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Impressions of Oregon

The Art of Reverend Melville Thomas Wire

Ginny Allen and Gregory L. Nelson


Every busy pastor should have a fad or avocation. Mine is outdoor painting in oils.
—Reverend Melville Thomas Wire


Melville wire, an ordained minister of the Methodist Church in Oregon, diligently served parishes throughout the state for sixty-one years, preaching, counseling those in need, and attending church socials. As solace from his busy routine, Wire traveled the countryside painting what he saw in the Oregon landscape. His talent with paintbrush, camera, and etcher's plate made him one of the state's foremost chroniclers of its diverse scenery. Scenes of rural Oregon that he created from the early 1900s until his death in 1966 portray a landscape with plentiful fish and game and a pastoral, contemplative countryside. Over his long career, he produced more than thirty etchings, hundreds of oil paintings, and dozens of watercolors. 1
      Wire's ministerial profession took him to all parts of the state. As he moved and traveled throughout Oregon, he painted the coast, the Willamette Valley, the Columbia Gorge, the high desert, the Klamath Basin, and the Umpqua-Roseburg area, as well as parts of California. While his contemporaries sometimes did their paintings in groups for inspiration and support, Wire was usually a solitary figure, heading out into nature with his paints and supplies to pursue his own vision. As an impressionist, he created beauty with the brush, not simply reproducing scenes but adding his emotional and sensual understanding of them. His landscape subjects varied from monumental, popular landmarks such as Crater Lake in south-central Oregon or Kiger Gorge on Steens Mountain to everyday scenes such as a small stand of myrtle trees on the Umpqua River near Roseburg. 2


 
Figure 1
    Back from the Beach, ink on paper, ca. 1935–1940. Wire's appointment to a pastorate in Astoria in 1921 reinforced his lifelong enjoyment of coastal scenes.

    OHS Museum collections, acc. no. 69-251.6.2
 


 
      Wire's first audience was his family and the friends he had made through his work in the ministry. As his ability and exposure grew, he drew the attention of art critics and collectors throughout Oregon and, eventually, the nation. His audience was attracted to the variety of the landscapes he depicted but they also appreciated his ability to convey atmosphere, light, and color. He won critical acclaim during his lifetime, and his work has remained popular among those who want to experience the natural beauty of Oregon from an earlier time.

 3
Melville thomas wire was born on September 24, 1877, in Austin, Macon County, Illinois. His family moved to Oregon in 1884, where Wire's father became pastor of the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Salem.1 An avid outdoorsman, Melville Cox Wire nurtured his son's enthusiasm for outdoor life and taught him habits that would serve him well in his work as an artist. Remembering how their father took them by horse and buggy to Hayden Bridge on the McKenzie River and introduced them to fly-fishing, Wire's brother, Frank, later explained: "We were expected to fish with a fly...and a fly only."2 Melville Wire learned that fly fishing is an art that involves skill, patience, and practice, requiring control of the rod to make the artificial fly alight on the surface of the water as a live one might in order to fool the fish into grabbing it. 4
      In addition to his ministry, Melville's father taught Greek and Hebrew at Willamette University in Salem, which also operated an academy that accepted younger children. At age eight, Melville was enrolled in Marie Craig's art classes. Craig, who had trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and the Philadelphia School of Design, had joined the faculty at Willamette in 1886 and was the school's only painting instructor. One of few art instructors in Oregon with professional training, she helped several students develop their skills — including Mamie Parvin, Clyde Leon Keller, and Myra Albert — and saw them move on to dominate the art scene in Oregon.3 "Melvie," as Wire was listed in those early class records, studied with Craig until he was sixteen and under her tutelage discovered a love of drawing and painting that would last a lifetime.4 5
      In 1894, Wire spent at least a month near Bend camping, fishing, and hunting. Central Oregon's high desert inspired him. On August 17, he described the scene in his diary: "Nooned at Cold Springs. We reached the lava at 3 o'clock. Were over an hour crossing. It is a wonderful sight. The rock looks like it had boiled up and cobled [sic] as it bubbled up and left the waves solid."5 He was drawn to the landscape and returned to the high desert the following summer before heading off to attend the state university in Eugene (now the University of Oregon) in 1895 and 1896.6 As he wrote in his diary in 1897, "I kind of feel as if I am getting home when I get up here."7 6
      In 1897, Wire transferred to Albany College (the predecessor of Lewis & Clark College in Portland) in Albany, a small town in the Willamette Valley. In 1899, apparently before completing his undergraduate degree, he began study for the ministry at Garrett Biblical Institute in Evanston, Illinois, his father's alma mater.8 Wire completed his studies in May 1902 and accepted a pastorate in Glenview, Illinois, where he "received a salary of $225 a year, but in addition to my salary I had numerous and bountiful chicken dinners thrown in."9 In those days, the Methodist bishop reassigned pastors about every two years in an effort to avoid the development of cliques and factions within the church. Wire took a pastorate in Brownsville, Oregon, southeast of Albany in the Willamette Valley, in 1902, was transferred to Drain in 1904, and moved to Portland in 1905 to serve at Patton Methodist Episcopal Church, where he remained for three years. 7


