Selden Connor Gile
| Selden Connor Gile | |
|---|---|
Selden Connor Gile in his twenties.
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| Born |
March 20, 1877 Stow, Maine |
| Died | June 8, 1947 (aged 70) San Rafael, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Painting |
Selden Connor Gile (20 March 1877 – 8 June 1947) was an American painter who was mainly active in northern California between the early-1910s and the mid-1930s. He was the founder and leader of the Society of Six, a Bay Area group of artists known for their plein-air paintings and rich use of color, a quality that would later figure into the work of Bay Area figurative expressionists.
Though self-taught as a painter, Gile was most influenced in this exuberant use of color by the Fauves as well as the early French Impressionist paintings he saw at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition of 1915. It was those paintings that prompted a "dramatic change" from his early muted colors to those of his most successful period in the 1920s. In the mid-twenties, local exhibitions of European art added the Post-Impressionists and the Blue Four to the list of painters and paintings that had an influence on Gile's work.
Most of Gile's paintings until about 1927 are small canvases featuring California landscapes and coastline. Stylistically, along with the aforementioned vivid colors, Gile would use thick paint, "...applying loose, expressive brushstrokes of varying sizes." Rarely did his paintings contain people, instead "...Gile invested the contours of the land with sensual qualities others might save for depicting people." As opposed to the Impressionists, who would frequently return to the scene of a painting or do much of their work in the studio, Gile, along with the other Society of Six artists preferred to complete paintings outdoors usually in one sitting.
Selden Connor Gile was born on 20 March 1877 in Stow, Maine. He was the youngest of six children born to farmer James Henry Gile and his wife Ellen Alice Bemis who named him after the then-Governor of Maine, Seldon Connor. Though his siblings were boisterous, Gile "...was a temperate boy and notably shy with women. Like his brother Ellsworth, he displayed a love of nature, an indefatigable energy as a hiker, and a colorful imagination." After completing high school in Fryeburg in 1894, Gile went to live with his elder brother Frank. While there, he attended and graduated from Shaw's Business College in 1899. Following his graduation, Gile worked several jobs until General Marshall Wentworth, his father's commanding officer in the Union Army, set him up to work as a paymaster and clerk at a friend's ranch in Rocklin, California. The artist arrived on the west coast in either 1901 or 1903. Before he left, however, he painted what is considered his earliest known painting, a small New England landscape called Farm Scene dated 1900.
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