Marcus Waterman graduated from Brown University and then moved to New York City, where he had a studio from 1857 to 1874. He became an associate member of the National Academy in 1861. After 1874, Waterman made his home in Boston and spent much of his time around New England in Vermont and Cape Cod. From 1879 to 1884, the artist traveled to Algeria, France, Holland, and Spain. In 1885, shortly after he returned from overseas, Waterman exhibited several Spanish and Algerian subjects in Boston. He went to Europe for good in 1900 and died in Moderno, Italy on April 2, 1914.

“With Marcus Waterman, although he is an American, we will transport ourselves to Egypt and Algeria, where he traveled for a long time, planting his tent by chance and setting up his easel. There he found the intensity and variety of colors which are particularly adapted to his brush. It is in this way that he produced those fine studies of lions and of tigers, so true to nature, so well grasped. Waterman was impressed not only by the animals but also by Oriental life, with its architectural grandeur and elegance, with its luxuriant flora, which the legends animate and to which the myths attribute some human action; he was struck also by the fauna, so superbly elegant; by the small horses with fine heads, the donkeys with long manes and tails and their intelligent looks, and by the camels which in our gray climate appear deformed and sad, but which in the light of an African sky appear majestic and grand. The pictures of Waterman, executed after such sketches, are very original and artistic. His coloring, ah! His coloring is sunny, shining, brilliant, bright; all that he knows is due to his personal talent and individual work, as he went to no school of painting.” A.C. de Soissons, A Parisian Critic’s Notes 1894, p. 70-71.