 
Figure 2
    This church in the Willamette Valley town of Brownsville was Wire's first pastorate in Oregon. Arriving in 1902, he remained in Brownsville for two years before being transferred to Drain, southwest of Cottage Grove.

    Melville Wire, photographer, courtesy of Deb Mohr
 


 
      On November 4, 1908, Wire married Virginia Spencer Hutchinson, a young widow, at the First Methodist Church on Taylor Street in downtown Portland.10 He had recently accepted an assignment in The Dalles, about sixty miles east of Portland in the Columbia Gorge, and his new wife presumably intended to join him there. The census of 1910, however, lists Melville Wire in The Dalles and Virginia H. Wire in Portland, living at her parents' home with her four-year-old daughter by her first husband. She taught voice at a studio nearby. By 1920, she was living with her parents and daughter in Tigard and using her former married name.11 8
      In 1910, Wire transferred to Lakeview in southern Oregon, where he met and eventually married Bessie Edna Burgess, a member of the local Methodist church. This marriage would last over forty-seven years. Born in 1885 in Wauceka, Wisconsin, Burgess had moved to Lakeview in 1909. Her father, James F. Burgess, was the superintendent of schools there, and Bessie was a teacher until she married Wire.12 Bessie and Melville's only child, a girl, was born in Portland on February 15, 1915, and lived only twenty minutes. 9
      The Wires moved often, as Melville was transferred from one pastorate to another: to Gresham in 1912, Grants Pass in 1915, Oregon City in 1919, Astoria in 1921, Pendleton in 1925, Klamath Falls in 1930, Albany in 1933, Ashland in 1935, and Roseburg in 1940. Finally, in 1943, they landed in Portland at the Clinton Kelly Methodist Church, where they remained until Melville Wire retired in 1946.13 As they moved from place to place, Wire painted the landscapes at hand as well as those he saw during his travels. His oeuvre reflects his response to the varied environments of the state and presents a unique opportunity to see much of Oregon's landscape from one man's perspective. 10
      Under the tutelage of her husband, Bessie later took up painting and became an accomplished artist herself, primarily a watercolorist. In 1951, the Oregonian described their lives together this way: "Her paintings ... provided a community interest wherever they have lived. Members of her husband's pastorates always have been interested in the work of the husband-wife artist team."14 11


