Houghton Cranford Smith (1887-1983)

By Jan Scalisi

When Houghton Cranford Smith strolled the beach at Pawley’s Island in the summer of 1954, he was always alive to opportunities to sketch. Besides the numerous paintings he created during the three summers he spent at Pawley’s Island (1952-1954), many of these small rough sketches, hastily scribbled on whatever surface was available, made their way into his paintings for the rest of his life.

Smith loved to paint outside and was intensely interested in landscape and color. Typical of his method, Smith referred to sketches made years before to create his colorful canvasses. A worldwide traveler whose interest in seeing the world was driven primarily by his passion for painting, Smith’s inveterate sketching provided material for painting during the last 40 years of his life, long after his travels were over.

“He didn’t leave the country again (after his honeymoon in Guatemala with his second wife) because he didn’t feel he needed to,” says Florence Cranford Smith Shepard, the eldest of Smith’s three children. Smith also had two sons, Houghton Jr. who lives in Michigan and Gerrit who passed away in 1997. “He understood the paintings he needed to do. He was perfectly content to stay at home and paint.”

Smith’s life as an artist and a man was charmed. His parents, Nina Van Dorn Lane and Daniel Cranford Smith of Brooklyn, New York, recognized and encouraged his talent early on. Smith fondly remembered learning how to draw in his father’s lap at the age of five.

His early art education included studies at the Nantucket School of Design and the Arts Students League in New York where he studied with George Bridgman, William Merritt Chase and Kenneth Hayes Miller. He learned critical lessons about the use of color and the relationship between colors from Ambrose Webster, and Charles Webster Hawthorne at Hawthorne’s Cape Cod School of Art in 1908 and 1909. Smith was instrumental in starting the Provincetown Art Association in 1914, an arts community that was a mainstay in Smith’s life for a decade after his initial visit in the summer of 1908.

His trip to Chile in 1916 resulted in an extended stay of four years due to the German blockade, and a marriage. He brought his bride, Elena Peralta of Santiago, back to the United States in 1920.

After a three-year stint as an assistant art professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Smith’s father asked him what he really wanted to do. Smith gave him an answer that changed his life.

“My father responded that he would like to go back to France and study. His father footed the bill for the same salary my father was making at the University of Kansas,” remembers Shepard.

Passionately committed to his art, Smith traveled and studied in France and Spain during the 1920s and 30s, working with Jean-Paul Laurens and later with Andre Lhote and Amedee Ozenfant in the early 1930s. His daughter, who was born in Nice, remembers living in a Paris apartment in the winters and summering in Le Brusc in Southern France on the Mediterranean Sea. Smith’s charm opened many doors for him.

“Whatever place my father rented, the people adopted all of us so my father could go and paint wherever he was,” she recalls. “We went to Spain for the summer when the Spanish Revolution was beginning. We came back by ship and my father never went back to Europe.”

When the Smith family returned to the United States in 1933, they lived with Smith’s parents at The New School campus, a progressive school that Daniel Smith had donated his land to support. When Smith’s wife Elena became ill and died in 1938 of cancer, Shepard recalls that her father seemed at loose ends, unsure of how to raise three children alone. But three years later, on a trip to Mexico, he met a woman from Lancaster, South Carolina, who was to be his wife, stepmother to his children and promoter of his art for the next 40 years.

“Laura Gilbert Williams was a teacher of the kind I wish they had more of,” Shepard remembers. Shepard credits the schoolteacher from South Carolina for saving her education.

“I had been going to a progressive school. When Laura came along, she was horrified. The other kids were reading things I couldn’t read.” Shepard switched to a boarding school where she eventually caught up to her peers. Later, after Shepard married and had three children, the Shepard family returned to live with Smith and Laura. Smith’s grandfathering of her two disabled children was reminiscent of the loving father he had been to his children.

“My father was marvelous with my children,” remembers Shepard. “We all gained from the two that are now gone because they were remarkable. My father realized that. Laura and my father were absolutely there for us.”

Shepard remembers Smith as full of fun, a marvelous mimic who could capture the essence of a person with a couple of props. Interested in art, literature and theatre, Smith and Laura had many friends and loved to throw parties. Smith frequently took the children to the theatre, museums and shopping. Shepard’s close relationship with her father during his latter years allowed her to witness firsthand the artist at work.

“When he was doing large paintings, he painted every day. He’d have his little routine: he’d paint something, then he’d sit back and smoke a cigarette and stare at his work and decided if it was the way he wanted it to be or not,” she recalls. ”If he didn’t like an area, he might cut out a little piece of paper or a rough drawing and stick it on the canvas and hold it for a second.”

Smith always did the sky first on his large canvasses. He did washes beforehand, carefully making corrections before he started on the final version. He took many months to do large paintings and he always painted in oil, although during his long career, he experimented with every medium available. Smith enjoyed painting to marching music because its rhythm matched his brushstrokes.

Smith’s passion has become Shepard’s passion.

“I discovered that my father had no order to any of his work. After his 90th birthday party, I sat down with my father and put things on the floor and asked him where he was and when he painted this. I made him sign everything,” Shepard says. In conjunction with Laura, Shepard set out to publicize Smith’s work, and has made much progress in the last 10 years with a number of prestigious exhibitions. All of his original papers are on microfilm at the National Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.

“To me, to live with his paintings, they grow on you. I find them to be tranquil,” Shepard says. “I feel like I’m there.”

Smith died at the age of 96, his last words to Laura a lament that he hadn’t made it as an academician. Laura, with the blessing of Smith’s children, turned the trust over to Shepard. Laura died 10 years after Smith passed away.

“My father didn’t need much. As long as he had his paint brushes and oils, he was content,” remembers Shepard. “He didn’t promote himself, he painted. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that this museum show is taking place in Laura’s home state.”