For sheer peculiarity, the exhibition “Louis M. Eilshemius: An Independent Spirit” at the National Academy of Design, will probably set a standard for a long time to come.[1] Eilshemius is one of the oddest of American painters, a genuinely obscure, hard-to-classify figure known mainly for a few works but admired by a handful of afficionados, periodically “discovered,” and then relegated to a footnote in the history of New York painting. For once the dreadful word “marginalized” is appropriate.

Every aspect of Eilshemius’s life and art embodies contradiction. Even though his best known pictures could easily be mistaken for the work of a passionate, slightly ham-handed amateur doing the best he can, their author was, in fact, a sophisticated, well-educated, well-travelled, traditionally trained painter capable of drawing with academic correctness. While he apparently ...

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