 
Figure 3
    Wire and Bessie Edna Burgess on their wedding day, June 30, 1914

    Melville Wire, photographer, OHS neg., coll 25-14
 


 
      Although Wire explained in 1932 that "painting ... is only my side line, for I think the ministry of my church the greatest job in the world," he was deeply devoted to his avocation. From his earliest days in the ministry he always had a car, which enabled him to travel to remote places to paint while maintaining his ministerial duties. "I have traveled extensively through the less known sections of Eastern Oregon in search of compositions for the brush," he told an Oregon Journal reporter in 1932.15 Wire painted scenery in every part of the state, the volume of work in a particular location dictated simply by the amount of time he spent there. The southern coast is perhaps less represented than other areas, although he did a good deal of work in the Crescent City area, just over the California state line, as well as in the southern California desert. 12
      An avid outdoorsman, Wire frequently packed his art materials on his back while searching out isolated spots over difficult trails. He sketched and photographed scenes as he hiked, explaining: "There is something pleasant about a calm reach of water in a small stream which invites one to pause and rest."16 Sometimes the sketches were in pencil, sometimes in oils, all done quickly outdoors in the plein air tradition. Using these sketches or photographs to prompt him, he finished the works at leisure in his studio. He built up his oils with multiple layers of paint applied in generous strokes and small dabs of color. Steens Mountain/Alvord Ranch, for example, is "painted with a vigor and energy almost unknown in this country at that time." Its "deeply impastoed and built-up brushstrokes," art historian Henry Sayre wrote, reminded him "of Claude Monet's paintings of his Japanese bridge."17 13


 
Figure 4
    Wire captioned this photograph "studying at Garrett Biblical Institute 1899." Wire is the student on the left. Garrett was part of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and Wire's father's alma mater.

    Melville Wire, photographer, OHS neg., coll 25-18
 


 
Arts organizations flourished in oregon, with artists exhibiting their work at the state fair as early as 1861. For a time, these early fairs were the only annual venue that large crowds attended and where prizes were awarded. They were the first public art galleries. Beginning in 1875, West Shore magazine, a "family paper, devoted to Literature, Science, Art and the Resources of the Pacific Northwest," reported the art news of the day and influenced the tastes of the time. The Portland Art Club, established in 1885, was the first true arts organization in the Pacific Northwest, offering artists the opportunity to put on exhibitions and encouraging art appreciation among the larger population. 14

COLLECTIONS AND EXHIBITIONS OF MELVILLE WIRE'S WORKS

In addition to his participation in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and his Oregon exhibitions, Wire's etchings have been exhibited with the Society of American Etchers, Lithographers, and Woodcutters and the National Society of Etchers as well as at the Pennell Exhibition at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and the Cleveland Art Museum. They are in the permanent print collections of the Cleveland Art Museum, the Achenbach Foundation collection at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University. Most notably in Oregon, the Gordon and Vivian Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts at the Portland Art Museum owns a collection of Wire prints and the Oregon Historical Society owns photographs, paintings, sketches, and etchings along with many of his original etched plates.
      Wire was an active member of several groups. By 1913, he was exhibiting with the newly formed Society of Oregon Artists, whose mission was to "promote harmony among artists and bring into prominence latent talent."18 A year later he was a charter member of the short-lived Mutual Art Association. He was active in the Oregon Society of Artists, joining in 1927 as a charter member while ministering in Pendleton and continuing as a member over the next decades. In addition to staging public exhibitions, members of the society met to paint and critique each other's work as well as to socialize. It would have been difficult for Wire to participate in many of these Portland activities because he was living apart from the group, but he often won awards sponsored by the society and considered many of the society's artists among his personal friends, especially Clyde Keller and Mamie Parvin, friends from his student days at Willamette. Although other groups were exploring the new movements of modernism and abstraction — Harry Wentz and his students at the Portland Art Museum, for example — the Oregon Society of Artists maintained a traditional, conservative approach, which seemed to mesh perfectly with the small-town minister's style. 15
      Wire also exhibited his work outside the region. In 1915, his work was included in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, which marked the opening of the Panama Canal and drew national and international attention to the West Coast. While only two Oregonians, Harry Wentz and Floyd Wilson, were represented in the official galleries in the Palace of Fine Arts, Wire and twenty-five fellow painters exhibited in the Art Room of the Oregon Building, an indication that he was not only an accepted member of the Oregon art community but also an active and important artist with a regional reputation.19 Wire's three paintings, Blooming Camas Fields, Southern Oregon Foxgloves, and Sand Dunes, Oregon Coast, demonstrate his impressionistic style: he did not merely record the view but put his own stamp on traditional subject matter. 16


 
Figure 5
    Wire took this photograph of his indispensable automobile on an eastern Oregon desert road, probably in the 1930s.

