Charles Hawthorne grew up in the seaport town of Richmond, Maine, where he developed an attachment to the sea. In the autumn of 1890, after graduation from high school, he moved with his family to New York, where his father, a ship's captain, worked for a shipping firm; Hawthorne went to work in a dry goods company, and later in a stained glass factory.
He had shown artistic talent in childhood and, with the opportunities available in New York, began formal studies of illustration and design at the Cooper Union. He moved on to study at the 16th Street Trade School and then to the Art Students League where he took evening classes with Frank Vincent DuMond in 1893. He received a scholarship in 1894-95 which allowed him to give up work and attend day classes with George de Forest Brush, Henry Siddons Mowbray, and William Merritt Chase. In March 1895 he entered the antique class at the Academy school, and in October 1895, the life class. The following summer, he attended Chase's school at Shinnecock on the Long Island shore. There he met Ethel Marion Campbell, also a painter, whom he married in 1903. In 1897 Hawthorne helped Chase organize his New York School, and worked as his assistant there that year.
Hawthorne spent the summer of 1898 in Holland at the fishing village of Zandvoort. Letters written during this period to his future wife reveal his interest in the Dutch masters, particularly Hals. There he began to experiment in painting exclusively with the palette knife. Upon his return from Europe he began painting and exhibiting with the Country Sketch Group, organzed by Van Dearing Perrine, and exhibited with the group in their 1899 New York show, and with fifteen canvases in their 1901 Chicago exhibition.
In the summer of 1899 Hawthorne founded the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts, although it was 1903 before he completed building his studio. He would spent the summer months painting and teaching there for the rest of his life. Hawthorne was the central figure around which the artists' colony developed and he was seminal in the formation of the Provincetown Art Association, and the Beechcombers Club. His monumental images of the native residents of Provincetown, rendered in stark, but sympathetic realism, were responisble for initially establishing his standing as an artist.
As a teacher, he exerted a major influence on the character of American painting in the earlier twentieth century. His teaching methods are described by his students in Hawthorne on Painting (1938; 1960). Among future Academy members active in Provincetown and who owed a debt to Hawthorne were William Auerbach-Levy, Gifford and Reynolds Beal, Max Bohm, George Elmer Browne, Edwin Dickinson, Jerry Farnsworth, Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Leon Kroll, Richard E. Miller, Ross Moffett, John Noble, William Paxton, Robert Philipp, Henry Varnum Poor, Helen Sawyer, Maurice Sterne, Frederick Judd Waugh, and John Whorf.
Hawthorne exhibited with the Society of American Artists from 1897, made his debut at the Academy in the annual exhibition in 1900, and was given his first one-man show at the Clausen Gallery, New York, in 1902; but it was through the exhibitions of the Salmagundi Club in New York that he got his real start. He received that organization's Adolf Obrig Prize in 1902, and in 1904 won both the Shaw and the Evans prizes. At the Club's 1905 awards dinner, the collector, John Gellatly, suggested that Hawthorne should have the opportunity to visit Italy, and Gellatly and others financed the artist's trip.
Hawthorne taught at the Art Students League from 1904 to 1906. During the latter year, he left for Italy where he stayed until 1907. There, he and Ettore Caser experimented with a recipe for Tintoretto's medium, which had been discovered in the Venice archives. It was later manufactured in the United States as Hawthorne Medium.
In 1908 he taught at the New York School of Art; in 1909 he wintered in Nutley, New Jersey; and the winters of 1910-11 and 1915-16 were spent in Bermuda, where Hawthorne had purchased a house. The three winters from 1911 to 1914 were spent in Paris where he exhibited in the Salons, and in 1912, was elected associate in the Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts, and a full member in 1913. In Paris he associated with Richard E. Miller, Max Bohm and John Noble, all of whom later settled in Provincetown.
Hawthorne established his New York winter studio in Macdougal Alley in 1917, and in 1919 purchased a house on West Fourth Street. He taught a life class at the Academy school for two seasons, 1922-24, taught at the Art Students League 1924-25, and then returned to the Academy for another year of teaching, 1925-26. He also taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana, and at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
After a successful exhibition at Schaus Gallery, New York, in 1908, William Macbeth became Hawthorne's New York dealer and negotiated his first sale to a museum, The Venetian Girl, which was bought by the Worcester (Massachusetts) Art Museum in 1909. After Macbeth's death in 1917, Hawthorne exhibited with the Babcock Gallery and Grand Central Art Galleries.
The Academy recognized Hawthorne's talent early, awarding him the Hallgarten prizes in 1904 and 1906. In the annual exhibition of 1911, he received the Clark prize for The Troussea; the award was given on the jury's first ballot, without a dissenting vote, an unprecedented honor in the history of the Academy. The Academy would also award him its Isidor Medal in the winter exhibition of 1914; the Isador Medal and an Altman prize in the winter exhibition of 1915; Carnegie prize, winter exhibition, 1924; and Proctor prize, winter exhibition, 1926.
