John Vanderlyn (October 18, 1775 – September 23, 1852) was an American neoclassicist painter. Biography Vanderlyn was born at Kingston, New York. He was employed by a print-seller in New York, and was first instructed in art by Archibald Robinson (1765–1835), a Scotsman who was afterwards one of the directors of the American Academy of...

Cephas Thompson (July 1, 1775 – November 6, 1856) was a successful, self-taught, early nineteenth-century portrait painter in the United States, who was born, died, and lived most of his life in Middleborough, Massachusetts. Thompson's father fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Thompson married Olive Leonard on March 18, 1802. His son, Cephas...

Jeremiah Paul ( fl 1795; d nr St Louis, MO, 13 July 1820). American painter. He was a minor yet versatile artist whose career began in Philadelphia, PA, in the 1790s. The son of a Quaker schoolmaster, Paul received his early training from Charles Willson Peale and in 1795 participated in the founding of the Columbianum, Peale's ill-fated attempt to...

Jacob Eichholtz was born November 2, 1776, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he spent much of his life. His first drawing lessons were rudimentary, obtained from a sign painter. He apprenticed with a copper and tinsmith before being hired as a journeyman to a master coppersmith in 1801. He established his own business, working as a tinsmith until...

Edward Greene Malbone was one of the leading miniaturist painters in early American art. Malbone was born illegitimate and went by the name “Greene,” his mothers name for most of his life until the court mandated that he could use his fathers’ name, “Malbone.” Born in Newport, Rhode Island, Malbone cultivated a love for the arts as a...

Rembrandt Peale (February 22, 1778 – October 3, 1860) was an American artist and museum keeper. A prolific portrait painter, he was especially acclaimed for his likenesses of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Peale's style was influenced by French Neoclassicism after a stay in Paris in his...

Washington Allston (November 5, 1779 – July 9, 1843) was an American painter and poet, born in Waccamaw Parish, South Carolina. Allston pioneered America's Romantic movement of landscape painting. He was well known during his lifetime for his experiments with dramatic subject matter and his bold use of light and atmospheric...

Although born in England in 1780, John Wesley Jarvis was the son of an American mariner who moved his family back to the United States by the mid-1780s. At the end of that decade, the Jarvises settled in Philadelphia, where the artist spent his childhood and began his artistic training. He is known to have frequented the studio of the aging Matthew...

Charles Fraser was born on August 20, 1782 and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. During his childhood he began learning about the world of painting. Despite the lack of support from his parents to pursue a painting career, Fraser endured with the encouragement of his fellow painters and friends. Other artistic support came from one of his...

The portraitist Samuel Lovett Waldo was born April 6, 1783, in Windham, Connecticut, one of eight children born to farmer Zacheus Waldo and his wife Esther Stevens Waldo. At the age of sixteen he went to Hartford and took drawing lessons from an obscure painter named Joseph Steward. He set up a studio there in 1803, but found few clients and...

Bass Otis (July 17, 1784 - November 3, 1861), was an early American artist, inventor, and portrait painter. He painted hundreds of portraits including many of the best known Americans of his day, and produced the first American lithograph in 1819. Life and work Otis was born in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, the son of Josiah Otis, a...

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...

The Beardsley Limner was an itinerant artist who worked along the old Boston Post Road, in Connecticut and Massachusetts, from about 1785 to 1805. He executed some of the most striking naive portraits in New England, and was given the name The Beardsley Limner based on his handsome paintings of Elizabeth and Hezekiah Beardsley, c....

A native of the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, Frederick W. Mayhew was born in Chilmark on 6 July 1785. Although Mayhew has been known for some time through his works, several of them signed, the biographical details of his life eluded scholars until recently. Difficulty arose from his misidentification as Nathaniel Mayhew and confusion...

The son of a maker of carriage bodies, James Frothingham was born near Boston, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1786. Initially he worked in his father's shop, where he taught himself to paint the finished coaches. He also experimented in sketching and is said to have received some instruction from Fabius Whiting, a younger artist based...

Nathaniel Rogers gained his fame painting miniature portraits in New York City, but had well-established roots on eastern Long Island. He was born in Bridgehampton on August 1, 1787, the son of John T. Rogers, a farmer, and Sarah Brown, the eldest daughter of the second Presbyterian minister in Bridgehampton, James Brown. Within the family he was...

George Ropes, born in Salem, Massachusetts, on 15 May 1788, was a deaf mute. He was one of nine children of a sea captain, George Ropes, Sr., and Seethe (Millet) Ropes and had one sister who suffered from the same affliction as he. The artist lived in Salem almost his entire life, except for the years 1798 to 1801, when his father decided to try...

Sarah Goodridge (February 5, 1788 – December 28, 1853) was an American painter who specialized in miniatures. She was the older sister of Elizabeth (Eliza) Goodridge, also an American miniaturist. Goodridge was born in Templeton, Massachusetts, the sixth child and third daughter of Ebenezer Goodridge and his wife Beulah Childs. At an early age,...

