Charles Capps
United States, 1898-1981 Sunlit Towers, 1954
Etching and aquatint
Gift in memory of Virginia Hartle Jackson 2008.0020
Capps, a native of Jacksonville, Illinois, moved to Wichita, Kansas, after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. (David Henry in: Kansas Printmakers, 70-78) In Wichita Capps was an active printmaker and a charter member of the Prairie Print Makers. The elegant geometric forms of grain elevators, the “cathedrals of the plains,” intrigued Capps, who treated them in different kinds of light, including moonlight (Harvest Moon, 1935). This scene, probably on an unseen railway line, contrasts the modest rural dwelling of earlier days with the enormous concrete grain tower emblematic of the great wheat harvests of the plains.
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