One of the earliest and most prolific artist-naturalists to work in America, John Abbot was born in London in 1751, the son of an attorney. Abbot wrote in his manuscript, Notes on My Life, that he acquired "an early taste for drawing, which might be much increased by my father having a large & valuable collection of prints, of some of the best Masters, he had also many good paintings." The young artist also received private instruction from the engraver and drawing master Jacob Bonneau. By age sixteen, Abbot had taught himself watercolors and began making scientific illustrations of insects in that medium.

Through Bonneau and others, Abbot became engaged with a prominent circle of natural scientists and collectors in London and, by 1773, had emigrated to America, armed with commissions from the Royal Society and private patrons. He settled in Jamestown, Virginia and spent two years exploring the area. As was his practice, he prepared native specimens, sketches, watercolors, and written documentation.

Seeking to avoid pre-Revolutionary activity in Virginia, Abbot left for Georgia in late 1775, settling northwest of Savannah the following year. He remained active in Georgia over the next five decades, avidly collecting and documenting natural history specimens, producing watercolors, and shipping his work to leading scientists, collectors, and publishers in the United States and Europe.

Abbot produced hundreds of watercolors of birds, rendered in a traditional, realistic style with delicate coloring. Characteristically, he portrayed the bird in a flattened, but revealing, profile view, on an abstracted fragment of natural habitat, such as the rock and marsh grass of this example. His earliest dated group of bird watercolors consisted of one hundred works done in 1791, which he shipped to John Francillon, his London agent and fellow naturalist. Francillon eventually sold them to Chetham’s Library in Manchester, England. The library commissioned additional watercolors, which Abbot sent in two groups in 1805 and 1809.

As quoted in Pamela Gilbert, John Abbot: Birds, Butterflies and Other Wonders (London: Natural History Museum, 1998), 117.

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John Adams Elder, painter of landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes, was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia. As a boy he learned the craft of cameo cutting. In 1850, at the age of seventeen he moved to New York City, where he studied briefly with Daniel P. Huntington (1816-1906). Within a year of his arrival in New York he traveled to Dusseldorf, Germany, and was a student of Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868) for five years. Upon his return to America he worked as a painter in New York City and in October 1856 exhibited a painting at the Richmond Mechanic Institute. Elder returned to Fredericksburg in 1860 and in 1862 enlisted as a solder in the Confederate States army. After the war he worked in Richmond and Fredericksburg, where he died. Elder was particularly known for his genre paintings and his battle scenes. He also painted portraits of Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jefferson "Stonewall" Jackson.

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Born in Owatonna, Minnesota, John Spelman began painting in childhood. After studying briefly at the Minneapolis Museum of Art, he moved with his family to Chicago and continued his studies at that city’s Art Institute. His interest in the outdoors—he was a hunter, trapper and fisherman—drew him to landscape painting. For more than thirty years Spelman spent his summers and some winters in a cabin on the north shore of Lake Superior near Grand Marais, where he painted woodland scenes at all times of the year. He also spent time in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and eastern Tennessee with the Chicago artist Rudolphe Ingerle, with whom he shared a palette and style. Spelman’s landscapes are broadly brushed and rich in color. To heighten their visual impact, he often used strong contrasts of light and dark.

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 Born in Durham, England in 1831, Brown studied art in England and Scotland before coming to American in 1853. He was a glassblower in Brooklyn, and a student at the National Academy of Design in New York City.

Brown exploited his considerable talent to supply the Victorian taste for his specialty – adept pictures of young white shoeshiners, vendors and servants. Brown’s street juveniles are invariably cheerful, spunky tykes, and they are undeniably appealing. Even the most uneven of Brown’s popularized works show painterly skill and sound training.

Brown died in 1913 in New York City.

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James Kelly Fitzpatrick was born in 1888 near Wetumpka, Alabama. After a brief stint at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and a few months of training at the Art Institute of Chicago, Fitzpatrick enlisted in the Army in 1918 for active duty in France. Following only four months of service, Fitzpatrick suffered severe wounds from shrapnel, permanently scarring his face, neck and chest. The war and the wounds he received profoundly influenced Fitzpatrick’s work. He told one student "I had been through the furnace of war and I knew that nothing mattered but the Spiritual things of this world." The pastoral beauty and vibrance of his work are a marked counterpoint to the destruction and pain that he experienced. After the war he returned to Wetumpka and actively painted. He attended the Academie Julian in Paris briefly in 1926 before returning home to Alabama. Fitzpatrick’s contributions to the arts in Alabama is immeasurable. As a teacher, he was the first director of the Montgomery Museum of Art School and taught at the Dixie Art Colony at Lake Jordan. In 1930 he became a founding member of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and was active in many organizations including the Alabama Art League and the Southern States Art League.

