Excerpt from Animal and Sporting Artists in America by F. Turner Reuter, Jr. © 2008:

Osthaus was born in Hildesheim, Hannover (now Germany), on 5 August 1858. He studied at the Royal Arts Academy in Düsseldorf, Germany, with Andreas Muller, Peter Jansen, E. von Gebhardt, Ernst Deger, and Christian Kroner. In the early 1860s Osthaus’ parents and younger siblings moved to Mexico in the employ of the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, whom Napoléon III had installed as Emperor of Mexico while the United States was distracted from foreign affairs by the Civil War; when his rule there was overthrown the Osthauses moved to Oshkosh, WI. Edmund joined them in 1883, where he shared a studio with his sister, Marie, also an artist. Shortly afterward he moved to Toledo, OH, at the invitation of David R. Locke, a local newspaperman and collector. He became chief instructor at the and complexity, from the single dog portraits on a typical twenty-four by thirty-six inch canvas to examples of impressive sizes. S. Murray Mitchell’s circa 1900 portrait of ten setters, which was six feet high and sixteen feet long and divided into three panels, and was described in the Forest and Stream edition of 28 April 1900. Oshthaus also produced a series of postcards, lithographs and calendar pictures for duPont, including every national champion from the first, Count Gladstone IV in 1896, through Monora in 1911; all were setter dogs except the 1909 winner, the pointer dog Manitoba Rap. At the persuasion of William Bruette, the editor of Forest and Stream magazine, Osthaus executed a series of eleven etchings of subjects including fox hounds, German shepherds, collies, bird dog puppies, a setter bitch and pups, as well as pointers and setters, with a limited number of impressions produced that were signed in pencil by the artist.

Osthaus was a member of the Tile Club in Toledo. He exhibited there regularly, showing such works as his Partridge Shooting and Retriever, both in 1903. At the Art Institute of Chicago (IL) he showed Still Evening in 1903 and, in 1911, Early Rambles and Setters. The Port Huron (MI) Museum of Arts and History has his Major, a portrait of a St. Bernard, and In the Field. The Toledo Museum of Art has another portrait of Major, among other works. The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH, has his Family Portrait and his Setters in a Field is at the Morris Museum of Arts and Sciences in Bernardsville, NJ. The Pebble Hill Plantation Museum in Thomasville, GA, has his oils, A Setter and a Pointer and Setters on Point. Other institutions holding his work include the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, VA; the Albany (GA) Museum of Art; and the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog in St. Louis, MO.

Osthaus died at his hunting lodge in Marianna, FL, on 30 January 1928.

Herring was born in Surrey on 12 August, 1795, the son of a London merchant of Dutch heritage who was born in America. His great interests as a child were drawing and horses. In 1814 he moved to Doncaster, where he saw the Duke of Hamilton’s William win the St. Leger, a spectacle which so inspired him that he went home and attempted to paint the winner from memory.

In Doncaster he started out as an assistant to a painter of coach insignia and inn signs, and was soon employed as a coach driver. In his spare time he began painting portraits of horses for inn parlors, where his skills were quickly recognized by local owners of hunting and racing horses, who offered commissions and enabled him thereby to start working full time at his painting. In 1830 he moved to Newmarket, where he is thought to have been taught by Abraham Cooper. After three years there, he returned to London.

Herring was enormously successful in his lifetime, and ranks with Sir Edwin Landseer as one of the greatest animal painters of the mid-nineteenth century. He was extremely prolific, painting numerous examples of such subjects as hunting, coaching, racing, shooting and farmyard scenes. He painted eighteen Derby winners and thirty-three successive winners of the St. Leger. His paintings were tremendously popular, with many being engraved both in color and black and white for sale to his many patrons. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1818, as well as at the British Institution and the Royal Society of British Artists. In 1840 and 1841 he was in Paris at the invitation of the Duc d’Orleans, for whom he painted several pictures. In 1845 he was appointed Animal Painter to HRH the Duchess of Kent; soon afterwards he received a commission from Queen Victoria, who remained his patron for the rest of his life. Earlier in the century he had painted for Kings George IV and William IV. His works hang in the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the National Gallery of Australia in Melbourne and in many well-known English and American collections.

Herring moved to Meopham, his country estate in Kent, in 1853, remaining there for the rest of his life. Three of his eight children, his sons John Frederick Jr. (1820 – 1907), Charles (1828 – 1856) and Benjamin (1830 – 1871), were also painters; of the three Charles, who died of scarlet fever at the age of 28, is held to have had the greatest talent while John Frederick, Jr., the longest lived of any of the Herrings and who for much of his career painted in the same manner as his father and signed his work in the same way, had the greatest success.

