Townsend - Harry

Townsend, Harry Everett (1879-1941)

Harry Townsend was born in 1879 on a farm in Wyoming, Illinois. Early in life he earned a living working with a sign painter. He completed high school and went to the University of Wisconsin. He was interested in art and transferred to the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied painting under Frederick Freer and Frank Duveneck and sculpting under Lorado Taft. During the summers Townsend serviced harvesters and binders in central Illinois for the McCormick Harvester Company. He also traveled to the Southwest and painted while living among the Native Americans. Both the Santa Fe and Rock Island Railroads used his art for advertising. In 1900 Townsend was invited to study painting under Howard Pyle in Wilmington, Delaware, which he did for four years. Next, he entered the National Academy of Design in New York to study sculpting under Herman McNeil. Townsend then went to Paris and London. In 1904 he returned to Chicago, taught at the Academy of Fines Arts, and married an art student. On returning to New York, he taught at the Art Students League. He moved to New Jersey and by 1910 was a successful illustrator whose creations appeared in Harper’s, Century, Everybody’s, McClure’s and several books. Townsend also studied etching, lithography, and woodcuts. In 1912 he returned to Europe with his family to set up a studio in northern France, but in 1914 he came back to the U.S. after war began. Once again, he worked as an illustrator.

During the early years of the war Townsend created war posters. In 1917, at the age of 39, he was commissioned as a Captain in the Engineering Corp and was in France by May 1918. He was one of eight official combat artists for the American Expeditionary Forces. War machines were his specialty, and he painted airplanes and the First Aero Pursuit Group of the U. S. Air Service. According to one historian, “Townsend’s work during the war focuses on the human element.”

“He produced a number of images showing how the rigors of combat eventually leave little to distinguish between winners and losers in war.”

His combat art is in the Smithsonian. His diary was published in 1991 as War Diary of a Combat Artist.

In 1921 the Townsends moved to Connecticut and settled in Norwalk, where he would live for the rest of his life. He worked for the WPA Federal Arts Project from 1935 to 1941 and produced 87 pieces of art including two murals. One was the First Settlers in Norwalk for the Benjamin Franklin Junior High School and another was the Purchase of Norwalk in the city hall council chambers. He also painted the first female game warden in the nation, Edith Stoehr of Wethersfield.

Of Townsend’s art, his WPA biography read that, though he had painted landscapes, he preferred “to paint in the figure.”  “All of his work has a decorative quality,” it continued.  “His is a clear, conservative style of great freshness and spontaneity.”

Townsend was a member of the Association of Connecticut Artists, the Silvermine Guild of Artists, the Westport Artist Market, the Architectural League of America, the Salmagundi Club of New York, the Society of Illustrators, the Allied Artists of America, the Society of American Etchers, and the Artists Guild of the Authors League of America. Townsend died in Norwalk in 1941.

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Sources:  WPA Artist’s Work Card; WPA Biography; AskART; Who Was Who in American Art (1985), p. 628; Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters (1986), p. 945; “Harry Everett Townsend (1879-1941)”; Self Portrait by Harry Everett Townsend; Walter Kudlick, U. S. Army Official War Artists. National Museum of American History

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from Harry Townsend:

Townsend, Harry