Tom Gleason, Artist
When I first met Tom, he was an anxious graduate student who had paused in his pursuit of painting to absorb the immense amount of material required to earn his doctorate in Russian history. While courting, we of course visited museums, and his excitement about art, especially of the twentieth century, was evident. I felt enraptured by his knowledge and sensitivity as he expounded on the virtues of a Cezanne landscape we saw at the Museum of Modern Art in 1963. His explication, for me, enlarged my sense of this curious, bright and multifaceted person, and brought me a brushstroke closer to loving him.
In 1951, when Tom was twelve, his parents moved to Washington, DC, and he entered St. Albans, a private Episcopal school associated with the National Cathedral, in the beginning of the second form (eighth grade). After a rocky start (according to Tom), he settled in as a reasonable student despite his tendency to talk back to some of his teachers. He was a good athlete and played on the soccer, track and tennis teams.
His beloved art instructor at St. Albans, Dean Stambaugh, was a remarkable teacher who drew many boys (including Al Gore) into the school studio. The hours Tom spent there, listening to recordings of classical music, especially opera and jazz, were among the happiest of his adolescence. As a serious art student in an exceptional high school art program, his experience with Stambaugh was life changing, as it was for many of his devoted students. These included Sandy Walker, a well-known Zen-influenced painter of woods, streams and mountains, who became a lifelong friend of Tom’s.
The Phillips Collection was the mecca to which Stambaugh took his students, and where Tom often went under his own steam. Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party was a favorite, and we always stopped to see it when at the Phillips. Tom especially loved the way the Phillips family had turned their spectacular home into a series of intimate spaces created by their hanging of personally selected artwork from their great collection. (Tom remarked once, after we had lived in our house for many years, that he liked to think he had done something similar in our home, though the pictures, of course, were more modest, as was our house.)
I don’t remember how I learned that Tom painted, as he wasn’t doing so when we met. Once, as we passed Harvard’s Lowell House (where his godfather, Charles Taylor, was master), he mentioned that he had painted in a studio in the basement while an undergraduate. I learned he had also spent two magical summers at the Penn State School of Visual Arts, where he had studied with Hobson Pittman, at the recommendation of Dean Stambaugh. Tom did funny imitations of Pittman archly admonishing him, “Tommy, you really must do something about those bilious greens and yellows.” As it happened, Tom did have a slight red-green confusion, a mild form of color blindness, and I imagine Pittman was seeing a byproduct of this affliction. Tom and I would occasionally disagree about a paint color. “What a gorgeous blue.” “No, it’s green,” he’d reply with typical firmness. I never could comprehend the shift of colors with which Tom saw the world.
Dean Stambaugh encouraged his students to submit works to venues in the Washington area, and Tom showed paintings at the Corcoran Gallery and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1982, while we were living in Washington and Stambaugh was long retired, Tom and other of his students raised a generous fund to provide a comfortable apartment for their teacher to live out his life across from the school.
A year after Tom’s death, while sorting pictures in the attic, I came upon a watercolor of bottles and vases signed “Tommy Gleason.” I assumed because of the “Tommy” it was one of his very early works, but Sandy assured me Hobson Pittman called him Tommy, and that he probably painted it in the early 1960s. This work has a wonderful delicacy and shows the definite influence of cubism and its roots in Cezanne.
Years later, Tom would say he lacked the courage to choose the life of the artist, and instead became an academic historian (as his father and grandfather had been). Despite this, art was a thread that ran throughout his life. In summers, he created wonderful sketches of places we visited: Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island, Mount Ascutney in Vermont or landscapes in North Cascades National Park (where Sandy and his wife, Ellen, were our hosts). He gave away many of these pictures, usually as thank-yous to our friends.
By 2004, Tom had retired, a step brought on by his developing Parkinson’s disease. The fortuitous side of this tragedy was that he now had time and space to devote himself to painting. Tom described himself in the introduction to an exhibit of his works, quoting Hokusai, “I’m just an old man, crazy about painting.”
Tom sat at his desk virtually every morning, intensely occupied with creating one after another of the joyous abstracts that flowed from the core of his being. He finally was able to return to the choice he hadn’t made decades earlier, though now he worked exclusively with oil crayons on paper. He joined the Providence Art Club, where he entered work in a New Members’ Exhibition, and then others following. He was exultant when invited to hang a solo show for the inaugural “Art at Watson” exhibit in the new Director’s Gallery of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, with which he had long been associated. His work, old and new, filled the overhanging, sunlit walkways of the second floor. Sadly, at the time of the opening he was at the New Bedford Rehabilitation Hospital, unable to attend.
In this exhibit were several works from his earliest years, including two still-life oils, a large vase with flowers emerging from thick impasto, and his 1961 masterpiece of the City of Florence viewed from the hills of Fiesole. He had gone there with a new friend, expatriate painter Richard Maury, whom he met while on a Fulbright year to Heidelberg. In this large painting, the influences of his favorite artists, Cezanne and Matisse, are evident in a riveting, unforgettable depiction of the city center viewed from the heights of this erstwhile village above the city.
Tom lived bravely with the knowledge that his time was limited. The contrast of his ebullient works with his physical decline was striking. Fortunately, the urgency with which he worked in his last years has left a lovely legacy.
— Sarah Gleason