Elmer Harmes, Sarasota, Ringling School of Art. On back stretcher, Sally Marlow, Circus Equestrienne, signed lower right, E Harmes, 43. Oil on canvas, 22 by 27 inches. Sally Marlow was the daughter of Roy and Teod Nelson, renowned circus acrobats. Sally doubled for Gina Lolobrigida in the Burt Lancaster movie, Trapeze. In the late 1950’s Marlow performed at the Circus Hall of Fame in Sarasota.
Elmer Harmes taught art at the Boys’ Technical High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and at the University of Minnesota for ten years. In 1933 Harmes and a group of Wisconsin artists founded The Little Colony, a summer art center and school at Prescott, Wisconsin. He moved to Sarasota in 1937 as an instructor in drawing and painting at the Ringling School of Art. Leaving in 1943 to join the Coast Guard, he returned in 1948, to establish the Harmes School of Art at the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport. Ralph McKelvey reviewed a Harmes painting exhibited at the Ringling Museum, as part of a Sarasota Art Association exhibit, in the Sarasota Herald, February 19, 1939, “A crafty bearded old man is the subject of what is perhaps the most strikingly forceful canvas of the show, ‘The Infallible Merlin,’ No. 16 by Elmer Harmes. Boldly executed, the old man caught hat-less in the open, with gray hair and beard flowing in the wind, is particularly notable for his facial expression that seems to speak of the anticipations of reward for posing. Here again art students may find something to consider in the convincing execution of an unkempt beard with a few quick strokes of the palette knife…A column would not do justice to the intensity of high color attained by Harmes in the several oils he is showing, paintings that lend a note almost of illumination to the walls where they are hung. No.14 ‘Greek Sponger,’ a boat on a flat-car, seen rather from below, offers a problem in drawing that would baffle a less competent artist.” Harmes was active in Sarasota and Florida art circles until his sudden and unexpected death in 1951. A memorial exhibit of twenty-seven paintings and drawing was held at the Goddard Gallery in Sarasota a week before Christmas, 1951. Born: June 30,1902, Milwaukee. Died: September 9, 1951, Laurel, Florida. Education: Wisconsin State School of Fine and Applied Arts; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; National Academy of Design, NYC; G. Oberteuffer; A. Carles; H. McCarter; G. Moller. Membership: Minnesota Institute of Art; Sarasota Art Association, Florida Federation of Art. Exhibits: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, 1924 prize; Milwaukee Art Institute, 1929 prize, 1931 prize; Wisconsin State Fair, 1929 prize, 1930 prize; Minneapolis Institute Art, October 1930, first award in oil, Little French Girl; Minneapolis Woman’s Club, April 1931, Forty Winks ( A woman in rose-colored gown, sleeping in a chair.); Minneapolis Institute of Art, October 1932, Red, White and Blue; Minneapolis Woman’s Club, April 1933, Swedish Hollow and Shanty Town, New York; Minneapolis Art Institute, October 1933, first prize in drawing, Prescott Framer; Twin Cities Art Exhibit, Minneapolis, 1929 prize, 1933 prize, 1934 prize, 1935 prizes; Sarasota Art Association, 10th Annual, March 1938 (exhibiting from Minneapolis, Minn.); Sarasota Art Association, Florida Theater building, March, April 1939, oil, Adrienne (Portrait of Harmes wife.); Sarasota Art Association, Cain Building, Orange Avenue, Art in Our Town, December 1939, oil, The Scallopers; Sarasota Art Association, January 1940; St. Petersburg Art Center, 415 Third avenue south, January 1940, Scallops and Young Man of the Forest; Sarasota Art Association, 10th Annual Members Exhibition, March 1940; Macbeth galleries, New York City, December 1940, with Hilton and Dorothy Sherman Leech, Aleen Aked, Truman Fassett and Howard and Louise Jay Penrose; Sarasota Art Association, Members Exhibit, January 1948; Sara De Sota pageant, sidewalk exhibition by Sarasota Art Association, February 1940; Sarasota Art Association, Circus Show (only circus art), March 1949, Stampede; Sarasota Art Association, winter, 1949, Hey Rube, Up From Thirty Fathoms; Goddard Gallery, Sarasota, Memorial Exhibition of twenty-seven paintings, December 1951.
