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C h a p t e r 4 February 1903 to May 1904 Married Life, Fatherhood, and Struggling to Pay the Bills By February 1903, the Shipman-Onderdonk family had left the Windermere and moved uptown to a large apartment at 159 West Eightieth Street. No doubt this helped Julian and Gertrude to survive, but it removed Julian somewhat from the art world activities that circulated around the Art Students League and the museums and galleries of midtown Manhattan.1 In 1903, events conspired to further tighten the young family’s purse strings: Gertrude’s mother became ill and required surgery, and an economic downturn that had followed a stock market crash in 1901 became more widespread (it would last into 1904). Few people, even in New York City, were buying art. Enriching , yet further complicating Julian and Gertrude’s life was the birth of their daughter Adrienne on September 13.There are few extant letters from immediately before or after the little girl’s arrival, which no doubt fully occupied Julian and Gertrude at the time (figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3).2 By all accounts, Julian worked non-stop, selling his work for whatever he could get, but because he had not yet adopted the habit of dating all his works, very few that are actually dated 1903 have been located. One of the works we do know came from this year is An October Morning, which Julian entered and had accepted into the 1903 Society of American Artists exhibition in New York City. Julian and Gertrude attended the exhibition’s opening reception on March 27, which must have been the social highlight of the year for them. In a letter to his family written the next day, Julian described the event in detail: the flowering plants decorating the Vanderbilt Gallery where the reception was held, the orchestra playing all night, and even what the young couple wore.3 4.1: Grandmother Shipman with Adrienne, ca. December 1903. Collection of Elizabeth Onderdonk Morgan. 4.2: Gertrude, as a new mother, December 1903. Collection of Elizabeth Onderdonk Morgan.| 23 | Baker pages final_FCID.pdf 41 12/26/13 1:22 PM Julian Onderdonk in New York| 24 | In a letter to his mother on March 23, 1903, Julian described An October Morning as a 24 x 38 inch, oil on burlap painting with a white lead primer. He sent a sketch of the painting in a later letter to her, but as it has not been possible to locate either the painting or that second letter, no other details are available. Julian had high hopes for the painting and was disappointed when it failed to sell at the show, but the size of the work and its acceptance into the exhibition indicate that Julian was growing bolder in his art and his marketing.4 Also in 1903, Julian wrote in letters to his family of his work on a group of paintings he referred to as the Tuxedo Park paintings , but these works have never been located either. The village of Tuxedo Park is in the Ramapo Mountains in Orange County, New York, near its border with Rockland County; west of the village lays Tuxedo Lake. In one letter dated March 22, 1903, Julian wrote: “Yesterday morning I felt too rocky to tell white from black so after I finally got up I couldn’t write because it was too late. So I went to painting on my Tuxedo Park pictures and have now four snow scenes almost finished.” In this letter, one senses how quickly his mood could swing from one extreme to the other, yet his optimism and hope for his art also shine through.5 The next day in a letter to his mother he again referred to the Tuxedo Park paintings: The Tuxedo Park pictures are painted in an entirely different way. They are done on ready made canvas and the paint is placed with more regard to a smooth surface than I usually try to get. They are all paintings of snow. Noontime on the snow, evening, night, morning, a snow storm on a hill side, a view up the valley over the snow clad mountains, and all sorts of things. It will cost me at least $250 for frames for the pictures but I have a little scheme by which I can get the frames and not let my relative know that I couldn’t raise $250 to pay for them. I expect...

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