled widely in the United States and continued to explore throughout his life subjects that first captured his attention as an artist in the Thirties. He gained early recognition for his portraits and landscapes, particularly his paintings in the Carolina Lowcountry.

Horace Day called himself a regional painter, interested in depicting the scenery of his adopted South. The style he chose to portray the landscapes and people of the South was a brand of Romantic Realism influenced by Claude Lorrain and Jacob van Ruisdael and also by the resonances in that landscape that he perceived with the rural, subtropical landscape and colonial architecture of southern China where he spent his early years. He primarily worked outside, as a plein air painter, using quick impressionistic brush strokes to record the scene.

Horace Talmage Day was the eldest of four children born in Amoy (now Xiamen), China of American missionary parents during their service with the American Reformed Mission in Fukien Province, China. The mission had bases of operation in Amoy and in Fuchow. Mission families in Amoy resided in the foreign enclave on the island of Gulangyu in Amoy harbor, an urban area that has become known for its Nineteenth Century colonial architecture. In Fuchow, the mission families were situated closer to the area’s peasant villages. The Day family served in both locations.

By the age of twelve, Day was painting quite accomplished landscapes of south China scenes in both oil and watercolor. One of his most cherished books on art was a book on the drawings of Claude Lorrain that he acquired as a teenager, before he began his studies at the Art Students League of New York. These early inspirations are reflected in the work done by Day throughout his career.