The Original Cotton Row Painter of Savannah: Henry Lee McFee

McFee's painting of Still Life with Oranges

​Henry Lee Mcfee was born in St.Louis in 1886. In 1907 he received a large inheritance to take up his part time hobby full-time: painting. He entered Stevenson Art School and traveled to Woodstock, New York attending the Art Students League classes offered there during the Summer. McFee would become one of the leading members of the Woodstock colony’s modernist Rock City Group which included Andrew Dasburg, Konrad Cramer and Eugene Speicher.
In 1913 he began exhibiting first in New York and later in Paris. In 1916 McFee exhibited six Cubist paintings which showed his interpretation of Cézanne and Picasso in an exhibition of American modernist art at the Forum Gallery in New York. He had his first one-person show at the Rehn Gallery in 1927 in New York City. The Rehn Gallery would become influential in his career as they would sponsor further solo exhibitions in 1929, 1933, 1936, and 1950. In 1937 he won a gold medal at the Paris Salon. During these years, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the St. Louis Museum of Art, and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. purchased McFee's canvases. He developed a style that brought the Cubist type forms of Cezanne together with moody tones and softer angles. He traveled to Santa Fe in the winter of 1926 to see the landscape his good friend Andrew Dasburg painted every winter. Dausburg, who had started as a teacher of Mcfee, would become his lifetime friend.

Mcfee was married to Aileen Fletcher Jones for twenty years (1916-1936). The marriage ended abruptly when he eloped to Savannah with her niece Eleanor Brown Gutsell. McFee enjoyed Savannah and soon set up a studio there, while also spending time in San Antonio and Woodstock. In 1938 he started an art school in Savannah where he taught local artists in his studio. Also in 1939 McFee, who was obviously becoming a much sought after teacher, was appointed Director at the Witte Museum School of Art, sponsored by the San Antonio Art League. McFee left Savannah in 1940 when he was offered a teaching position at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. McFee became known as one of the important painters and foremost teachers in Southern California. He was the inspiration for an entire generation, first at Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles and from 1943 until his death at Scripps College in Claremont. His paintings continued to be collected by other institutions such as the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Saint Louis Museum of Art. McFee would die in 1953 at his home in California.

Mcfee had a studio and home on Factor’s Walk in Savannah for over ten years. He would become the first of the Cotton Row Painters of Savannah. It would be his studio that Alexander Brook would acquire after he left. The various Cotton Row Painters would exist from 1930 to the 1980s. The large, cheap and ‘derelict’ cotton warehouses that overlook the Savannah River would be the perfect space for art studios. This period only ended when River Street was developed in the eighties. Ann Osteen would be the last remaining Cotton Row Painter after the development.
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But for fifty years the old abandoned cotton warehouses of Savannah were a hotbed of creativity and artists. In 1978 the Savannah College of Art and Design would be founded here in Savannah and they would continue the tradition of artists being inspired and honing their crafts by the beauty and cultural milieu of Savannah.
 

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The Skull a painting be McFee

One in a celebrated series of Paintings of black women by McFee