Gerrit Sinclair

BORN: 1890 Grand Haven, MI

DIED: 1955 Milwaukee, WI

Gerrit V. Sinclair studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1910 to 1915.  His most well known teachers at the Art Institute were John Vanderpoel and John Norton. In 1917, the artist enlisted in the Army Ambulance Corps and served in northern Italy and Austria during World War I as an ambulance driver and also painted in Paris in 1930. Scenes from his experience abroad are recorded in his works of the early 1920s. 

Following the war, Sinclair settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he became a member of the faculty of the Layton School of Art upon the school’s founding in 1920.  He continued to teach at the Layton School and at the Oxbow Summer School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan until his retirement in 1954. Gerrit V. Sinclair’s paintings chronicled American life in Wisconsin and the Midwest from the 1920s through the 1950s. Sinclair is recognized both as an important artist and teacher from the Great Lakes region. 

Sinclair largely ignored modern European trends in art in favor of developing a warm figurative style that embraced the dignity of life in ordinary American towns and rural locales. Sinclair’s regionalist views of the American scene focus on the “virtues of family, patriotism, hard work and the simple pleasures of daily life”. An instructor at the Layton School of Art, Sinclair influenced numerous young artists getting their start in Milwaukee.

During his lifetime Sinclair’s paintings were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, the Salon Printemps in Paris, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, the Whitney Museum in New York, the New York Watercolor Club, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Art Institute of Chicago,  the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, The Century of Progress ; the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, and many other museums and galleries. 

Sinclair was a member of Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors, Wisconsin Federation of the Arts and the Wisconsin Painting Museum.  He received numerous prizes and commissions for his work including W.P.A. murals during the Great Depression, including the Federal Building in Wausau, WI with murals entitled “Lumbering” and “Rural Mail”.

His style is a blend of realism and Impressionism but is clearly modern in its abstract concern for composition and color.  Sinclair is best known for his regionalist paintings of rural and urban Wisconsin.  His farm scene entitled ”Spring in Wisconsin” was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. 

SOURCES AND BIOGRAPHICAL EXCERPTS:

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AskART - 

MOWA -The Museum of Wisconsin Art  -