As I peered at the watercolor, I saw signs of the style of artist Walter Dodd Condit. In the mishmash of angles and colors were the familiar outlines of rowhouses typical of much of the works of this Philadelphia artist.
The auction house was selling several of Condit’s works recently, and I was hoping to grab at least one of them. This abstract-looking watercolor was the first to attract my attention, followed by a painting of clearly defined Philadelphia rowhouses in bright colors reminiscent of buildings in Bermuda.
That latter painting was similar to a Condit watercolor titled “Shawmont Ruin” that I had bought two years ago at auction. The image was a lone abandoned house on the same street up the hill from the house whose contents were for sale at the auction. I was familiar with Condit’s name because several of his works had come up at auction before, but I was always outbidded on them.
I didn’t want that to happen this time. I decided to bid on the abstract array of rowhouses and none of the others, including several woodcuts, and watercolors of a boat, cyclist and a “Medieval Apparition,” which the auction house described as a “visionary or fantasy scene” but I couldn’t quite figure out.
The abstract-style painting, titled “Hilltown,” reminded me of an interview that I conducted several months ago with Condit’s son Walter Lloyd Condit, who lives in Massachusetts. He mentioned that his father began creating abstract paintings and woodcuts later in life (the artist died in 1991).
“We saw his work change,” his son said in the interview. “It became more and more abstract as he got older.”
Now I wondered if “Hilltown” was a transitional piece between the artist’s realistic images of rowhouses and his abstract period. The auction house described it as a “European town seen from above.” I’m not sure how correct that description is.
Early on, his father loved sketching old houses and old boats, his son said. “He liked rotten boats and rotten houses. There’s a romantic flavor to his work. He was a romantic at heart.”
He spent some summers as an adolescent with his father on his small boat, sometimes traveling as far as Chesapeake Bay. He was in high school and they’d go when he was out of school.
“For several summers I went sketching with him on his boat. It was a plywood boat. It wasn’t a big boat. It could sleep two,” said his son, who attended the Rhode Island School of Design and is now a mental health professional.
I had always been curious about when the artist painted the “Shawmont Ruin” watercolor I bought at the house sale, because there was no date on it. The son figured that it was the 1950s or early 1960s when his father’s works were more realistic. “I like that picture that you have,” he said. “I like that time of his work. … maybe because I was closer to him and he and I went sketching.”
He also went out on the boat with his father when he was in college. He himself painted for a while after college but stopped: “My heart wasn’t in it,” he said.
Condit was born in New Jersey, and the family moved to Norristown where his father was a court stenographer. The family was middle class, and Condit and his brother went to the Haverford School. His son wasn’t sure if the two received scholarships to this elite prep school.
His son also wasn’t sure when his father first began painting, but he was creating portraits as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Students then, his son said, were taught to paint models and portraits.
Condit the artist was awarded a William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship from PAFA to go to Europe but decided against it, his son said, because World War II had broken out. He chose instead to use the scholarship to travel to Mexico with a friend.
His son also noted that most biographies mention that his father graduated from PAFA (he was a student there), but he actually received bachelor and master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, which had a collaborative relationship with PAFA. He said his father may have attended a special program of some sort at the Barnes Foundation.
After college, his father worked as a commercial artist designing doilies. He gave that up, and eventually was an adjunct professor at the Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia. He taught the history of art, utilizing some of the hundreds of thousands of slides he owned and practicing his lectures at home, said the son. His father also taught at art centers in the Philadelphia region.
“I got a good knowledge of art and history from him. I appreciate that.”
Condit’s wife, Annie, was also an artist, who gave it up to raise her family of three girls (one daughter, Cecelia Condit, is a video artist) and one boy in the Shawmont/Roxborough section of Philadelphia. They vacationed in New England, his son said, including Maine, Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. He recalled that his father “sketched along the way, early in the morning. I don’t remember ever joining him. But he went off on his own and sketched boats, landscapes and things like that. We camped most of the time.”
Condit didn’t have a studio; he painted in a room of his home. He never sold much of his art and was never represented by a gallery. He applied to art shows, his son said, and sometimes was rejected, which angered both of them because he was “a professional painter, not an amateur. … He was a very good watercolorist.” To most, he is a little-known Philadelphia artist.
“He didn’t make a lot of money. He struggled … It was hard for him to make a living,” his son said. “He had three or four classes he taught at Hussian. He never knew how many classes he’d be teaching. He got paid by the course.”
Condit was an Episcopalian who loved sports and felt like an outsider because he wasn’t able to fight in World War II because of a heart murmur, his son said. He was never a public-school teacher, although that’s how an auctioneer described him the first time I attended an auction of his works.
As for the latest auction, I bought “Hilltown,” along with two woodcuts because the auction house was practically giving them away and the auctioneer kept eyeballing me to coax me into buying them.