    Melville Wire, photographer, OHS neg., coll 25-97
 


 
      Wire was also an early and accomplished photographer, capturing landscapes with the camera's eye. His earliest photographs date to the turn of the twentieth century — perhaps before — and he continued to take them throughout his career. His photographs were rarely publicly exhibited, however, and appear to have been intended solely for his personal use and enjoyment.20 As was Wire's habit, the photographs that remain were carefully mounted in photo albums and labeled, often with date and subject. This was characteristic of his paintings as well: dates and locations are often inscribed on the stretcher bars or included with his signature on the front. 17


 

Figure 6

    Photographs from Melville Wire's Album
    Wire with camera on Nye Creek Beach, 1901. His photographs often helped him to complete works later in his studio

    OHS neg., coll 25-9 (detail)

 


 


 
Figure 7
    Steen's Mountain packtrain, 1928. Bessie and Melville Wire generally would travel to a remote area of the state for vacation. Bessie would remain in a base camp while Melville would obtain local guides, often using packtrains to get into areas unreachable by car.

    Melville Wire, photographer, OHS neg., coll 25-59
 


 


 
Figure 8

    Wire with a horse in the Steens Mountain area, 1928. Hanging in the tree behind Wire is his painting Keiger's Gorge, drying so that it can be rolled safely for the return trip. Wire rarely dressed casually, even when he was in remote areas on painting excursions.

    Melville Wire, photographer, OHS neg., coll 25-51

 


 


 
Figure 9
    Boat on the Columbia, 1908. Wire was ministering in The Dalles at the time this landscape with Indians fishing on the river was taken. The calmness of the water in this scene is a reminder that Wire would have known a different river landscape, before the construction of the dams.

    Melville Wire, photographer, OHS neg., coll 25-92
 


 
In 1935, while serving as pastor at the First Methodist Church in Albany, Wire met Gordon Gilkey, a member of his congregation who was studying printmaking at the University of Oregon under the guidance of Eyler Brown. Gilkey had recently taken up etching, and with his enthusiasm for the medium he enticed Wire to join him in Brown's classes.21 The painstaking technical process of etching — which involves making a print from a design carved into a metal plate — captivated Wire. Creating an etching entails using a stylus to carve the design into a wax coating on the plate, "biting in" the lines with acid, and transferring the image to paper and both allows for accuracy and requires technical ability. "As a work of art," Wire believed, "an etching is artistic emotion expressed in the bitten line without the aid of color." He also explained that "In making prints, as in making speeches, the secret lies in quitting at just the right time."22 18
      Over the next twenty years, Wire made more than thirty known plates, mainly scenes of a quiet, contemplative countryside. His works are full of abandoned barns and houses without figures or animals. Dead or dying trees represent the passage of time and the fleeting moment before a scene disappears. Wire used pencil sketches as guides to direct his attention to the detail captured on the plates. 19
      Etchings were enormously popular with an expanded art-buying public during the years after the Depression. The Hartford Insurance Company, for example, selected Wire's etching Cabin by the River for the inaugural cover of the Hartford Agent in 1945. Cabin by the River is a study of an unusual group of tall, slender myrtle trees that Wire discovered a short distance from Roseburg on the Umpqua River.23 Expressing his delight that someone had been thoughtful enough to spare the ancient group of trees, Wire described the etching for a gallery flyer:
This sleepy, little-known pastoral region is the essence of all peace. The Umpqua River winds slowly along into the distance. A waterbird calls. Faint breezes stir through the overhanging branches. It is with reluctance that one puts away his drawing materials in such a place.24
 		20
      The broader, national audience that Wire was able to reach through the Hartford Agent and the Associated American Artists Gallery connected with his pastoral scenes much as his Oregon-based audiences did. Wire's scenes from the western edge of the nation carried a sense of romance and adventure for those in distant parts of the United States. 21


