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[circa 1968]

BIOGRAPHICAL DATA ON PALMER C. HAYDEN

Palmer C. Hayden was born in Virginia, January 15th, 1890, in the town of Widewater and christened Peyton Col Hedgeman, son of James and Nancy Hedgeman. He was educated in the public schools of that state, and took his first drawing lessons from a correspondence school while serving in the  United States Army during World War I. After his period of enlistment, during which he saw service in the Philippines, he returned to New York and took part-time work in Greenwich Village to earn a livelihood while studying art with Victor Perard, Art Instructor at Cooper Union.

In 1925 he studied painting at the Boothbay Art Colony in Maine under Asa G. Randall on a working scholarship, doing chiefly boats and marine subjects. These works he exhibited the following year at the Civic Club in New York, and won the William E. Harmon award of a gold medal and $$oo.oo with a painting of the Portland water front. As a result of this recognition he was given an additional sum of $3000.00 by a friend who was a patron of the arts to enable him to continue his studies abroad.

He went to France in 1927 where he studied in Paris and in Brittany under private instruction from M. Clivette Lefevre, Art Instructor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He gave a one-man show at the Galerie Berheim Jeune in Paris in November, 1928, and exhibited in the group shows: Salon des Tuilleries, Paris, 1930; and the American Legion Exhibition, Paris, 1931. In the latter he showed paintings of Negro subjects, somewhat unusual at the time, of which two were sold 

He was also represented in the Harmon Foundation Exhibitions of 1928 to 1933. In the exhibition of 1933 he won Mrs. John D. Rockefeller's prize for painting with his "Fetiche et Fleurs". His work was shown in the Harmon Foundation's College Art Traveling Exhibitions of 1934-1935; in the New Jersey State Museum, 1935; and the Roerich Musuem, New York, 1935. Paintings were sold to Atlanta University and to various individuals, including Monsignor William Cashin, who purchased the painting of St Andrews Church, and to Mr. Trevor Arnett, "Marroniers en Fleurs".