Henry McCarter, Untitled

McCarter spent extended periods of time in Paris. Living there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he embraced modernist approaches to the arts, apprenticing with Symbolist artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and experimental printmaker Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In Philadelphia, he would become an influential instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts who shared the lessons of European modernism with his colleagues and students.

Here he depicts the dormitory building of PAFA’s Chester Springs summer program in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Located adjacent to a series of famous hot springs, the building had formerly been an elegant hotel. PAFA opened the summer program there in the first decade of the twentieth century and closed it in 1952. McCarter and his colleague Mildred Bunting Miller were administrators of the program.