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...

Henry Golden Dearth (22 April 1864 – 27 March 1918) was a distinguished American painter[1] who studied in Paris and continued to spend his summers in France painting in the Normandy region. He would return to New York in winter, and became known for his moody paintings of the Long Island area. Around 1912, Dearth changed his artistic style, and...

Joseph Rusling Meeker (born in Newark, New Jersey, 21 April 1827; died in St. Louis, Missouri, 27 September 1887) was a United States painter. Biography He studied at the National Academy of Design in 1845-46, and exhibited at the American Art Union in 1849-50, the Academy of Design in 1867, and the Boston Art Club in 1877. His studio was at St....

Julian A. Scott (February 14, 1846 – July 4, 1901), he was born in Johnson, Vermont, and served as a Union Army drummer during the American Civil War where he received America's highest military decoration the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Lee's Mills; he was also an American painter and Civil War artist. Family Julian was the...

The first historian of the American stage, William Dunlap was a passionate lover of the arts, a gifted painter, a tireless chronicler of his day and a writer of considerable charm. He wrote or adapted more than sixty plays. While subsequent scholarship has found a considerable number of innacuracies in his historical work, his first hand account of...

Constantino Brumidi (July 26, 1805 – February 19, 1880) was an Greek/Italian-American historical painter, best known and honored for his fresco work in the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Parentage and early life Brumidi was born in Rome, his father a Greek and his mother an Italian. He showed his talent for fresco painting at an early age...

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...

Robert Frederick Blum was a major figure painter and illustrator who emerged from the active artistic milieu of mid-century Cincinnati, where he was born. From his studies in Cincinnati, Blum traveled to Philadelphia and studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1876-1877). Blum and many of his contemporaries greatly admired the...

William Morris Hunt (March 31, 1824 – September 8, 1879), American painter, was born at Brattleboro, Vermont to Jane Maria (Leavitt) Hunt and Hon. Jonathan Hunt, who raised one of the preeminent families in American art. William Morris Hunt was the leading painter of mid-19th century Boston, Massachusetts.[1] Life and career Hunt's father's family,...

Joseph Steward (1753–1822) was a prominent American artist. Early years Joseph Steward was born on July 6, 1753. He was the son of Joseph and Jane (Wilson) Steward of Upton, Massachusetts. Stewart went to Dartmouth College, graduating in 1780. Joseph Steward continued his studies under the guidance of Reverend Doctor Levi Hart of Preston,...

William Herbert Dunton, known later in life as “Buck,” was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1878. His lifelong passion for the outdoors was nurtured from an early age by his grandfather, who took him on expeditions, teaching him about hunting and fishing. Drawing the outdoors followed naturally. As a child, Dunton was self-taught, developing a precise...

William Page (January 3, 1811 in Albany, New York – October 1, 1885 in Tottenville, Staten Island) was an American painter and portrait artist. Life and work William Page studied at Phillips Academy, Andover in 1828-29 (not the Andover Theological Seminary on the same campus, as is commonly asserted). A man of mercurial temperament, Page was...

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...

(b Philadelphia, PA, 6 March 1791; d Philadelphia, PA, 25 Dec 1878). Miniature painter, daughter of (2) James Peale. She was instructed by her father. Her first attempt, a fruit piece, was exhibited in 1811 at the Society of Artists in Philadelphia. From 1820 to 1840 she was a popular miniature painter, known for the accuracy of her likenesses and...

Theodore Kaufmann (December 18, 1814 Uelzen, Germany - 1896 New York City) was an artist who worked mostly in the United States. Biography He served for several years as a mercantile apprentice. He studied painting in Düsseldorf with Peter von Cornelius, in Munich with Wilhelm von Kaulbach,[1] and also in Hamburg and Dresden. He took part in the...

John Ramage (1748 – October 24, 1802) was an Irish American artist. Career Ramage was born in Dublin, Ireland. He entered the Dublin School of Artists in 1763 and began his career as a goldsmith and miniaturist. Most of his commissions were earned via portraits. In 1772, he traveled to Halifax, Nova Scotia and subsequently settled in...

George Bernard Butler, Jr. (1838-1907), portrait, genre, animal, and still life painter, was born in New York City, where he studied art under Thomas Hicks. In 1859 he went to Paris to study under Thomas Couture, then returned to serve in the military during the Civil War. Despite the loss of his right arm, Butler continued his art career in New York...

