Edgar Hewitt Nye’s forte was landscape painting, and he had a preference for bleak scenes with leafless trees. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he spent many years in Washington, DC, when he was not in England or France.
At age thirteen, Nye began to study at the Corcoran School of Art, and was there from 1892 to 1900, a time when the institution was undergoing a major expansion. His initial classes were held in the Renwick Building (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery of Art), where in 1890 there were forty students and two instructors. In 1897 the school and gallery moved to an imposing Beaux-Arts style building designed by Ernest Flagg; it was named in honor of its benefactor William Wilson Corcoran and housed his extensive collection.
Soon after Nye completed his studies at the Corcoran, he began to travel and study abroad, most often to England. His chronology can be reconstructed with information relating to his personal life, but details of his artistic career remain vague. He married Beatrice Jackson Noah in Baltimore in 1904, and that year, a daughter was born. The relationship didn’t last, as he would have a child with Amy Alma Phillips in Oxford, England, in 1906. Nye stayed in Oxford for a few years, taking art courses there and in London. Though he divorced Beatrice in 1907, he did not marry Amy, but would have three more children with her. By 1910 he was in St. Ives, Cornwall, where he was a student of John Noble Barlow, a leading landscape painter. A seaside resort, the location was famous for the quality of its light which had attracted such noted artists as J.M.W. Turner and James Whistler. He continued his studies with Barlow through 1914, at times at Newlyn, another Cornwall site and art colony. Nye was also in France in 1914, but apparently was not involved in the war. By 1917 or 1918, his residence was Washington, DC, though he may have gone abroad for short periods; his draft registration paperwork, dated two months before the end of WWI, lists his address as Washington, DC, and his occupation as artist.
Nye lived permanently in Washington from 1921 until his death in 1943. He met his second wife here, Elizabeth Quackenbush, a teacher, and they married in 1922. A 1926 photograph links Nye to a mural for the Department of Agriculture, but no further information can be found on its whereabouts. For the rest of his time in DC, Nye conducted private lessons in his studio and was active with local art organizations, such as the Washington Society of Artists and the Washington Watercolor Club where his paintings frequently garnered prizes. In 1931, a newspaper mentioning his lessons at Andrews Studios in Seminary Hill, Virginia, said Nye was teaching plein-air, in a “modernistic mode.” He was also linked to the Washington Musical Institute in 1933, for which he was the only faculty in the Department of Art. He exhibited in the biennials hosted by his alma mater, the Corcoran Gallery, and at various galleries in the United States and England.
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