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 saw himself as unfairly overlooked by the art establishment, for much of his later life Eilshemius was highly regarded by a coterie of vanguard artists, dealers, and collectors. He produced no pictures during the last two decades of his life, but, up until then, he was an immensely prolific artist and, among other things, a voluble writer. Though he was born to an affluent family, able to live comfortably on inherited money until his last years, he died a pauper.

Knowing something about Eilshemius’s background makes it no easier to decide whether we should regard him as a visionary poet or as a crank with aspirations towards a kind of idiosyncratic realism, as a