Mary Russell Smith was born at Edgehill, close to Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. She was a true lover of nature and all the things of nature, wandering the fields and woods near her childhood home, gathering objects that caught her eye. Smith had much influence to become an an artist because all in her family were painters. Her father, Russell, was a...

John Whetten Ehninger (July 22, 1827 New York City - January 22, 1889 Saratoga, New York) was a United States painter and etcher. Biography He graduated from Columbia University in 1847. He was a pupil of Couture in Paris 1848-1849, and afterward studied at Düsseldorf and other art centres 1851-1852. Among his paintings, which include landscape...

Francis Blackwell Mayer (December 27, 1827 – December 5, 1899) was a prominent 19th century American genre painter from Maryland. While he spent most of his life in that state, he took a trip to the western frontier in the mid-nineteenth century and executed a series of drawings of Native Americans; he also studied in Paris for five years in the...

Walter Bowman Russell (May 19, 1871 – May 19, 1963) was an American polymath known for his achievements as a painter, sculptor, author and builder and less well known as a natural philosopher and for his unified theory in physics and cosmogony. He posited that the universe was founded on a unifying principle of rhythmic balanced interchange. This...

Frederick William MacMonnies (September 28, 1863 – March 22, 1937) was the best known expatriate American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts school, as successful and lauded in France as he was in the United States. He was also a highly accomplished painter and portraitist. He was born in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, New York and died in New York...

Abbott Handerson Thayer (August 12, 1849 – May 29, 1921) was an American artist, naturalist and teacher. As a painter of portraits, figures, animals and landscapes, he enjoyed a certain prominence during his lifetime, as indicated by the fact that his paintings are part of the most important U.S. art collections. During the last third of his...

Carl Friedrich Heinrich Werner (1808–1894) was a German watercolor painter. Born in Weimar, Werner studied painting under Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld in Leipzig. He switched to studying architecture in Munich from 1829 to 1831, but thereafter returned to painting. He won a scholarship to travel to Italy, where he ended up founding a studio in...

Otto Stark (1859–1926) was an American Impressionist painter who was considered to be a member of the Hoosier Group of Indiana artists. Stark's work most clearly showed the influence of Impressionism, and he often featured children in his work. He began his career as a commercial woodcarver's apprentice in Indianapolis until an ankle injury...

Alfred Henry Maurer (April 21, 1868 – August 4, 1932) was an American modernist painter. He exhibited his work in avant-garde circles internationally and in New York City during the early 20th century. Biography Maurer was born in New York City. He was the son of German-born Louis Maurer, a lithographer. At age sixteen, Maurer quit school to...

Lemuel D. Eldred had formal training in Paris but retained in his best pictures a planar, Yankee austerity that seems at times primitive, at times modern.  Born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, he exhibited considerable artistic talent as a child.  With the support of his parents, he made his way to the Academie Julien and later embarked on a...

Hermann Fuechsel studied in Munich and in Dusseldorf, under Brander and C. F. Lessing, before coming to the U.S. in 1858.  He was a  member of the Artists Fund Society.  He began exhibiting in 1860 at the Boston Athenaeum and the American Art Union.  The Crayon for February of that year noted: " ... Mr. Fuechsel has completed a sunny mountain...

Edward Hill (December 9, 1843 – August 27, 1923) was a prolific artist as well as a published poet, songwriter, and newspaper correspondent. His paintings include White Mountain landscapes, southern genre scenes, still lifes, portraits, American Indians, European attractions, and the scenery of the American West. Early life Hill was born in the Union...

Sylvester Phelps Hodgdon studied with Benjamin Champney in Boston and later with Samuel Rouse in New York City.  In the early 1850s he worked as a lithographer for L. H. Bradford in Boston, during which time he executed views of the Flume and the Old Man of the Mountain. For thirty years he kept a studio in the Tremont Studio Building and he lived at...

Fisher is known to have lived in Portland, ME.  He worked at Cumberland County Power and Light (along with Frederick J. Ilsey of the Brushians group).  Although not a member of the Brushians group of Portland, ME, his paintings are similar to theirs in size, style, and subject matter.

John Durand's birth and death dates are unknown, and only a few of his portraits are signed and dated. The sketchy chronology of his life is based on these few signed works, as well as on account book entries and information about his sitters. Scholars place his first activity in Virginia in 1765, but by 1766 Durand was in New York City. In that year...