Edward Sewall

Edward Sewall

Sewall, Edward

Portland

painter

photographer

Northwest artist

Oregon artist

Edward Sewall was awarded the first Carey Prize which included a scholarship to the Portland Museum Art School. In 1930, as a student, he received honorable mention for work sent to the Art Students League exhibit in New York. Some of his early work was done as a WPA artist. He was the only Oregon representative in the 1933 annual exhibit of American Contemporary Artists at the John Herron Art Institute in Indiana and in 1935 he was awarded a second prize for a watercolor at the College Art Association exhibit in New York.

After attending the Art Students League from 1931 to 1934, Sewall returned from New York in 1935 and opened a studio in Portland at SW Broadway and Columbia called the Barn Studio. He was well-known for portraiture and in 1935 was commissioned for a painting of Governor Julius Meier which is now in the State of Oregon collection. He painted a series of watercolors of old Portland houses, some of which were exhibited. One of his watercolors, Woodland Arrangement, was part of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in 1941 and was selected for the Carville, Louisiana Marine Hospital. He helped organize the Creative Arts Gallery in Portland in 1933. In 1936 he took part in an exhibition sponsored by that gallery, held at the Portland Art Museum. In 1950, partly because his work was receiving little notice, Sewall gave up painting for photography.

Artist biography reproduced with permission from the authors, Oregon Painters: the First Hundred Years (1859-1959), Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit.

Male