Henry Fitch Taylor’s Figure With Guitar III is an important rediscovery in this fascinating artist’s oeuvre. This highly advanced musical abstraction was last on the open market in 1966, in an exhibition at Noah Goldowsky Fine Arts. Although unsigned, its authenticity is certain because it is reproduced in a group of several dozen black and white photographs of Taylor artworks that accompanied the collection when it came to market around 1960-65. It is one of a group of three paintings by Taylor alleged to depict guitar players, possibly completed around the same time. The other two are in Smithsonian Institution collections: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The recent reentrance of this painting to the market offers collectors and museums a wonderful opportunity to add an important early American modernist painting to their collection.

Music and musical instruments are a recurrent theme in Taylor’s modernist oeuvre. Late in 1913, he transitioned abruptly from painting landscapes informed by Impressionism to advanced abstract themes, probably because of his leading role in organizing the pivotal Armory Show of February 1913. For the first time, paintings and sculpture by shockingly modern European artists including Picasso, Braque, and Brancusi were exhibited in the United States. The exhibition, consisting of some 1,300 artworks, a survey of American and European art from 1800 to the current day, touched off a national furor and is still considered the most important exhibition in the history of American art.

By 1917 Taylor had written “The Taylor System of Color Harmony” a means of selecting color schemes for paintings, interior decoration, and other purposes using musical notes and compositions selected through a measured template. ]Images of now-lost paintings show musical themes, with keyboards or stringed instruments, notably an colorful abstraction owned by the Chrysler Museum, which depicts a stringed instrument of an unidentified type. The links between colors and music were explored by experimental American and European artists, inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s pivotal 1911 text Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which proposed close connections between abstract art, color, music, and spiritualism. Kandinsky exhibited in the Armory Show Improvisation 27 , a large color abstraction. His painting and book attracted much attention from viewers and art critics and was reproduced in the collection of 54 postcards of individual works in the exhibition, sold at the door.

The titles assigned to three paintings under discussion are plausible if we look at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s example. It clearly shows an abstract figure holding a musical instrument with a bridge and sound hole. The haloed head is shown as a perfect sphere, outlined with a dark line. That outlined circular form toward the top of the canvas is repeated in the two other “Guitar” paintings. In Figure with Guitar III, the outlined circular form is balanced by two smaller circular forms toward the bottom, which may allude to sound holes in a stringed instrument.

Picasso and Braque painted abstractions featuring stringed instruments in the first of two Cubist periods; Analytic Cubism. Examples of these were exhibited in the Armory Show (one was Braque’s Violin, Mozart, Kubelick), and much commented on as radical, wonderful, or simply scandalous.

In Figure with Guitar III, Taylor’s distinctive method of paint application is manifested in a sophisticated, subtle transition from one color to another with overlapping geometric shapes, some translucent, allowing for viewing one through another. Like the two other Guitar paintings, he uses dark lines to render geometric forms. Here, the angular forms with acute and right angles contrast with the three spherical forms.

Taylor’s experimentation with color abstraction and the links between music and color are remarkable for their pioneering role in the history of American art. Important too, is that he was by far the oldest American artist to transition to abstraction after the Armory Show and to play an active role in organizing that legendary exhibition. Born in 1858, his close contemporaries in organizing the show and essaying abstraction were Elmer MacRae (b. 1875), Walt Kuhn (b. 1877), Jerome Myers (b. 1867) and Arthur B. Davies (b. 1862). None of these colleagues pursued abstraction for more than a couple of years before returning to their established styles and subjects. Taylor continued until his death to experiment with modernist themes and mediums (in addition to oil paintings he created paintings on plaster, sculpture in plaster, wood, and stone; batik; and watercolor).

To conclude, the painting’s former ownership by Jeptha H. Wade III (1924-2008), a distinguished Boston attorney and conservationist, is noteworthy. Wade’s great-grandfather, Jeptha Homer Wade (1811-1890), was a portrait painter and photographer who changed his profession to inventor and industrialist. He was a founder and subsequently president of the Western Union Telegraph Company and was actively involved in developing over eight railroads, among many other business ventures. In so doing, he amassed great wealth and built adjoining mansions on Cleveland’s Millionaire’s Row. Through the generations, there was a passion for art and supporting civic and arts organizations, most notably the Cleveland Museum of Art. Jeptha H. Wade III’s grandfather, Jeptha H. Wade II (1857-1926), was a founder of the museum in 1912, donating the parkland on which the museum stands, and donating to the Museum thousands of artworks and $1,250,000 to establish an acquisitions fund. Obituaries mention that he was museum president and the museum’s most generous donor. His grandson’s purchase in 1971 of Figure With Guitar III is not only a testament to the painting’s significance but also to Wade III’s keen collector’s eye, passed down through the family by his great-great grandfather.