A River Lavadero, Madrid (Street in Madrid)
River Lavadero was donated to the Union League Club by Sarah F. Wadsworth, the mother of the artist. A sunny, impressionistic landscape depicts a laundry facility in Madrid; rows of white linen hang on the branches while the river flows beneath. Under the spell of Wadsworth’s artistic touch, a site of hard work and labor appears romantic and even pretty. As often is the case in the work of Wadsworth, human presence is minimal, the landscape dominates the visual and emotional energy. One woman crosses a bridge on the right and another woman, almost fully obscured by the laundry sheets, kneels at the riverbank below.
Madrid was a favorite respite for Wadwsorth. He basked in the warm Spanish sun and clear blue summer sky. But his haven became his downfall, as during that summer he took ill and never returned to Chicago. River Lavadero could have been his final painting. He died that summer in Madrid in 1905. His early passing elicited numerous tributes in the press, who praised the gifted American Impressionist for his plein-air paintings.
His father, Dr. Francis L. Wadsworth, was from Maine and became a prominent physician in Chicago at Rush College of Medicine and St. Joseph’s Hospital. His mother Sarah was artistically inclined; she painted and played the piano. When Frank was fourteen years old, she enrolled him in the junior course at the School of the Art Institute, but he stayed for only one month. After an eight-year hiatus, at the age of twenty-four, he returned to the School of the Art Institute, where over a short period mastered the curriculum and earned seven honorable mentions for his paintings.
After his father died, he and his mother traveled to Europe in 1896 and met the exponent of American Impressionism, William Merritt Chase. The two became good friends--Chase an important mentor for the younger Wadsworth. Back in the United States, Wadsworth studied formally with Chase in New York City and at his summer school in Shinnecock, Long Island, where the students specialized in outdoor painting.
Wadsworth received numerous accolades for his appealing pictures. He was recognized in 1904 with a bronze medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. He served on the jury for the Art Institute’s American art annual. And the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (founded in 1902) mounted a solo show for him in February 1905. That summer, Wadsworth accompanied Chase to Spain, on what was to be his last trip. He died in Madrid, at age thirty-one of what was referred to as "autumnal fever."
[For more on his death, see: Metzler, S.: "Death by Dysentery? Artist Frank Russell Wadsworth in Madrid," Hektoen International online journal of Medical Humanties: https://hekint.org/2017/07/25/death-dysentery-artist-frank-russell-wadsworth-madrid/].
