About The Artist

Projected as one of the most promising American artists in France during the 1920s, Clinton Clement O’Callahan produced a captivating body of work throughout his 22 year-long career. He began studying art in Hartford, CT in 1906, at age 16, with the well-known Connecticut artist Henry C. White. From ages 18-29 his greatest influence and lessons learned were from the prominent artist and teacher in Hartford, Charles Noel Flagg. As early as 1908, his father, Jeremiah, a successful pub owner, realtor and racehorse owner, encouraged and financially supported the art careers of his18-year-old son, Clinton, and his friend Milton Avery (who would later become a very successful artist). O’Callahan was a member of the CT League of Art Students and the Art Society of Hartford. 

In 1910, O’Callahan went to Provincetown, MA, and studied with Charles Hawthorne, a highly regarded American artist who conducted a summer art academy on Cape Cod. He continued this practice for many summers, up until 1920. Much of his work from this period was comprised of portrait, coastal, marine, and landscape compositions. 

In August of 1917, soon after the United States joined World War I, O’Callahan enlisted in the US Army 101st Machine Gun Battalion and was immediately sent to Neufchateau, France for training. He was exposed to poisonous gas while in the trenches on the Front in early 1918 and was subsequently confined to hospitals in Neufchateau, Limoges and Savenay, with his injuries. After many months he recovered and by July 1918 he was working at the prisoner of war camps in Saint Aignan and Vernueil, France. In February 1919, he was discharged in the United States and returned to Hartford, CT. O’Callahan was celebrated upon his return by the CT League of Art Students. Once settled, he continued evening art and anatomy classes with Charles Noel Flagg while in Hartford and painted during the summer in Provincetown, MA at Hawthorne’s art colony.

O’Callahan returned to France in October 1919 as an artist and student, at age 29. He set his base in Paris and lived in the Montparnasse section, on the Left Bank of the River Seine, for the next twenty years. The community and atmosphere of Montparnasse was in its heyday in the 1920s and 30s, attracting creative people from all over the world who wanted to be in the center of intellectual and artistic life in Paris. O’Callahan immediately became immersed in the community when he arrived in Paris, meeting widely recognized Hartford artists then living in Paris, like Louis Orr and Robert F. Logan. He frequented students’ dances and sat at the numerous popular cafes with writers, like Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and artists, like Modigliani, Picasso, Pascin, Matisse, etc. Most of O’Callahan’s time was spent working at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, known for the free congress of art students, models, and monitors, with a teacher’s criticism available at two-week intervals. O’Callahan considered himself a student under Charles Guerin for four years, from 1919-1923. Guerin, a teacher at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere, was practiced in impressionistic qualities, heavily influenced by Monet and Renoir, but much of his art ideas were revolutionary at the time because of his palette freedom ahead of fauvism. O’Callahan’s art of this period, influenced by his teacher’s ideas and criticism, showed direct expression; a truthful approach to nature with an interest in large patterns of color and solid form.

In 1919 and 1920, O’Callahan visited the towns of Neufchateau and Savenay where he had been during the war, and spent time painting the familiar scenes. He also traveled to the south of France, visiting Renoir’s home at Cagnes sur Mer and making watercolor studies at Antibes, Nice, and Marseilles. In 1921 he spent time in North Africa, absorbing the culture and sketching scenes. Other travels over the years included annual visits to New York City and Connecticut and later to Spain and England.

By 1921 O’Callahan was exhibiting annually at the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon des Independents. In 1923, one of O’Callahan’s major modern paintings, “At The Bath”, was accepted for the Carnegie International Exposition in Pittsburgh and cited by artist and critic Augustus John as “the most significant picture in the exhibition.”  O’Callahan was an active member of many art groups in Paris, including Ami de Montparnasse, the American Association in Paris, Society des Artistes Independents, and the Society of CT Artists.

In 1924, O’Callahan had one-man exhibitions at the Hartford Athenaeum Annex in Connecticut and at the Babcock Galleries in New York City. Both shows were extensively reviewed in the New York Times, the Hartford Courant, New York Evening Post, Art News and the Paris edition of the New York Herald. By 1925 O’Callahan was sharing a studio with Guerin, at 14 rue Boissanade, who had by then became a close friend.

From 1926 through the early 1930s, O’Callahan was an exhibiting and founding member of the “Groupe des Peintres et Sculpteurs Américains de Paris.” The artists exhibited annually in Paris at the Galerie Durand-Ruel and the Galerie Knoedler and were well known and highly regarded in Paris and the U.S. The group had its first U.S. exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY in 1927. A collection of this art then traveled to galleries around the U.S. for a couple of years. O’Callahan also sold a painting, “The Girl in the Green Robe” in 1927 to the French Government. The painting was exhibited at the Salon du Franc in Paris where he received a letter of recognition by Marshal Joffre. O’Callahan continued to exhibit at the Babcock Galleries in New York City annually. One of O’Callahan’s paintings, “La Femme Enceinte” sold in New York for $2,000 in 1929, which would translate to over $30,000 in 2021. In 1930 O’Callahan was invited, along with his friends Milton Avery, Russell Cheney, and Aaron Berkman, to be part of an exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford organized by the highly regarded director, A.E. “Chick” Austin, Jr.

During this productive period during the roaring ’20s in Paris, O’Callahan began to suffer from episodes of depression and possibly PTSD from the war and would frequent the American Hospital in Paris for medical help during these low periods. He met and fell in love with a British nurse, Monica Bliss, who was working at the American Hospital. They traveled together to Majorca, Spain where their son, Juan, was born in July 1933. The family then traveled to England for a time, staying in Cornwall, where O’Callahan painted watercolors and sketched. O’Callahan’s mental health deteriorated further and he returned back to Paris alone. Despite his wife and son following him back to Paris, they did not live together as a family again, and just before World War II, O’Callahan’s wife and son moved to South Africa while he stayed in Paris.

O’Callahan returned alone to the U.S. in late 1939, at the very outbreak of WWII, escaping Paris and taking the last boat from Madrid, Spain before the war started. He lived part of the time in Hartford, CT with his sister before moving to Gloucester, MA where he lived in a warehouse apartment on a wharf. He continued to suffer from depression and alcoholism during this time and his creative output dwindled to watercolor studies of the harbor scenes. He was planning to return to Paris in the fall of 1943 but unexpectedly died of a heart attack on July 10th, 1943, at the age of 53. 

O’Callahan had brought back to America what he could carry of his French paintings, studies, and drawings at the start of WWII. Other paintings had previously been stored with, or given to, family members living in New York City and Hartford, CT. Another few hundred paintings, including some of his most significant work, were stored in Paris for the duration of the war in a warehouse owned by LeFebvre-Foinet, an art supply and storage company. After his death and the war, those paintings were probably dispersed in Europe and are not recorded on this website.