John Frederick Herring, Sr. died at Meopham on 13 September, 1865.

Excerpt from Animal and Sporting Artists in America by F. Turner Reuter, Jr. © 2008:

Benson was born in Salem, MA, on 24 March 1862. He was the second of six children, all of whom were encouraged by their parents to learn by experimentation. In this vein, while his siblings dismantled their mother’s sewing machine and constructed lightning rods, he began painting birds in his teens. During these years he explored the marshes around Salem, both on foot and in small boats, shooting and sketching waterfowl. His formal education in art commenced when he was nineteen with Otto Grundeman, Frederic Crowninshield, and others at the School of Painting and Drawing of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA), where he met several future fellow members of the Ten American Painters (a group that split from the Society of American Artists in 1898 out of dissatisfaction with its standards) such as Robert Reid (qv) and Edward Simmons, as well as Edmund C. Tarbell (qv) and fellow Salem native John Redmond. Benson and Redmond began teaching drawing classes in Salem two evenings a week in 1882. In 1883, after a trip to Cuba with his father, Benson went with his friend and Museum School classmate Joseph Lindon Smith to France, where he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian under Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger and summered in Concarneau, a village in Brittany. During this period he also met John Singer Sargent (qv) and Willard Leroy Metcalf (qv), both of whom numbered among his closest friends.

Upon his return in 1885 Benson worked as a portrait painter in Salem and taught in Portland, ME, for two years. He married Ellen Peirson, a friend of his sister’s whom he had also known in Concarneau, in 1888. In 1889 he began teaching at the School of Painting and Drawing of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Benson became joint head, with Tarbell, of the school in the following year; he remained in that position until 1913, when he, Tarbell, and others resigned their positions after a disagreement with the governing council as to how to run the school. During the same period he painted in Dublin, NH, where he worked with Abbot Handerson Thayer (qv); Newcastle, NH, where he and Tarbell taught a summer open-air painting class from 1893 to 1898; Eastham, Cape Cod, MA, where in 1893 he purchased a house with two of his brothers-in-law as a hunting retreat; and North Haven Island, ME, where he spent summers with his wife and children beginning in 1901.

Benson attained his initial success as a portrait and figure painter, using interior and exterior compositions, for which he used both professionals and his children as models. While he never abandoned this sort of painting, in 1912 he began depicting game birds and waterfowl with greater frequency. In addition to painting in oils, he often drew in ink wash and composed in watercolor. At the same time he took up etching, in which he had dabbled with some success in 1882 but had not pursued since. His first known exhibition of a waterfowl scene was Swan Flight, which he showed at the St.Botolph Club in Boston in 1894. He is first known to have placed human figures in his sporting works in 1906, although it was 1914 before he started doing so regularly. His lifelong enthusiasm for angling and wingshooting provided him with the experience necessary to make such works accurate in every regard. His etchings in particular proved so popular that he nearly exhausted himself on more than one occasion in trying to meet demand. He produced over 350 individual plates in his lifetime, and a complete set of etchings and drypoints printed from these plates is in the collection of the Boston Public Library. He also made seven lithographs, of which six were wildfowl subjects, but found he had little interest in the medium. After 1921 he began working more extensively in watercolors, with the result that he was able to paint scenes from the shooting and fishing trips that he regularly took in Canada and the eastern United States. During and after the 1920s his sporting scenes attained considerable popularity. In 1935 Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling (qv) asked Benson to design the second of the Federal Duck Stamps; the result, done from his wash drawing Canvasbacks, is the rarest example of that series.