 
Figure 10
    Cabin by the River, ink on paper, ca. 1943–1944

    OHS Museum collections, acc. no. 69-251.8
 


 
      While pursuing the everyday challenges of the ministry, Wire also found time to actively market his artwork. He sold color reproductions of some of his oil paintings through a Chicago printer in 1927 and offered his prints through the Associated American Artists Gallery, a print club established in New York City in 1934. The gallery commissioned original, limited-edition prints from well-known American artists and reproduced them to be affordable to middle-class audiences. The prints sold through subscription at prices as low as five dollars. Prints were affordable because the process allows making multiple copies of an image. In marketing materials for the Associated American Artists, Wire described his etching Back from the Beach (see p. 589):
Stunted, storm-shaped trees, a driftwood fence, weather-beaten buildings, the rutted road through the sand and a general air of dilapidation invested this unfrequented beach with the sort of shabby dignity one sometimes finds in an individual whose cherished plans were never realized but who achieved instead a distinctive personality.25
 Between 1944 and 1948, the Associated American Artists Gallery purchased eight of Wire's etchings for publication and national distribution. He was the only Oregon artist to be so honored.26		 22


 
Figure 11
    The untitled drawing above clearly served as a preliminary sketch for the etching The Deserted Barn (ink on paper, 1936, right). The two images are reversed by the etching process.

    OHS Museum collections, acc. no. 87-64.9.102
 


 
      After Wire retired in 1946, he and Bessie moved to Salem. Even then he maintained part-time positions with the church, serving as pastor at Buena Vista for eight years and at Oak Grove for nine.27 In retirement, however, Wire seemed to direct his attention to his art with increasing zeal. He stepped up his exhibition schedule with shows at the J.K. Gill Gallery in Portland and the R.L. Elfstrom Gallery in Salem, where he displayed eight paintings and eleven etchings.28 In September 1948, the Maryhill Museum in south-central Washington state exhibited Wire's etchings at a one-person show.29 Another exhibition at R.L. Elfstrom Gallery followed, as well as a show at the Oregonian's Hostess House in Portland in 1950.30 In 1954, Wire held an exhibition at the Pine Tavern in Bend, a popular venue for artists at the time. The following year he had an exhibition at Oregon State University, and he and Bessie held a joint exhibition at the Meier and Frank store in Salem.31 23


 
Figure 12
    "Southern Oregon, near Gold Hill, has a fragrance of a romantic pioneer past," Wire explained in a brochure for the Associated American Artists Gallery. "This barn, under the Ponderosa pines, remains a symbol of bygone days."

    OHS Museum collections, acc. no. 69-251.3.2
 


 
After a long and productive life together, Bessie Wire died in April 1962 and Melville moved to the Willamette Lu-theran Home in Salem.32 There he met Bertha Peabody Shiffer, a widow, and they married on October 8, 1963.33 Although the physical demands of printmaking eventually became too much for him, Wire continued to paint in oils and took up watercolors. "Since retiring I'm sort of turned loose," he said in a January 1966 interview. "But it's pretty hard for me to spend a lot of time outdoors.... Besides, etching isn't an old man's work."34 Wire painted at least two hours a day until his death on June 22, 1966. He was buried in the Lee Mission Cemetery in Salem near his second wife, his parents, and a younger brother.35 24


 
Figure 13
    At his parsonage in Astoria, shown here in 1924, Wire filled his study with his paintings, reflecting his passions for both the ministry and his art.

    Melville Wire, photographer, OHS neg., coll 25-98
 


 
      Wire told a reporter in 1966:"I don't just look at the landscape and try to sketch an exact replica. Instead I put my own feeling into it, interpreting it as it appears to me."36 His interpretations provide a unique record of the Oregon landscape as it appeared during his lifetime. Wire's work stands out from the work of his contemporaries for its breadth and quality. He avoided scenes of snow-capped mountains and surf-pounded beaches, which were typical for other artists, and was drawn to more peaceful, tranquil subjects. While others explored new trends in modernism and abstraction, Wire remained true to his impressionistic analysis of the landscapes he loved. 25


Notes

The epigraph is from Fred Lockley, "Oregon Folks," Oregon Journal, July 15, 1932.

