My Treasure Hunt leads me to Wilmington, Delaware

In May of this year my wife and I had the opportunity to travel to Wilmington Delaware.  Wilmington is where my grandfather studied at the Howard Pyle School of Art in the early 1900’s and is the town where he rented his first art studio. 

This was my first visit to the area and I can highly recommend a trip there for anyone that enjoys American history.  May is a beautiful month in Delaware and the trees and flowers were just gorgeous!

There are three museums that have Ashley paintings in their collections, the Delaware Art Museum, the Brandywine River Museum, and the Hagley Museum.  All three of them were so supportive of my effort the document my grandfather’s work – I can’t thank them enough!  I highly recommend visiting all three – they are all very different and have wonderful collections and beautiful grounds to wander around.

The most unexpected find of the trip was in the Ashley files at the Delaware Art Museum.  In these files I found a hand written (by my grandfather) list of his illustrations. As you may recall, I have such a list for his paintings, but, until now, no information whatsoever regarding is illustration works. With this new information, a whole new door has opened for me to journey through and start the effort to document his illustrative artwork which for the most part preceded his painting artwork.

Thanks, as always, for checking in.  If you have or know of someone who has an Ashley, I’d love to hear from you.

Working thru COVID

It’s been quite some time now since I have written about my progress and I have good things to report.  Although COVID has slowed and/or postponed many of my efforts, I have made significant advances in spite of the pandemic impacts.

Right off the bat, I would like to start by thanking my good friend Doug Weisman for all the help he has provided me.  He is a very talented photographer and his skills are indispensable in this effort to accurately capture images of my grandfather’s paintings.  Besides his amazing talent, he is a great travel companion!  Thank you Doug!  https://www.douglasweismanphotography.com

And now, on to the progress report:

First of all, I’d like to report on the effectiveness of this website.  I have received 6 communications from Clifford Ashley enthusiasts and this has led to the photographing and inclusion of 5 more paintings into my work!  I want to thank each of you who have reached out to me!  It has been such a pleasure sharing information and stories.  For me, this is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my project!

I would like my website to see more traffic and I have been told that I need to enhance my website’s visibility and searchability.  Thankfully, I have a very talented daughter who will help me with this, so -- look for changes in this area in the next few months…. 

I have continued to work with the New Bedford Whaling Museum (whalingmuseum.org).  If you haven’t had the opportunity to visit them, you should …. They have an amazing facility and collection, and a visit should be on your bucket list!  They also have the largest Clifford Ashley painting collection in the world!  

In 1973, the NBWM, in conjunction with The Brandywine River Museum (brandywine.org), put together an exhibition of paintings by Clifford W.  Ashley, which they named “Whalers, Wharves, and Waterways.”  The catalog that accompanied this exhibit includes the 69 paintings in the exhibit, four in color and 65 in black & white.  One of the talented staff at the museum took on the task of locating the color slides taken of Ashley paintings by Elton Hall who, in 1973, tracked down many of the privately owned paintings used in the exhibition.  We have now digitized these slides and processed them with professional color correction/restoration software and have added roughly 40 hi-resolution images to our effort from this source.  This has been a huge success!  Thank you NBWM!!

Over the past year plus Doug and I have traveled far and wide throughout New England and photographed numerous Ashley paintings.  I am fortunate to pilot a small airplane and we have journeyed to Maine, Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Cuttyhunk Island (cuttyhunkhistoricalsociety.org), the South Shore of Massachusetts, the Greater Boston area, and Vermont to meet Ashley painting owners and to photograph those works.  

I have also developed a much clearer picture of my grandfather’s work efforts as well as insights into his personal life.  I have spent many wonderful hours chatting with my mother (his daughter) about Clifford Ashley as a father, as an illustrator, as a painter, as a writer, and as a knot expert.  I have spent countless hours reading books that he illustrated, reading books that he wrote, and sifting through personal papers and family owned pen & inks, watercolors, and charcoal sketches.  Soon I will need to start assembling all this information in an organized fashion and figure out the best way to make it accessible to those who are interested!

Once again, a heartfelt thanks to all of you who have been so welcoming and helpful, making this journey of mine possible and so special! 

Winter Progress

Time has certainly flown by since my last post! It’s been a month and I have made steady progress on my project. I have captured 10 more High-Resolution images of Ashley Paintings and have organized all of the information I have collected so far into a massive spreadsheet. It is really exciting to now be able to go to a single document to access the fruits of my effort. It is particularly exciting to scroll through the spreadsheet and look at the progression of Ashley’s skill through the years … what an amazing talent he was!!

I have also located 14 more of his paintings! Painting owners have been wonderfully helpful and responsive. I believe that I have located most of CWA’s paintings that are currently in the possession of museums and other public institutions, and so now my quest continues with an effort to connect with private owners. This is certainly a time consuming task, but so far it has been one of the most enjoyable parts of this project - chatting and sharing information with people who love their CWAshley painting!

That’s it for now … as always, I look forward to hearing from anyone who is interested in this project!

My First Post

Hi there. Roughly a year ago I was visiting my mother and I came across an old index card file box full of index cards. These cards were my Grandfather's records of his lifetime of oil paintings. I felt like I had found a secret scavenger hunt map and I couldn't resist the temptation to locate and photograph as many of these paintings as possible. Each of the index cards in this file has information pertaining to one of his paintings. The cards are filed numerically and I have discovered over this past year that my grandfather almost always wrote the associated number on the back of the actual painting. The index cards contain a variety of information including a painting title, the painting size, the date painted, the location and subject matter of the painting, a list of art shows the painting was shown at, and often times the first buyer. With this information my goal is to locate, identify, photograph, and catelog his oil paintings. At the same time I would like to share the information that I have with the owners of his paintings so that information can travel through time with his artwork.

This is my first entry to this blog. Over the past year I have located nearly 100 of his roughly 350 oil paintings and I have had the opportunity to take High-Resolution photographs of 58 them. What a fabulous treasure hunt it has been already. Over the next weeks and months I will chat more about this past year’s search adventures and details and will hopefully be adding posts about new finds and photograph results. Thanks for visiting this site and feel free to reach out to me if you have any information you would like to share….