William Newport Goodell

William Newport Goodell

William Newport Goodell (1908-1999), artist, craftsman, and educator, was born August 16, 1908 in Germantown, Philadelphia. He briefly attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA),, including its country school in Chester Springs, studying under Pennsylvania impressionist Daniel Garber and noted academician Joseph Thurman Pearson, Jr., before opening his own studio on Germantown Avenue in 1929.

Between 1930 and 1949 Goodell was represented via jury or invitation in a range of major annual and special exhibitions on the East Coast and won several cash awards and purchase prizes, including the First Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design annual exhibition in New York in 1933. He also exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., the PAFA, and Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, among other notable venues.

During the 1940s, Goodell served with Pearson on the Woodmere Art Museum's “very vigorous exhibition committee,” and for several years as a member of the exhibition committee of the Fellowship of the PAFA. He was described as one of a handful of “important young Pennsylvania artists” in a Works Progress Administration state guide.

Influences

Goodell would have been well aware the work of artists who became known as the Pennsylvania Impressionists, also called the Bucks County Impressionists, who worked in and around New Hope, north of Philadelphia. Besides Pearson and Garber, Goodell’s instructors during his short stay at the PAFA included Henry McCarter and Hugh Breckenridge. Garber was an early member of the New Hope art colony and an influential teacher. Garber’s technique of backlighting figures is found in several of Goodell’s works in which subjects appear bathed in a halo of light (Pastoral, Willow in Sunlight). Like Garber, Goodell’s interest was in creating sense of eternal or spiritual light rather than capturing the ephemeral or fleeting effects associated with impressionism.

Goodell was also connected to New Hope through his sisters, Anne and Margaret Goodell. Anne Goodell married Julian Lathrop, son of William Langson Lathrop, one of the founders of the New Hope artists’ colony, and both Anne and Margaret lived and painted in New Hope. There is evidence that Goodell painted in the New Hope area (Bucks Farm, On the Bridge), but his studio remained in Philadelphia, and the influence of impressionism both in terms of subject matter and technique was less direct than on his older siblings.

Goodell’s work also reflects other stylistic influences of the period. His energetic representationalism echoed American Regionalism (Church), a movement influential through the early 1940s, and the bold, graphic style of public works being commissioned under the Federal Art Project, the visual arts arm of the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) (Making Sally’s Pigtails). Watercolors of urban and night scenes are reminiscent of American Realism, but while this movement expressed the alienation of modern life, Goodell’s portrayals were never desolate (Sun Patterns, Steaming Off). Overall, Goodell’s work is characterized by a vitality, sincerity and positivity that were perhaps a debt to his Quaker roots.