The identity of the artist who created the Denison family portraits has long eluded scholars. His sitters are all from Stonington, Connecticut, and their portraits are part of the tradition of Connecticut portraiture that flourished from c. 1790/1810. One of the first to suggest an identity for The Denison Limner was Ralph Thomas of the New Haven...

Alvan Fisher (August 9, 1792 – February 13, 1863) was one of the United States's pioneers in landscape painting and genre works. Early years He was born in Needham, Massachusetts, the fourth of Aaron and Lucy (Stedman) Fisher's six sons. He moved with members of his family to Dedham, Massachusetts, around 1805 where he worked as a clerk in his...

William Guy Wall (1792 – 1864) was an American painter of Irish birth. Wall was born in Dublin in 1792 and arrived in New York in 1812. He was already a well trained artist and soon became well known for his sensitive watercolor views of the Hudson River Valley and surroundings. Some of these watercolors were published as engravings by John Hill...

Robert Havell, Jr. (Nov. 25, 1793 - Nov. 11, 1878) was the principal engraver of Audubon's Birds of America, perhaps the most significant natural history publication of all time. His aquatint engraving of all but the first ten plates of John James Audubon's Birds of America is now recognized as a significant artistic achievement in its own right...

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...

Margaretta Angelica Peale (born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 1, 1795 - died there, January 17, 1882) was an American painter, one of the Peale family of artists. The daughter of James Peale, she was the sister of Sarah Miriam Peale, Anna Claypoole Peale, and Maria Peale. She was taught by her father, and painted primarily still-lifes, many...

Asher Brown Durand (August 21, 1796 – September 17, 1886) was an American painter of the Hudson River School. Early life Durand was born in and eventually died in Maplewood, New Jersey (then called Jefferson Village), the eighth of eleven children; his father was a watchmaker and a silversmith. Durand was apprenticed to an engraver from 1812...

John Neagle (4 November 1796 – 17 September 1865) was a fashionable American painter, primarily of portraits, during the first half of the 19th century in Philadelphia. Biography Neagle was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His training in art began with instruction from the drawing-master Pietro Ancora and an apprenticeship to Thomas Wilson,...

Nathaniel Jocelyn (January 31, 1796 - January 13, 1881) was an American painter. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of a clockmaker and engraver. He trained as a watchmaker, later taking up drawing, engraving, and oil painting. He studied engraving with George Munger around 1813: they published at least one print together under the...

Charles Ingham was born in Dublin in 1796, where he became a pupil of William C., a portrait painter known for his likenesses of female subjects. Following four years of study with C., Ingham adopted his master's specialty. Thus, when he left Ireland and moved to New York in 1816, he soon became known as that city's premier "ladies' painter." The...

Little is known about the life of Isaac Sheffield, yet he left a substantial body of easily recognizable work. His usual subjects, painted during the 1830s and early 1840s, were sea captains and their families from the bustling Connecticut port of New London and nearby towns. The artist's father, Captain Isaac Sheffield, was a shipmaster who...

Born in Naples, Nicolino Calyo was an accomplished American nineteenth century view painter who brought the discipline of his classical European training to vibrant portrayals of the American scene.  He studied at the Naples Academy, where he learned Neoclassical, Italian, and Dutch landscape techniques and traditions.  Calyo fled Italy in 1821,...

Charles Codman (circa 1800–1842) was a landscape painter of Portland, Maine. His art is featured at the Portland Museum of Art as mature, fine early American landscape painting. Codman was probably from Boston and was apprenticed to the ornamental painter, John Ritto Penniman. Codman began as a decorative painter and had no formal training...

Sarah Miriam Peale (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 19, 1800 – February 4, 1885, Philadelphia) was an American portrait painter, one of the notable family of artists descended from the miniaturist and still-life painter James Peale, who was her father. She is noted as a portrait painter, mainly of politicians and military figures. Lafayette sat...

Henry Inman's father was an English-born brewer who settled near Utica, New York, and it was there that the future artist was born in 1801, raised, and educated. Aside from primary schooling, Inman also received some artistic instruction in his native town from an itinerant portrait painter. After the family moved to New York City in 1812, he...

William Allen Wall was born to a prominent Quaker family of New Bedford. His father was the master of a Quaker school, ran a hardware store, and promoted cultural activities in the city. Wall seems to have inherited from his father an appreciation of art and may have received instruction from him in watercolor and pencil technique. His father...

Paul Emil Jacobs (August 20, 1802, in Gotha - January 6, 1866) was a German painter. Jacobs, son of the philologist Frederick Jacobs, received his art training at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and first became known for his painting of Mercury and Argus (from Classical mythology). In 1824 he went to Rome, where he attracted great critical...