Benson was a member of the Chicago (IL) Society of Etchers and, in New York City, the National Academy of Design, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Association of Portrait Painters, the Society of American Etchers, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Ten American Painters. He exhibited several works at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, including Flying Merganser in 1920, Leaping Salmon in 1923, and Great White Herons in 1934. He exhibited somewhat less frequently at the National Academy of Design; among pictures shown there was Bald Eagles, in 1942. At the Art Institute of Chicago he showed numerous paintings, such as The Fox Hunter in 1915, Wood Duck Pond in 1923, The Crow in 1924, and Grouse Flying in 1938. He received medals for exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Watercolor Society; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, IL, in 1893; the Paris Exposition in 1900; the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY, in 1901; the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, MO, in 1904; and the Sesqui-Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1926. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England; the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, PA; the Boston Art Club; and the Society of American Artists and the American Watercolor Society, both in New York City. His paintings and etchings were in high demand for exhibition and sale; he had numerous one-man and joint shows at various galleries, and on several occasions found himself unable to fulfill a request for paintings to exhibit because everything was either sold or promised elsewhere. Institutions holding his work include the Carnegie Institute; the Buffalo (NY) Academy of Fine Art; the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Fogg Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem; the Los Angeles (CA) County Museum of Art; and the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, among many others. His murals of the Three Graces and the Four Seasons are in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Benson died in Salem, MA, on 15 November 1951.

Xanthus Smith (1839-1929) was a prolific artist who worked in a variety of media. His American Civil War paintings and drawings are his most notable body of work. As a captain’s clerk aboard the USS Wabash he participated in Union naval activities at Port Royal, South Carolina in 1862-63. His meticulous documentation of warships, encampments and naval engagements complements his other aesthetic acomplishments to make him one of the most renowned Civil War artists. Smith died in Philadelphia in 1929.

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Though born in Philadelphia, Henry Benbridge’s career flourished in the South where he fulfilled portrait commissions for distinguished citizens and society families. Formally educated at the Philadelphia Academy, Benbridge also received early artistic training in his hometown, studying with the English portraitist John Wollaston. In 1764, having reached his majority, he moved to Rome to continue his artistic pursuits. He launched his formal career in London in 1769, where he exhibited two paintings at the 1770 Royal Academy Exhibition, including a portrait of Benjamin Franklin, who was then residing in that city. Benbridge returned to Philadelphia in 1770, carrying with him letters of introduction from both Franklin and the noted artist Benjamin West.

In 1771, Benbridge moved with his wife Hetty Sage, a miniature painter, to Charleston, South Carolina. Wealthy Southern families often emulated their English cousins by commissioning fashionable portraits from leading artists, and prominent families from across South Carolina and Georgia kept Benbridge in high demand in the years before and after the American Revolution. This painting of the Archibald Bulloch family of Savannah, executed in a Roccoco manner and exuding an aristocratic air, is representative of the artist’s formal conversation portraits. An early leader of the Liberty Party in Georgia, Archibald Bulloch served as president of the Georgia provincial congress and commander-in-chief of the revolutionary state.

A colonial sympathizer, Benbridge was briefly imprisoned following the 1780 fall of Charleston to the British. By 1784, he was actively painting again in Charleston. The final two decades leading up to Benbridge’s 1812 death in Philadelphia are relatively obscure, though he did work and teach in Norfolk, Virginia, giving lessons to Thomas Sully, among others.

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Best known for his watercolors of sailing yachts executed in a crisp Precisionist style, Sandor Bernath was born in Hungary and lived in Budapest before immigrating to New York. By 1918, he had begun to establish himself in the art life of the city. Although slightly younger than Edward Hopper and the Precisionist painters Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, Bernath adopted both their aesthetic and subject matter. He made his professional debut in 1922 with a solo show at Mrs. Malcolm’s Gallery on East Sixty-fourth Street. The exhibition of nineteen watercolors included both New York and European subjects, indicating that Bernath had spent time abroad. In 1923, he turned his attention to seascapes of the New England coastline. During the twenties, he became a member of the New York Water Color Club, American Water Color Society, and Brooklyn Society of Modern Artists, and exhibited at the Whitney Museum and Art Institute of Chicago. Like many of his peers, Bernath worked as a teacher and illustrator to support himself. In the late 1920s, he moved to Eastport, Maine, where he continued to live until at least 1945. According to one source, he spent the last years of his life in South America and died in Belize in 1984.

While Eastport remained his primary residence, Bernath visited and painted in a number of American art colonies—including Provincetown on Cape Cod—producing streetscapes and architectural views reminiscent of Hopper. In 1935, he traveled to Taos, New Mexico and painted the church at Rancho de Taos, as well as a pink adobe structure surrounded by desert blooms. Bernath visited Charleston in 1937. Like many artists, including Hopper, he was drawn to its rural cabins, moss-hung trees, historic churches, and Civil War monuments. Accordingly, he approached the subject of The Battery with a cool palette and smoothly delineated forms. Although the sky is restricted to a small area, it is full of weather. The dramatic background reveals Bernath’s sensitivity to a particular place, season, and atmosphere.

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