Charcoal Club (Baltimore, Md.)

Art club and school.

Organized in 1883 by a group of art students and friends of art for the purpose of conducting art classes and for holding exhibitions. The exhibitions varied from weekly one-man shows to the annual juried exhibition of Contemporary American art. From 1910 to 1926, this all-American show was the high point of Baltimore's brief art season. It brought paintings by such "modernists" as John Sloan, George Luks, Frank Benson, Robert Henri, Leon Kroll, and Arthur B. Davies to Baltimore for the first time. The club's membership, which remained strictly male until 1963, was composed of painters, sculptors, writers, architects, musicians, and art patrons. In the early twentieth century the club had two hundred members including such prominent men as Governor Albert C. Richie, Ferdinand C. Latrobe, Robert Garrett, Waldo Newcomer, General Felix Agnus, Edwin F. Abell, S. Teakle Wallis, William T. Walters and his son Henry, Ross R. Winans, Dr. A.R.L. Dohme, and Theodore Marburg.

Aside from serious art exhibitions, the club was known for its practical jokes, smokers, poker nights, wild parties, and spirited battles with the Baltimore Museum of Art.