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GOVERNMENT COMMISSIONS
As the Depression worsened, the federal government took a growing and crucial role in supporting artists. In 1934, the PWAP commissioned Gates and Prentiss Taylor, another Washington artist, to paint the gardens of Charleston, South Carolina. The resulting watercolors were exhibited in a traveling show, which included a stop at the National Museum in Washington (later known as the National Collection of Fine Arts, and now the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or SAAM) in 1935,
The following year, the Treasury's Section of Fine Arts commissioned Gates, together with Washington artists Mitchell Jamieson and Prentiss Taylor, to sail to the Virgin Islands in order to paint watercolors of the people and landscape. The watercolors were to hang in government buildings and travel in exhibitions around the states to stimulate tourism. The resulting watercolors showed that Gates had expanded his palette and, at the age of thirty, fully mastered the medium.
Despite the acclaim garnered by the Virgin Island watercolors, Gates did not seem anxious to repeat the experience. He wrote about the artistic challenges of painting the people and places of the Islands:
Its [sic] too much like cake. At first I was excited about it. But its [sic] too picturesque. It sort of wears on you. Everywhere you go there is a picture ready for you. And there is so much brilliant color it drives you crazy.... The goats start in the afternoon, by night the donkeys begin to bray, then the roosters start up at midnight and the dogs bark all the time. |