The University of South Carolina Union recently enhanced its campus art collection with several paintings by Philip Mullen and Frederick Judd Waugh, which are on lease through McKissick Museum, the University of South Carolina’s museum. While located in Columbia, the McKissick Museum collaborates with other USC campuses in a variety of ways, including loaning of art and artifacts for display.
The donation includes five works by Mullen– Lisa’s Flowers, Solo II, Inland Lakes, Night Flight Diptych, and Plain XVII– along with Waugh’s painting Seascape. Together, these artworks enhance the campus environment and provide students with opportunities to experience artwork connected both to the University of South Carolina’s artistic legacy and to the broader history of American painting.
Frederick Judd Waugh was an American painter who was born September 13, 1861, and passed September 10, 1940. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and later at the Académie Julian in Paris. Waugh became widely known as a marine painter whose work focused on the movement and atmosphere of the ocean. His artworks showcased his dramatic depictions of the ocean and captured the movement of waves with beautiful brushwork and a careful observation of nature. Waugh’s seascapes were highly acclaimed, as he received the Popular Prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition five times, which had not been accomplished by any other artist. During World War I, Waugh had even designed ship camouflage for the U.S. Navy.
Waugh’s artwork that was donated was titled Seascape. This painting is a framed oil-on-canvas work representing a seascape. The frame is gold and patinated and the canvas is held in frames by gold clips. The skyline occupies the top one-third of the canvas, and ocean water occupies the bottom two-thirds of the canvas. There are two large waves cresting and the sky is cloudy, but bright. The water is done in shades of dark blue with white-light blue foam, and there are no representations of land, people, animals or vessels. This painting was given to the McKissick Museum by Ms. Elena Prevost Smith on October 21, 1998. His work remains part of major museum collections today, and the addition of Seascape brings an important example of early American landscape painting to the USC Union campus.
In addition to the historical significance of Waugh’s Seascape, the donation also includes five works by Philip Mullen. Mullen was born in 1942 and is an artist who earned a PhD at Ohio University and began teaching at the University of South Carolina in 1969. He later became Distinguished Professor Emeritus after more than three decades of teaching. Over the course of his career, his paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including participation in the Whitney Biennial, and are represented in collections associated with major institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian. In 2020, Mullen received the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, South Carolina’s highest recognition for artistic achievement. Mullen is widely recognized as one of South Carolina’s most influential contemporary painters and is known for his exploration of light, atmosphere, and spatial perception in his works.
His artwork Lisa’s Flowers is an acrylic painting on a wooden stretcher, and the composition is vertically oriented. The subject is a vase of flowers with blue and white blooms. The composition is somewhat abstracted, and the dominant compositional colors are blue, purple, yellow, orange, and white. The painting is signed in black at the bottom right corner, “Mullen.” At the back of the canvas, “Lisa’s Flowers” and “top” with an arrow in black are at the top. In the center of the canvas back is “Mullen/(c) 3/1992” in black. His artwork titled Solo II is a multicolored acrylic on canvas painting that is rectangularly shaped with vertical columns and lines, and was created in 1985. His artwork titled Inland Lakes is a multicolored acrylic on canvas painting. Different shapes cover the canvas with no straight lines except the top of the painting, and the frame is wood. This artwork was created in 1982. His artwork titled Night Flight Diptych is an acrylic on canvas multicolored abstract painting that was made in 1982. It is framed in a wooden frame, and has highlights of red, blue, green, and yellow paint. The final artwork that was donated by Mullen is titled Plain XVII. It is a large multicolored painting that is divided up into small squares, each with a different color and texture. The credit line for all of these paintings by Mullen that were donated were under J.C. Moore Collection.
Together, the additions of works by Frederick Judd Waugh and Philip Mullen enhance the visual landscape of the USC Union campus and provide students with opportunities to directly see original works of American art. By bringing nationally recognized artwork into everyday learning spaces, the university creates new opportunities for inspiration, reflection, and connection through the visual arts.
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