Frederick Oakes Sylvester

Frederick Oakes Sylvester was an important St. Louis artist and poet in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, leaving an indelible mark on the art and art education communities in the region. Originally from Massachusetts, Sylvester adopted St. Louis as his second home. Fascinated by the city and its river, Mississippi River, his extensive body of work depicting it led to him being known as the “Painter and Poet of the Mississippi.”

Sylvester was educated at Massachusetts Normal School in Boston and began his career as director of the Art Department of Newcomb College at Tulane University, New Orleans, in 1891. He moved to St. Louis in 1892 to serve as a drawing instructor at Central High School, beginning a long and influential career in St. Louis schools. Sylvester was a gentle and patient teacher. According to one student, “He made his pupils feel that he was personally interested in them and gave them courage to express the creative impulse and love of beauty that is dormant in every child.” Sylvester is credited with setting a standard for excellence in art in his two-decade teaching career in St. Louis schools.

Sylvester’s art showed influences of both Regionalism and Impressionism. His initial works in St. Louis focused on the city and its urban conditions. After a trip to Venice in 1906, Sylvester returned with a new appreciation for his own city and the waters that shaped it. Thereafter, he took on the Mississippi as his primary subject and became widely regarded as its premier artistic interpreter. Between 1909 and 1911, Sylvester completed murals at Central High School, the St. Louis Noonday Club, and Decatur High School, all featuring the Mississippi. One of Sylvester’s most memorable exhibitions, a 1911 joint exhibition with fellow artist Robert Bringhurst at the City Art Museum, included one hundred canvases depicting scenes of the Mississippi.

Sylvester served as secretary, vice president, and eventually president of the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, and was secretary of the Society of Western Artists. He also was a member of the St. Louis Art League and the Two-by-Four Society. A writer as well as a painter, he wrote poetry to accompany his paintings of the Mississippi River. In 1911, he published a collection of these poems accompanied by images of his paintings, titled The Great River. Sylvester also wrote and performed in skits put on by the St. Louis Artists’ Guild’s “All-Star Stock Company” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 21, 1909).

In 1902, Sylvester purchased “Oak Ledge,” a summer cottage on the banks of the Mississippi in Elsah, Illinois, just across the river from St. Louis. That same year, he also became the first art director of Principia College in Elsah. Sylvester often invited students and groups of colleagues to Elsah for painting excursions along the Mississippi, including his close friends Takuma Kajiwara and Kathryn Cherry. Cherry, herself a well-known ceramicist, painter and educator, later succeeded Sylvester as art director at Principia in 1915.

Sylvester’s health began to decline in the early 1910s, forcing him to resign his position at Central High School in 1913, though he continued serving as art director at Principia College. Sylvester died of tuberculosis in 1915. According to his wishes, his ashes were sprinkled over the Mississippi River near Elsah by his wife and Kajiwara, poetically returning the artist to the river to which he dedicated his work.