Colorado History – Thomas Allen paints Texas

By Anna Lee Ames Frohlich
westernfootprints@comcast.net

Though he died almost two decades before I was born, my great grandfather Thomas Allen seems very real to me, as if I know him. This probably is due to the fact that I grew up with his paintings in various family homes and have seen some of them in museums and private collections. The paintings seem to speak to me, not just of the subjects, but about him.

On several of his trips back to the United States from Europe, Thomas Allen made painting trips to the West. It was on these trips that he did some of his very best work. Fresh from the Royal Academy of Art in Dusseldorf, he brought the equivalent of a color camera locked within his skills.

Frank T. Robinson in Living New England Artists, 1888, stated of Allen: “He is well equipped with an immense amount of study and preparation in art, is an intense and earnest student, a spirited draughtsman, interesting in his facilities and power in keeping things together on his canvas; paints with a stimulating freshness, as if his young days had been happy ones; is remarkably even and refined in sentiment and color; sees the comic side of animal and human life, as well as the serious, and is thoroughly in love with his profession.”

From a visit back to his family’s home in St. Louis, it would have been easy for him to board a train from his father’s St. Louis, Iron Mountain, & Southern Railroad and to travel through Texarkana all the way to Galveston, Texas. The connection had just been completed in 1877 when his first paintings in that area were done.

Today, the paintings that he did in Galveston in the fall of 1877 and in San Antonio and the surrounding area in 1878 – 1879, are much treasured and sought after by collectors in that area and elsewhere. He is best remembered for his oil paintings, but his watercolors were incredible too.

This tiny watercolor, only 4 ¼ x 6 ¾ inches, tells of his visit to the Galveston area in 1877. It depicts the transportation used in that area for long before the days of railroads. Freighters transported their goods in heavy Mexican “carretas” pulled by oxen. In this small space, using a technique that gets away from many artists and results in blurred edges, Allen was able to crisply depict the layers of clouds and sky, the birds following the wagons as if looking for a meal, the aura of the barren landscape dotted by prickly pear cactus, and the feeling of the laborious effort with which the caravan is progressing.

One oil painting that Allen did of this same scene is labeled by him, On the road to Mexico. The rider in the picture is wearing a large Mexican sombrero like two that Thomas Allen brought home from his trips to Texas.

Robinson said of Allen, “I call to mind the purity of his color in his several efforts at watercolor painting; there are no stains on his paper, no fussy stumbling and feeling about for results; he works directly and surely for incident, and not with a hope for accidental effects.”

Another thing about his watercolors is they contain amazing detail for that medium. A fine example of this is Thomas Allen’s The Portal of the Mission of San Jose painted near San Antonio in 1878. The sculptures in the frieze around the doorway are so clear that years after he did the painting, and after much more deterioration had taken place, the doorway was repaired using his painting as a model.