Artists

Walter Launt Palmer was the nineteenth century’s most celebrated painter of snow scenes. The son of the sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer, Walter was surrounded by great art and artists at an early age. He trained with the noted Hudson River School landscapist Frederic Church and exhibited at the National Academy of Design before embarking on a...

Ammi Phillips painted for more than fifty years, producing perhaps as many as two thousand portraits in so many disparate styles that his works were once thought to be by several different artists. Currently about five hundred works can be attributed to him, most sharing the characteristics of plain backgrounds, strongly contrasting light and dark...

During the mid-nineteenth century, before America had truly established its claim to artistic originality, American artists were seduced by the fascinating Parisian art scene.  During the latter half of the nineteenth century an important group of American artists congregated in France, among them Mary Cassatt, James Abbot MacNeill Whistler –...

Eunice Pinney is the earliest known American primitive watercolorist. She was born into a large, wealthy family in Simsbury, Connecticut. Well-educated, she and her seven siblings enjoyed performing plays for neighbors, and Pinney's flair for drama surfaces in the poses, gestures, and facial expressions of the people in her...

Harper Pennington was born in Baltimore to a prominent Maryland family. After studying drawing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris with the renowned teacher and artist Jean Leon Gérome, in 1880 he traveled to Munich, where the American artist Frank Duveneck's school was well known. Pennington was advised to join Duveneck's winter art class in...