Artists

Edwin Austin Abbey (April 1, 1852 – August 1, 1911) was an American artist, illustrator, and painter. He flourished at the beginning of what is now referred to as the "golden age" of illustration, and is best known for his drawings and paintings of Shakespearean and Victorian subjects, as well as for his painting of Edward VII's...

The son of a farmer, Francis Alexander was born in Killingly, Connecticut, on February 3, 1800. During the winters of his eighteenth and nineteenth years he earned a small sum teaching in the local school and at the age of twenty used it to seek instruction in New York City. He studied for several weeks with Alexander Robertson, but was forced to...

John White Alexander (7 October 1856 – 31 May 1915) was an American portrait, figure, and decorative painter and illustrator. Biography Alexander was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now a part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Orphaned in infancy, he was reared by his grandparents and at the age of 12 became a telegraph boy in Pittsburgh. His...

Mathias Alten (1871–1938) was an American impressionist painter from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Biography Mathias Joseph Alten worked as an artist between 1890 and 1938. Although best known for his land- and seascapes he was also an accomplished portrait, floral, and animal painter. William H. Gerdts, a pre-eminent authority on American...

Ezra Ames (May 5, 1768 – February 23, 1836) was a popular portrait painter in Albany, New York during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. More than 700 portraits have been attributed to him. He was born in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1768. He moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1790, and married Zipporah Wood in 1794. Some time later he moved...

Ambrose Andrews was born in West Stockbridge, MA in 1805. He was a painter of landscapes, portraits and miniatures. He studied at the National Academy of Design, NYC in 1824. He started to work as a full time artist shortly after 1824 and was active throughout his life. He worked in Schuylerville, New York in 1824, in Troy, New York from 1829 to 1831,...

John James Audubon (Jean-Jacques Audubon) (April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was a French-American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. He was notable for his expansive studies to document all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations that depicted the birds in their natural habitats. His major work, a color-plate book...

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...

Joseph Badger (ca.1707–1765) was a portrait artist in Boston, Massachusetts in the 18th-century. He painted some 80 portraits of merchants, businessmen, clergy, and other notables, and their wives and children. Biography Badger was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to tailor Stephen Badger and Mercy Kettell. In 1731 he married Katharine Felch;...

James Bard was a marine artist of the 19th century. He is known for his paintings of watercraft, particularly of steamboats. His works are sometimes characterized as naïve art. Although Bard died poor and almost forgotten, his works have since become valuable. Bard had a twin brother, John (1815–1856) and they collaborated on earlier...

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...

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 Holbrook Beard began his career as portrait painter. In 1856, he traveled to Italy, Germany, and Switzerland with fellow artists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Worthington Whittredge. In 1858, Beard briefly settled in Buffalo, New York, helping to establish an art community that eventually culminated in the establishment of the Buffalo Fine...

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...

  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 Wesley Bellows (August 12[1][2] or August 19,[3][4][5] 1882 - January 8, 1925) was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City, becoming, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".[6] Youth Bellows was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Edwin Howland Blashfield (December 5, 1848 – October 12, 1936), an American artist, was born in New York City. He was a pupil of Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat in Paris beginning in 1867, and became (1888) a member of the National Academy of Design in New York. For some years a genre painter, he later turned to decorative work, where his academic...

Oscar Bluemner (June 21, 1867 – January 12, 1938), born as Friedrich Julius Oskar Blümner[1] and since 1933, known as Oscar Florianus Bluemner,[2] was a German-born American Modernist painter. Early life Bluemner was born as Friedrich Julius Oskar Blümner in Prenzlau, Germany on June 21, 1867.[1] Architecture Bluemner moved to Chicago in...

David Gilmour Blythe (May 9, 1815 – May 15, 1865) was a self-taught American artist best known for paintings which satirically portrayed political and social situations. Early years Blythe was born in East Liverpool, Ohio on May 9, 1815 to poor parents of Scottish and Irish ancestry. After a childhood in a log cabin by the Ohio River, at the...

A member of the National Academy of Design, where he exhibited from 1846 to 1871, Boardman was labeled by the American Art Union Bulletin of 1848 as "very clever."  He was painting in Jackson, NH, as early as 1847.  He was a friend of George Inness. His White Mountain paintings were done in the period 1848 to 1858.  He painted both in the White...

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...

DeWitt Clinton Boutelle was born on April 6, 1820 in Troy, New York. He was a self-educated artist but began painting “under the influence of Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand at an early age.”(1) Both men who influenced him were well known Hudson River School members. Boutelle created a mix of portrait and landscape paintings during his career....

Fidelia Bridges (May 19, either 1834 or 1835–1923) was one of the minute population of successful female artists in the 19th century and early 20th century. She painted small aspects of nature: flowers, birds, and other plants in their natural settings. She first was an oil painter and later took up watercolor painting. She was known for her...

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...

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...

Known for her oil portraits, landscapes, genre, and flower paintings, Maria Brooks studied at the South Kensington and Royal Academy Schools in London. She opened a studio in the Windsor Hotel, Montreal, in 1881, and was known to be working in Quebec City in 1886. Sometime after this, she left Canada for the United States, painting in New York in 1889...

George Loring Brown (1814-1889) was an American landscape painter. He was born in Boston and first studied wood engraving under Alonzo Hartwell and worked as an illustrator. He studied painting with Washington Allston, but soon went to Europe, residing principally in Italy for years. The motives of his pictures are usually Italian, and there is...

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....

A pioneer in the development of abstract painting, Patrick Henry Bruce focused on the still life in his explorations of the boundary between representation and “pure” painting. Bruce was a descendent of American statesman Patrick Henry (1736–1799). He began his art studies at the Richmond Art School at the age of sixteen. In 1902 he moved to...

John Henry Bufford (1810-1870) was a lithographer in 19th-century Boston, Massachusetts. Biography Bufford trained "in the Pendleton shop in Boston from 1829 to 1831."[1] According to one historian, Bufford's work as a lithographer represented "a mediocre sort of craftmanship at best. ...He had no very special skills as [an] original artist and...