Edward Henry Pottthast was a native of Cincinnati and a product of the extraordinary art community that flourished there in the nineteenth century. He was a contemporary and friend of Frank Duveneck, John Henry Twachtman, Joseph De Camp, and Robert Blum, among the Cincinnati coteries. The son of German American artisans—his father was a cabinetmaker, his mother, a milliner—Potthast spent twelve years pursuing art instruction at night at the McMicken School of Design while he apprenticed and later earned his living as a lithographer. By 1882, he had saved enough money to go to Antwerp and then Munich, where he studied for three years. Potthast returned to Cincinnati and to lithography, resuming evening study, this time at the Cincinnati Museum Art School. He made a second trip to Europe between 1887 and 1890. In France, he painted at Fontainebleau on the edge of the Barbizon Forest and was touched by French Impressionism absorbed through the mediating influence of the American Impressionist Robert Vonnoh. Again, he returned to Cincinnati and to lithography before settling permanently in New York City in 1896, when he was nearly forty years old.
Prudent as ever, Potthast at first obtained free-lance work as a lithographer for Scribner’s and Century magazines before finally trusting his livelihood to fine art in the early years of the twentieth century. Potthast prospered in New York, settling into a studio at the Gainsborough Building at 222 West 59th Street, where he remained until his death. A sociable man, he took an active part in the city’s professional art milieu and saw his work acknowledged with a series of awards and prizes. His mature style was a comfortable and personal adaptation of impressionist painting techniques and bright palette filtered through a benevolent but conservative character. Potthast, a lifelong bachelor, was as professionally modest as he was judicious and never engaged in the kind of self-promotion that would have gained him greater recognition during his lifetime. Since his death in 1927 his reputation has steadily grown, as collectors and institutions have increasingly appreciated his accomplished images of American work and leisure in the early years of the twentieth century.
Potthast is best known today for his brightly colored beach scenes of seaside resorts along the Atlantic coast from Coney Island, Brooklyn, to Monhegan Island, Maine. These were a relatively late development in his career. He was fifty-eight years old in 1914 when he first began to exhibit his series of beach paintings. His early work reflected a broad spectrum of interests and abilities. He painted figural studies, genre scenes, landscapes, cityscapes, and coastal views in a variety of styles that reveal the influence of his Munich training and his exposure to Barbizon painting, as well as that of the French Impressionists and most decisively, the Spanish painter, Joaquìn Sorolla y Bastìda (1863–1923).
