James Dexter Havens (American, 1900 to 1960)
James Dexter Havens was born January 13, 1900 in Rochester, New York and had a fairly unremarkable childhood until he was fourteen, at which time he was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. Doctors gave him only two years to live, but he clung to life for the next forty-six years, albeit bedridden much of the time. In order to combat boredom, he turned to drawing.
In the early 1920s, Attorney James S. Havens -the artist’s father- who had already served as a U.S. Representative to Congress (1910 to 1911) and was head of its legal department of the Eastman Kodak Co was searching for something to help his desperately ill son. Through his high offices at Kodak, he rubbed shoulders and played golf with a great many men in all sorts of fields. Among these men was Professor JR Macleod, who headed the lab at the University of Toronto where Frederick Banting and Charles Best were doing the first research on insulin in 1921-22. Through the intervention of Professor Macleod, young Jim Havens, became the first American to undergo insulin therapy. By the time he received treatment, he weighed less than 74 pounds at the age of twenty-two.
Initially, the insulin, administered by Dr. John R. Williams of Rochester, was ineffective and it was only after Frederick Banting traveled to Rochester and injected the young man himself that the diabetes was finally brought under control. In fact, when Banting finished injecting Havens, the young man enjoyed the first full meal he’d had in many years.
Havens later trained at the University of Rochester, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and with Thomas Fogarty for etching, Troy Kinney, Charles Woodbury at Ogunquit, Maine and John E. Costigan. Self taught as a printmaker, Havens made his first prints, mainly in the form of bookplates and greeting cards, in the late 1920s. On July 18, 1927, he married Gladys (Corland) Havens and together they had a son, James C., and a daughter, Bettina ‘Tina’ Havens (Letcher), who eventually married a professor of physics at the University of Rhode Island.
By the mid-1930s, Havens was a fairly accomplished printmaker, usually working in color, creating both linoleum cuts and woodcuts. During this period, he built a home/studio for himself and his family in Fairport, New York, five miles southeast of Rochester. His oil painting, Alling Clements Painting A Landscape, is really quite rare among Havens’ works.
According to his daughter, Tina, he made thousands of prints and did most of his pleinair paintings in watercolor. In a phone conversation in September 2005, Tina Havens Letcher said that the artist at the easel in the painting is without a doubt Alling Clements, because her father and Clements were the best of friends and went on wide-ranging painting excursions at least once a week. The men were so close that, when Alling Clements died in 1957, Havens said, ‘Half of me is gone.’ James Dexter Havens died at his home in Fairport, New York on November 30, 1960 at the age of sixty from colon cancer.
In the early 1980s, his daughter-in-law Anne Havens ‘estate-stamped’ all of his completed works and sold them. In a different phone conversation in September 2005, she agreed with her sister-in-law Tina that the man painting at the easel is undoubtedly Alling Clements. Havens was a member of the Woodcut Society, the Rochester Art Club, the Rochester Print Club, the Academic Artists, the Albany Print Club, the American Watercolor Society, The Washington Water Color Club, the Boston Society of Independent Artists, the Boston Print Club and most importantly was elected an Associate of the National Academy in 1951.
Information courtesy of Charlton Hall Galleries Inc., September 2006.