William Matthew Prior, the second son of Matthew Prior and Sarah Bryant Prior of Duxbury, Massachusetts, was born in Bath, Maine, in 1806. His earliest portrait is inscribed in the artist's hand, W. M. Prior's first portrait 1823. An inscription on an 1824 portrait (privately owned in 1992), W. M. Prior, Painter / Formerly of Bath / 1824 / 3 piece...

Howard Pyle (March 5, 1853 – November 9, 1911) was an American illustrator and author, primarily of books for young people. A native of Wilmington, Delaware, he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy. During 1894 he began teaching illustration at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University), and after...

According to the recollections of his daughter Flora Raleigh Phinney, Charles Sidney Raleigh produced more than eleven hundred paintings, six hundred of them of whaling ships. Raleigh had an early introduction to maritime pursuits. Born in Gloucester, England, in 1831, he left home at the age of ten and spent the next thirty years as a sailor and...

Born in Philadelphia in 1847, Milne Ramsey was a still life, landscape, and figure painter who remains best known for his highly realistic his still-life scenes. Early in his career as an artist, Ramsey studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and then under Leon Bonnat in Paris from 1871-1876. Although he exhibited extensively throughout his...

No information on the artist has been located. The artist's name and active date of 1777 come from the inscription on the National Gallery's painting Basket of Fruit with Parrot (1980.62.20). While it is possible that this is an English painting, it probably was produced in America by an artist copying a European still life, or more likely, a...

William Tylee Ranney (May 9, 1813 – November 18, 1857) was a 19th-century American painter, known for his depictions of Western life, sporting scenery, historical subjects and portraiture. In his 20-year career, he made 150 paintings and 80 drawings, and is considered the first major genre painter to work in New Jersey, and one of the most...

Carducius Plantagenet Ream was one of the most important still life painters of the 19th century. Born in Lancaster, Ohio, Ream began his artistic career painting in New York and Cincinnati before he moved to Chicago in 1878. It was in Chicago that Ream became the city's leading still life painter and gained national and international recognition for...

Allen Christian Redwood was one of the few sketch artists of the Civil War who actually fought in military battles, and his documentation was of noted historical value to the Southern side of the War. By the 1890s, he was a western illustrator for Harper's, Century and other magazines and traveled widely in the West. In 1898 Harper's sent him to...

Robert Lewis Reid (July 29, 1862 – December 2, 1929) was an American Impressionist painter and muralist. Life and work Robert Reid was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston under Otto Grundmann, where he was also later an instructor. In 1884 he moved to New York City, studying at the Art...

Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 – December 26, 1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U. S. Cavalry. Early...

During the first half of the nineteenth century artists fanned out across the northeastern United States to find aesthetic inspiration in nature. Thomas Addison Richards was one of the few who traveled extensively in the South. Through his paintings, illustrated magazine articles, and guidebooks, Richards introduced the natural beauty and distinct...

William Rimmer (20 February 1816 – 20 August 1879) was an American artist born in Liverpool, England. He was the son of a French refugee, who emigrated to Nova Scotia, where he was joined by his wife and child in 1818, and who in 1826 moved to Boston, where he earned a living as a shoemaker. The son learned the father's trade; at fifteen became a...

Ellen Robbins is best known for her watercolor paintings of flowers and autumn leaves. Primarily a self-taught watercolorist, Robbins was born in Watertown, Massachusetts in 1828. During her youth, she spent hours copying lithographs from drawing books. During the 1940s, she studied briefly at the New England School of Design and Manchester...

Mary Roberts (died 1761) was an American miniaturist active in Charleston, South Carolina in the 1740s and 1750s. One of the earliest American miniaturists, and the first woman recorded as working in the medium in the American colonies,[1] she is also believed to have painted the first watercolor-on-ivory miniature in the...

ROBERTSON, ARCHIBALD (1765–1835), miniature-painter, born at Monymusk in Scotland on 8 May 1765, was eldest son of William Robertson of Drumnahoy, near Aberdeen, and Jean Ross, his wife; Andrew Robertson [q. v.] was his brother. He was educated at Aberdeen, and received his first instruction in drawing from a deaf-and-dumb artist. In 1786 he...

Severin Roesen (ca. 1815 – after 1872) is a painter known for his abundant fruit and flower still lifes and is today recognized as one of the major American still-life painters of the mid-nineteenth century. Life Little is known about Roesen. He is believed to have been born in or near Cologne, and to have exhibited a floral painting at the...

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...

Toby Edward Rosenthal (15 March 1848 in New Haven, Connecticut – 23 December 1917 in Munich) was an American painter. Biography Moving to San Francisco with his parents in 1855, he there studied painting under Fortunato Arriola. In 1865 he went to Munich, where he was a pupil of the Royal Academy under Strachuber, Karl Raupp and Karl Theodor...

Peter Frederick Rothermel (July 8, 1817 – August 15, 1895) was an American painter. Biography Rothermel was born in Nescopeck, Pennsylvania in 1817, although some date his birth earlier, in 1813 or 1814. He had a common-school education, and studied land surveying.[1] At age 20, he moved to Philadelphia and became a sign painter.[2] Then at age...

Charles B. Russ was an artist active in the second half of the 19th century.  During the period from 1870 to 1880, Russ lived on Hancock Street in Cambridge, MA.  Russ's daughter, Annie, married Henry Lansing Millis on December 15, 1880.  The town of Millis, MA, was named for Henry's father, Lansing Millis, who made his money in railroads. Russ...