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Edmund Marion Ashe was born in New York City in 1867. He studied art under John Warde Stinson and worked as an illustrator in the early part of this century. His drawings were published in Collier's, Harper's Magazine, Scribner's Magazine, and St. Nicholas Magazine. He also produced illustrations for such books as In Camp with a Tin Soldier (New York, 1892) by John Kendrick Bangs; Her First Appearance (New York, 1901), Ransom's Folly (New York, 1902), and The Bar Sinister (New York, 1903) by Richard Harding Davis. During Theodore Roosevelt's administration (1901-1909), Ashe served as an artist-correspondent at the White House, where he was recorded to have secured several news scoops through his personal friendship with the President. During this period he also served as an instructor for the Art Students League in New York. He was a member of the New York Watercolor Club, and was one of the first members of the Society of Illustrators, having joined in the first month of the club's founding in 1901. Ashe was also a founder of the Sivermine Guild in Norwalk, Connecticut, near his family home in the town of Westport. In 1920, Ashe moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to teach at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He worked there until his retirement in 1939, eventually becoming Head of the Department of Painting and Decoration. In April 1931, the Carnegie Institute presented an exhibition of oil paintings by the members of the faculty of the College of Fine Arts of the Institute. It was the first time that the men who taught painting and decoration at the Carnegie Institute exhibited as a group. Of the nine members of the faculty composing the group in the show, four are represented in the Steidle Collection: Edmund M. Ashe, Roy Hilton, Wilfred A. Readio and Everett Warner. Ashe contributed three canvases, one of which, entitled Crab Houses at Christfield, was described by a critic as "brilliant in color, novel in conception, and interesting in arrangement." Credited with capturing "the extraordinary picturesqueness of the Pittsburgh community," Ashe was a perennial participant in the exhibitions of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. Ashe's work had also been shown in New York in the early 1920s, and in 1929, a selection of his paintings depicting the people of the Cumberland Mountains was exhibited at that city's Ferargil Galleries. A review of the show states, "Possibly no finer record of the mountaineers has appeared than Mr. Ashe has created. They are shown at work or at rest, in their cabins or following the mountain paths. They are drawn as a skilled photographer might catch them and placed in settings chosen by an eye trained to harmonious color and well-proportioned design." In May 1932, Ashe and seventeen other artists were selected from the twenty-second annual exhibition of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh to be presented in the Carnegie Institute's first Exhibition of Paintings by Selected Pittsburgh Artists, a show highlighting Pittsburgh's best painters. Ashe was accorded this honor again in the second exhibit of June 1935, and the sixth exhibit of June 1939, his last year as Head of the Department of Painting and Design. He had been invited to participate in all six of the exhibits and showed in three of them. After 1939, he was no longer eligible, having retired and moved from Pittsburgh to live in Charleston, South Carolina. The first painting by Edmund M. Ashe to enter the Steidle Collection was Finishing the Heat, Open Hearth Furnace. Captured in soft, feathery brush strokes and rendered in brilliant reds, yellows and oranges, two steelworkers stand illuminated by the light of an open hearth furnace. The composition of the piece is almost identical to that of Steel, executed in 1942. No doubt drawn from the same preparatory sketches, Steel is almost twice the size of its predecessor, and while similar in its composition, the execution of the piece is vastly different than Finishing the Heat. Retaining the same palette of the earlier piece, Ashe has translated the soft atmospheric quality of the first into a hard-edged rendering with definite shapes and volumes. In it one is also able to discern more of the background and interior of the steel mill, abandoning the air of mystery in the first for a more precise description of the process depicted in the second. Steel was presented in the early months of 1942 by the Lancaster Alumni Club in the Memory of Hugh M. Clarke, class of 1913, along with a second large canvas entitled Work. Perhaps the most foreboding example among Ashe's paintings in the collection, Work reveals the haggard, expressionless faces of steelworkers descending a hill into what appears to be a monstrous, never-ending steel mill that recedes off into the smokey haze of the background. Both Steel and Work were exhibited at New York's Ferargil Galleries before entering the Steidle Collection. In the fall of 1938, Mr. C. W. Heppenstall, class of 1893 and president of the Heppenstall Company in Pittsburgh, contributed the oil painting Tapping Induction Furnace to the collection. Made in Mr. Heppenstall's mill in Pittsburgh (with the well-dressed gentleman on the far right possibly representing Mr. Heppenstall himself), the painting is of considerable historical interest in that it depicts the first electric induction furnaces used in this country for steel production. Again featuring Ashe's rich palette of blues and reds, the scene shows various workers in a variety of poses, operating the latest innovation in the manufacturing of steel. Another interior scene showing men working is Off-Hand Blowing Glass. Again Ashe has created a composition of men working around a pair of furnaces, but in this example engaged in the centuries old process of blowing glass. The bottles that are the final product can be seen on racks in the background. The familiar murals in the rotunda and central corridor of Steidle Building were commissioned in December of 1938 by an alumni committee. The three large paintings represent the three main mineral industries of Pennsylvania: steel, coal, and petroleum. Installed in the rotunda, and seen as soon as one enters the building, are Changing Shift, which portrays the change of shift at a coal mine, and Changing the Bit, which shows a driller and tool dresser working on the derrick floor of a standard Pennsylvania drilling rig. In the corridor, The Cast depicts iron workers tapping the metal from a blast furnace. The New York Times of October 15, 1939, published an account of the installation of the murals in the Mineral Industries building and printed a reproduction of Changing the Bit. It is interesting to note that Changing Shift and Changing the Bit depart from Ashe's usually bright palette. Confining himself mainly to browns and grays, the artist seems to be more interested in composing the vertical, horizontals and diagonals of the different structures depicted. After his retirement from Carnegie Institute in 1939, Ashe returned to his home in Westport, Connecticut. He died in 1941. In 1986, Ashe's work was featured in the exhibition American Illustration 1890-1925: Romance, Adventure & Suspense, held at the Glebow Museum in Calgary, Canada.
Sources: Ashe, Edmund M., "Pittsburgh's Best," with portrait of Ashe, Carnegie Magazine, vol. 10, February 1937, 273-280. The Constable reproduced in Parnassus vol. 1, no. 6, October 1929. "Exhibition in the New York Galleries," Art News, vol. 28, October 12, 1929, p. 12. "Exhibition of Paintings by the Tech Fine Arts Faculty," with Crab Houses at Christfield illustrated, Carnegie Magazine 5:4, April 1931. Falk, Peter Hastings (edit.). Who Was Who in American Art. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1985. "Heppenstall Donates Painting to Art Gallery," Mineral Industries, vol. 8, no. 1, October 1938, p. 3. Larson, Judy. American Illustration 1890-1925: Romance, Adventure & Suspense. Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Glenbow Museum, 1986. "New Mural at Pennsylvania State," The New York Times, Sunday, October 15, 1939. O'Connor, John Jr., "Presenting Pittsburgh Artists," with Sunday, Day of Rest illustrated, Carnegie Magazine, vol. 9, June 1935, pp. 67-71. "Paintings by Pittsburgh Artists," with Anne illustrated, Carnegie Magazine, vol. 13, June 1939, pp. 79-80. Reed, Walt and Roger. The Illustrator in America 1880-1980: A Century of Illustration. New York: Madison Square Press, Inc., 1984. Saint-Gaudens, Homer, "Exhibition of Paintings by Pittsburgh Artists," Carnegie Magazine, vol. 6, May 1932, pp. 38-42. This document copyright © 1996, Eric John Schruers |