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Born and raised in New Orleans, Jo Cain studied at the Chicago Academy of Art and at the Art Students League in New York. Through the years he painted a variety of subjects, but one of his favorites was the street life of his native city. Representations of New Orleans provide the subject for many of his earliest paintings, as well as late works like "Miss Willie’s Revisited", which shows the "parlor" of one of the city’s more famous bordellos. Other memories of New Orleans include two views of "St. Louis #3", one of its historic cemeteries; "House with Cornstalk Fence"; "Queen of the Mardi Gras"; and "Peep Show". In the 1930s Cain’s work became increasingly abstract. The apparent flatness of his compositions, together with the sense of movement achieved by the manipulation of overlapping color planes and perspective, are characteristics of a style described in 1939 as "decorative expressionism." Cain’s paint is usually thickly applied, and while his dancers, harlequins and ladies of the evening owe their inspiration to Matisse and other modernists, as one critic observed, his work "has a fresh vision that cannot be clearly traced either to contemporary American or French schools. His world is never dirty, mean or gray, but it is always bright and luminous" (Stanley Lothrop, Boyer Galleries, New York, 1939).

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As a paymaster on a Union gunboat during the War Between the States, Meeker spent countless hours patrolling Louisiana swampland. Throughout his career, Meeker drew on this experience as a source of inspriation for his art. The author of several marvelous articles on his personal artistic vision, Meeker leaves little doubt as to his passionate search for "an area of repose." It is tempting to describe Meeker’s artistic development as reminiscent of the change in light that marks day’s passage from dawn to dusk. His earliest swamp pictures have the rather vivid intensity of discovery–of the new day–while his later pictures have a twilight effect. These are often moody in the tonalist manner so prevalent after the rise of the Salmagundi Club school.

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Julian Scott discovered his artistic life’s work in the chaos and destruction of the American Civil War. Born in Johnson, Vermont, Scott received his youthful education there at the Lamille Academy. At the age of fifteen he enlisted as a drummer in the Third Vermont Infantry and campaigned with that unit. He kept sketchbooks of his activities during the war, which provided him later with sources for his paintings. Scott received the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery at the Battle of Lee’s Mill in 1862. After the war concluded, Scott studied art at the National Academy of Design and was a student of the history painter, Emile Leutze. He then traveled to Paris and Stuttgart, Germany, to continue his education. Scott’s first studio was in New York City but he soon moved to Plainfield, New Jersey, his home for the remainder of his life. In 1890 he was commissioned by the Department of the Interior to visit the American West to draw and paint Native American tribes. His work was published as part of the Eleventh Census Report on Indians Taxed and Untaxed, and in Edna Dean "Proctor’s Song of the Ancient People" (1892). Scott is best known for his large history paintings, many of which record events of the Civil War.

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After leading a rather colorful life in his native Sweden and in the American Midwest, Knute Heldner settled permanently in New Orleans in 1923. There he became something of a fixture in bohemian French Quarter life, painting numerous swamp senes in his signature cool palette for sale to the tourist trade. With works exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery and Smithsonian Institution, Heldner was recognized by the American Federation of Artists as one of the twelve greatest living artists before his death in 1952.

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Best known for his landscapes of Venice and the Grand Canyon, Lucien Whiting Powell was born at Levinworth Manor in Upperville, Virginia, the son of a distinguished Virginia family. Educated in the district schools and under private tutors, he served in the Virginia Cavalry during the Civil War, after which he studied with Thomas Moran in Philadelphia. Continuing his education abroad, Powell traveled to London in 1875. There he studied at the London School of Art, and copied works by J. M. W. Turner in the National Gallery. He returned to Europe in 1890, where he painted dream-like Venetian scenes reminiscent of the work of Turner. In 1901 the 55-year-old artist took a trip to the American West and painted scenes in the Grand Canyon. In 1910 he traveled to the Middle East and painted landscapes of the Holy Land. Powell’s earliest paintings dealt with life in his native Virginia. He painted three nocturnal scenes between 1868 and 1875 that focus on a barnyard. Though we know very little about the artist’s working methods, the pictures were probably composed from sketches made by Powell in Virginia before or soon after the Civil War. Like his later studies, they served Powell again and again throughout his career.

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