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Chapter 11. Julian Onderdonk’s Pseudonymous Works
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C h a p t e r 1 1 Julian Onderdonk’s PseudonymousWorks Chas. Tunison may not have been a great, or even a good, artist; Julian was certainly unimpressed with Tunison’s paintings. But for all his faults, Tunison had a shrewd eye for art and artistic talent and a good sense of how to sell paintings, both developed over decades spent in the New York art world. When he first met Julian, Tunison recognized Julian’s genius and saw an opportunity to have Julian’s energy and artistic output support not just Julian and his family, but Tunison and his family as well, if only Julian could be kept very busy painting and out of the eye of the New York art circle. If Julian had been noticed as an up-and-coming young artist, he would have been sought out by the better galleries, and Tunison would have become superfluous. Julian, for his part, had two immediate goals in his life—to paint full time and to somehow support his family. It seems that in the late spring or early summer of 1904, Tunison came up with an idea that met both men’s immediate needs. As Julian began his business arrangement with Tunison in 1904, the two men made the fateful agreement that Julian would not sign his own name to the works Tunison was to sell. All things being equal, signing his pictures with a pseudonym was of no obvious benefit to Julian. His paintings’ fine artistic quality suggests they would have sold easily, regardless of the signature, had he been able to get noticed among the buyers and sellers of the New York City art world. But, as we have seen, he had not yet been able to get that notice and he was desperate to support his family. That desperation, in combination with his lack of business acumen and discomfort at being a salesman, even of his own work, meant that the arrangement to sell his paintings under a pseudonym had benefits for Julian, if only for the short term. Julian and Chas. Tunison must have given serious consideration to just what that pseudonym would be, and a work from 1904 reflects some experimentation with the first name. The last name “Turner” seems to have been an easy decision, but there is evidence they briefly tried at least one other first name in a work clearly painted by Julian in 1904 but signed “Elbert H. Turner.” The letter formation used in the signature and verso inscription on this work is identical to that of the Chas. Turner signatures. There is also the evidence of another variant of the pseudonym in the three Chase Turner paintings discussed in chapter 10. Again, the formation of the letters in the Chase Turner signatures is identical to that in the Chas. Turner signatures, and all demonstrate the eccentricities that typified Julian’s own signature. Until more works come to light, it is not possible to know definitively the sequence and duration of usage for Julian’s pseudonyms. For now, all we know for sure is that Julian signed at least three pseudonyms to works during the period from 1904 to 1909, and all but four of the known pseudonymous works of that period are signed Chas. Turner. Of the more than fifty-five known paintings signed Chas. or Chase Turner, seventeen are dated. Thus, if we include the Elbert H. Turner painting, there are eighteen dated pseudonymous works. All but three of the dates fall into the range 1904– 1906, and 1904–1907 is exactly the period with the fewest dated paintings signed Julian Onderdonk.1 Many of the Chas. Turner works bear strong similarities to paintings done by Julian and signed with his own name, including a Venice scene, a number of seascapes, two or three dozen Staten Island landscapes, and two Texas scenes. The last known dated Chas. Turner paintings are a watercolor from 1908, and possibly one oil painting dated 1909. At least two pieces of documentary evidence support the argument that Julian was painting works for Tunison to sell and signing them Chas. Turner. First are the letters Julian wrote to his father and G. Bedell Moore saying he had entered into an agreement with Tunison to sell paintings for him and that he was not going to sign his own name to them, but rather Tunison ’s. Second, in spring 1907, Julian wrote to his mother saying that he was tempted to...