Artists

Thomas Hart Benton (April 15, 1889 – January 19, 1975) was an American painter and muralist. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His fluid, sculpted figures in his paintings showed everyday people in scenes of life in the United States. Though his work is strongly associated with the...

Alexander Brook, a leader among New York City's mainstream figurative painters during the 1930s, painted numerous scenes based on his observations in Savannah. Trained in the American realist tradition of painting, Brook's landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes are largely devoid of overt or hidden social meaning and are characterized by subdued...

BACHER, OTTO HENRY (31 May 1856-16 Aug. 1909) was one of Cleveland's first artists to travel to Europe and attain a national and international reputation. The Cleveland native was born on River St. near St. Clair Ave., son of Henry and Charlotte Bacher. He attended the CLEVELAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS. After working as a decorator of lake vessels and local...

Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion. Though not the first artist to record these sites, Bierstadt was the foremost painter...

Frank Weston Benson, frequently referred to as Frank W. Benson, (March 24, 1862 – November 15, 1951) was an American artist from Salem, Massachusetts known for his Realistic portraits, American Impressionist paintings, watercolors and etchings. He began his career painting portraits of distinguished families and murals for the Library of...

William Bennett was born in England. In 1799 the esteemed watercolor artist Richard Westall sponsored Bennett's entry into the Royal Academy of Art in London. Bennett showed an aptitude for landscape views, paying particular attention to topographical detail and the subtleties of light and atmosphere. Enrollment in the British forces in 1803 cut short...

Julie Hart Beers Kempson is regarded as among the best and perhaps the only woman artist of nineteenth-century America to specialize in landscapes. Biography Julie Hart Beers Kempson, a painter of the Hudson River School, was one of very few professional women landscape painters in nineteenth-century America and the only one to achieve any...

Charles Grant Beauregard (* 1856 in Montreal , † 1919 in Troy) was an American painter. Life and Work Even as a young man wandered from Beauregard in the State of New York and lived there the majority of his life in Troy, where he worked as a teacher at the Emma Willard Private School. While he initially dealt with portraiture, he later turned to...

As a young man, Beaman had a studio on Tremont Street in Boston.  Although Beaman studied at the Lowell Institute and in Paris in the late 1870s, his preference was for a more rural lifestyle.  He moved to Northfield, Massachusetts where he lived with a hermit atop the mountain back of Northfield village.  In coming down to the village he passed...

William Henry Bartlett (March 26, 1809 – September 13, 1854) was a British artist, best known for his numerous steel engravings. Biography Bartlett was born in Kentish Town, London in 1809. He was apprenticed to John Britton (1771–1857), and became one of the foremost illustrators of topography of his generation. He travelled throughout...

John Badger Bachelder (September 29, 1825 – December 22, 1894) was a portrait and landscape painter, lithographer, and photographer, but best known as the preeminent 19th century historian of the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War. He was a dominant factor in the preservation and memorialization of the Gettysburg Battlefield in the...

  Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith (September 26, 1846 – June 23, 1923) was a Canadian landscape painter best known for his works of the Rocky Mountains and the Selkirk Range. Bell-Smith emigrated to Canada from England in 1866. He had studied painting in England and worked as an artist and photographer in Montreal until 1871, when he moved to Toronto....

George Caleb Bingham (March 20, 1811 – July 7, 1879) was an American artist whose paintings of American life in the frontier lands along the Missouri River exemplify the Luminist style. Left to languish in obscurity, Bingham's work was rediscovered in the 1930s. He is now widely considered one of the greatest American painters of the 19th...

Constantino Brumidi (July 26, 1805 – February 19, 1880) was an Greek/Italian-American historical painter, best known and honored for his fresco work in the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Parentage and early life Brumidi was born in Rome, his father a Greek and his mother an Italian. He showed his talent for fresco painting at an early age...

William Bradford, a 19th-century American marine painter, was born on April 30, 1823 in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.  He was born to Quaker parents who disapproved of his desire for a painting career.  He worked as a clerk in his father’s dry goods shop in New Bedford, devoting his spare time to sketching. In the early 1850s, he launched his...

William Russell Birch (1755-1834) has long been recognized as the first artist to achieve true commercial success in depicting American scenes for the domestic market. In his early career in London, Birch was influenced by the landscape painters whose work arose in the rich artistic ferment he encountered there in the 1770s and 1780s. After...