1.Oregonian, November 28, 1926. Wire's parents were Rev. Melville Cox Wire, born in Union, Broome County, New York, in 1846 and Mary Elizabeth Bradshaw, born in Barnesville, Del Monte County, Ohio, in 1849.

2.Oregon Journal, July 7, 1966.

3. Marie Craig LeGall (1860–1944); Mary (Mamie) Parvin Brown (1867–1932); Clyde Leon Keller (1872–1962); and Myra Albert Wiggins (1869–1956).

4. Abbot Hall Gallery show flyer, 615 NW 20th, Portland, Ore., January 5–February 6, c. 1967, copy in Nelson's possession [hereafter Abbott flyer].

5. Melville T. Wire, diaries, July 26, 1894–1897, five volumes, A 136, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene [hereafter Wire diaries].

6. Maria Berggren, Office of the Registrar, University of Oregon, Eugene, email message to authors, September 12, 2002.

7. Wire diaries.

8. David Himrod, United Library, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Ill., email to authors, November 11, 2002. Wire obtained a certificate from Garrett but not a degree, which would have required an undergraduate degree in the classics.

9.Oregon Journal, July 15, 1932.

10. Multnomah County Marriage Records, vol. 22, p. 448, Certificate No. 11431, microfilm, Oregon State Archives, Salem.

11. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 14th Census of Population, 1920, Oregon. It is unclear how Wire's first marriage ended.

12.Oregonian, April 15, 1962.

13. Pastor's Personnel Record, United Methodist Church Archives, Salem, Ore,

14.Oregonian, July 2, 1951.

15.Oregon Journal, July 15, 1932.

16. Abbot flyer.

17. Henry Sayre, review of Oregon Painters: The First Hundred Years (1859–1959), by Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit, Oregon Historical Quarterly 101:2 (Summer 2000), 247–8.

18.Oregon Spectator, April 16, 1912, quoted in Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit, Oregon Painters: The First Hundred Years (1859–1959) (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1999), 72.

19. See Robert Lundberg, "The Art Room in the Oregon Building: Oregon Arts and Crafts in 1915," Oregon Historical Quarterly 101:2 (Summer 2000): 214–27.

20. While it was unusual for an artist to be skilled in both painting and photography, Wire was not alone. Myra Albert Wiggins and Helen Plummer Gatch, both of Salem, also painted and achieved fame as photographers.

21. By 1937, Gilkey (1912–2000) was the official etcher at the New York World's Fair, and he would go on to head the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts at the Portland Art Museum. Gilkey's influence would surface again when he served as Wire's printer for later etchings.

22. Mimeographed handout, n.d., MSS 25, Melville Wire collection, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland; Bend Bulletin, November 2, 1954.

23.Oregonian, February 17, 1945. Later covers of the Hartford Agent featured the work of Thomas Hart Benton, Adolph Dehn, Luigi Lucioni, John Costigan, Gordon Grant, and Louis Lozowick, some of the best-known American artists of their day.

24. Abbot flyer.

25. Associated American Artists, Patron's Supplement Number 31, copy in Nelson's possession.

26. Kitty Harmon, Pacific Northwest Landscapes (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2001), 143.

27. Pastor's Personnel Record, United Methodist Church Archives, Salem, Ore.

28.Oregonian, October 14, 1945, November 3, 1946.

29.Oregonian, September 8, 1948.

30.Salem Capital Journal, September 25, 1950; Oregonian, June 18, 1950.

31.Corvallis Gazette-Times, April 8, 1955.

32.Oregonian, April 15, 1962.

33. Salem City Directories, 1947–1963, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland.

34.Salem Capital Journal, January 22, 1966.

35. Lee Cemetery Records, United Methodist Church Archives, Salem, Ore.

36.Salem Capital Journal, January 22, 1966.

Melville Wire: Oregon Impressionist, an exhibition curated by Ginny Allen and Gregory L. Nelson, will be at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon, in 2005. Wire's works will be displayed in the Study Gallery March 12–May 6, with a companion exhibition in the Print Room March 26–May 21.

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