Style and Approach
Esther Williams, Art and Music
Williams’ style is typically rather loose and somewhat impressionistic, perhaps influenced by her Boston teacher Philip Hale, who worked in that manner. Williams did not, however, think her style had much to do with her teachers, as indicated by correspondence exchanged in 1939 with Laura Penny, a graduate student writing her thesis on twentieth-century American female painters.
Penny contacted artists based on their participation in the art exhibition at San Francisco’s 1939 Golden Gate Exposition. A list of questions she posed included one about the artist’s interests other than painting, in response to which Williams noted her appreciation for music and literature. Penny also inquired about Williams’ teachers and about other artists she admired. Regarding her instructors, Williams cited her study under both Philip Hale and André Lhote, but noted that their influence on her had not been extensive, and that she did not paint the way she had been taught. Regarding the “great masters of painting” that she found most stimulating, Williams stated, “One’s Gods change as one’s problems change. The great masters are a continual and ever fresh source of inspiration.” She listed several painters she admired, including Piero della Francesca (c.1415-1492), Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). It is notable that none of these were contemporary, the most recent, Renoir, having died two decades earlier.
Renior seems to have been a favorite of Williams. She recounted to her mother, in a letter of January 1947, having seen a “lovely” exhibition of Renoir’s work in New York, describing the artist as follows: “What a painter—and how he did it is pure magic. No darks are dark intense—but sing with great richness. No edginess but clarity.” Williams’ appreciation of Renoir’s ability to have clarity without resorting to strong edges can be read in her own paintings, and it resembles the artistic philosophy her mother espoused in a diary entry from March 9, 1894: “All works of art should be in the nature of a sketch, something suggestive but not finished. A finished thing is a lie. An impossibility.” The loose handling of paint found in Williams’ work thus can be related to her mother and perhaps to artists like Renoir. And while her teacher Philip Hale’s impressionist style might also have had an impact, the Cubist approach of her other principal instructor, André Lhote, little influenced Williams’ work.