Hugh Bridport, born in England in 1794, was a portrait painter, drawing instructor, architect, and engraver, who practiced lithography in Philadelphia 1828-1830s. Trained at the Royal Academy and with miniature painter Charles Wilkins, Bridport immigrated to Philadelphia with his artist brother George in 1816. Soon after their arrival, the brothers...

Ralph Albert Blakelock (October 15, 1847 – August 9, 1919) was a romanticist painter from the United States. Biography Ralph Blakelock was born in New York City on October 15, 1847.[1] His father was a successful physician.[1] Blakelock initially set out to follow in his footsteps, and in 1864 began studies at the Free Academy of the City of...

Nothing is known about English portrait painter Joseph Blackburn prior to his presence on Bermuda in 1752. During an extended stay on the island he painted about twenty-five portraits, including those of members of the Jones, Tucker and Harvey families. His compositions show that he was familiar with the work of the leading London portrait painters...

James Edward Buttersworth (1817–1894) was an English painter who specialized in maritime art, and is considered among the foremost American ship portraitists of the nineteenth century.[1] His paintings are particularly known for their meticulous detail, dramatic settings, and grace in movement. Early life and education Buttersworth was born in...

Harrison Bird Brown began his career as a modest beginning as a sign painter. He later turned to painting and established himself as one of the most celebrated landscape painters in Maine during the second half of the nineteenth century. Brown spent the greatest portion of his life in Maine, and his works often depicted the wholesome outdoor...

Elizabeth Jane Gardner (October 4, 1837-January 28, 1922) was an American academic and salon painter, who was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. She was an American expatriate who died in Paris where she had lived most of her life. She studied in Paris under the figurative painter Hugues Merle (1823-1881), the well-known salon painter Jules Joseph...

Dennis Miller Bunker (November 6, 1861 – December 28, 1890) was an American painter and innovator of American Impressionism. His mature works include both brightly colored landscape paintings and dark, finely drawn portraits and figures. One of the major American painters of the late 19th century,[1] and a friend of many prominent artists of the...

Albertus, born in Tarrytown, New York in 1814, was the son of a sculptor, John Henri Isaac Browere (1790-1834), famous for his plaster life masks of Thomas Jefferson, Gilbert Stuart, and others. Washington Irving’s History of New York inspired Albertus to depict Peter Stuyvesant’s Arrival at Hartford (1833), Recruiting Peter Stuyvesant’s Army...

John Henry Brown (Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1818-1891, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Brown's prolific career illuminates the fate of antebellum miniaturists. He began an apprenticeship in 1836 to the painter Arthur Armstrong (1798-1851) while working as a clerk in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Recorder's Office. In 1839 Brown established himself as a...

John Bunyan Bristol was born in Hillsdale, New York, a small town east of Hudson, New York near the Massachusetts border. Although largely self-taught, Bristol is known to have studied briefly with early Hudson River painter Henry Ary, who is also thought to have given instruction to Bristol’s great contemporary, Sanford Robinson Gifford....

George Henry Boughton (December 4, 1833 – January 19, 1905)[1] was an Anglo-American landscape and genre painter, illustrator and writer. Life and work Boughton was born in Norwich in Norfolk, England, the son of farmer William Boughton. The family emigrated to the United States in 1835,[2] and he grew up in Albany, New York where he started...

Norton Bush was first noted for his portraits, marine views and landscapes of the East Coast and California. Later in his career, after visiting Central and South America, Bush devoted himself to his favorite topic, painting tropical scenery.  Norton Bush was born in Rochester, New York, Feb.22, 1834. He first studied art in his native city under...

BROMLEY, VALENTINE WALTER (1848-1877), painter, great-grandson of William Bromley (1769-1842) [q. v.], was born in London on 14 Feb. 1848. From his childhood he manifested a remarkable faculty for art, both as an original designer and as a depicter of nature. He was especially remarkable for invention and swiftness of execution. He contributed...

Franz A. Bischoff (January 14, 1864-February 5, 1929) was an American artist known primarily for his beautiful China painting, floral paintings and California landscapes. He was born in Steinschönau, Austria (now known as Kamenický Šenov in the Czech Republic on January 14, 1864.[1] He immigrated to the United States as a teenager where he...

Born in Durham in northern England, John George Brown studied art while training as a glass-cutter in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; he continued his studies at the Edinburgh Royal Academy. After a short stay in London, Brown emigrated to the United States in 1853, studied at the National Academy of Design, and opened a portrait studio in Brooklyn, New York....