Born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of a manufacturer of musical instruments, Rufus Fairchild Zogbaum grew up in New York City. He studied at the Art Students League, then with Leon Bonnat in Paris. Influenced by the French artists Detaille and De Neuville, he specialized in American war illustrations: of the Civil War, the skirmishes with the Indians, and the Spanish-American War. In 1884 Zogbaum traveled to Montana to sketch military life on the frontier. The result of this and later trips to Montana, as well as an 1888 tour in Oklahoma was a series of illustrations for articles in "Harper’s Weekly", and in books including his own "Horse, Foot and Dragoons, Ships and Sailors" and "All Hands". In the 1890s Zogbaum concentrated on naval and military subjects, such as "Seige at Vicksburg", a dramatic interpretation of one of the major battles of the Civil War.

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.

Sidney Dickinson was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, the son of a Congregational minister, and raised in various places, including upstate New York, and Fargo, North Dakota. Interested in art at an early age, he studied at the Art Students League in New York City under William Merritt Chase and George Bridgman, and at the National Academy of Design with Douglas Volk. Known primarily as a figure and portrait painter, he exhibited widely, was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes and is represented in many museum and private collections. An enthusiastic practitioner of alla prima painting, Dickinson often completed a portrait in a sitting of three or four hours. As versatile as he was prolific, he painted some of the most interesting personalities of his time, including such fellow artists as his cousin Edwin Dickinson, Raphael Soyer, and the sculptor Robert Aitken. While Dickinson composed his portraits and figurative works directly in the studio, his working method for landscapes seems to have remained the traditional one of painting studies to serve as the basis for finished works.

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.

 

For over 20 years, Tarleton Blackwell has created lively, antic scenes of Southern rural life, featuring pigs, wolves, foxes, dogs, roosters, and more-layered with portraits, figures, and familiar icons from both high and popular culture. This exhibition of 25 oil and mixed-media paintings examines some of varied sources of Blackwell’s art, focusing on his personal and expressive intermixing of Southern imagery, the Baroque art of the Spanish master Diego Velazquez, and symbols of American power, justice, and money. The works range from an early oil painting in the famous Hog Series, History of Uncle John Edwards Boar (1986), to one of his most recent, Fox Chef with Link Sausage/Coffee (2005), a zany tableau from a hog sub-series called the Cinderella Section. The selection features some of the artist’s best-known characters, like the militaristic Fox General and the U.S. Marshall (a possum), as well as the numerous hogs and piglets that have made him one of the most accomplished American artists working in the South today.

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.

 

Thomas Addison Richards was one of the founders of the antebellum Southern landscape tradition. His landscapes of Georgia and the Carolinas demonstrate a style and sensibility that connect European landscapes to American practitioners of the Hudson River School and Southern romantic painters. Born in Great Britain in 1820, he immigrated with his family to the United States in 1831. He and his brother, William Cary Richards, moved to Penfield, Georgia, where they started a publishing business. Among the illustrated works they published were "Tallulah and Jocassee" (1852) and "The Romance of Southern Landscape" (1855). Thomas Addison Richards painted Southern landscapes primarily in Georgia and South Carolina but he also kept close ties to New York and New England publishing. He was corresponding secretary of the National Academy of Design from 1852 to 1892 and a prominent illustrator for "Harper’s New Monthly" Magazine, other national periodicals, and numerous art and travel books.

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.

Retirement from the ministry offered Thomas Campbell the opportunity to pursue a second—and successful—career as an artist. Born in England, Campbell immigrated to the United States at the age of nineteen was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1866. He served first as missionary to Native Americans and subsequently held pastorates at churches in New York and Illinois. From the time of his arrival in this country, he actively maintained a sketchbook, recording his impressions of the American landscape.

In the hopes of improving his wife’s failing health, the couple moved to east Tennessee around 1892. Following her death that year, Campbell retired from the ministry and devoted himself to art. A brief teaching stint at Maryville College (1893-1894) was followed by a two-year sojourn in Europe. In 1902, Campbell returned to the Maryville campus where he founded the art department, where he taught until his death. Campbell’s work in Tennessee consisted primarily of landscapes, as well as fine painting on china.

 For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.

 

 

Thomas Satterwhite Noble was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He attended Transylvania University in his native city and studied art with Oliver Frazer (1808-1864) and George P.A. Healy (1813-1894). In 1853, at the age of eighteen, he moved to New York City, and by 1856 he was studying art in Paris with the historical painter Thomas Couture. Noble returned to the United States in 1859. During the American Civil War he served with the Confederate Army despite his aversion to slavery and sympathy for the plight of African Americans in the South. After the war he moved to Saint Louis and explored the lives of freed slaves in America in a series of historical and allegorical paintings. Noble made New York City his home and died there in 1907.

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.

Thomas Waterman Wood, in the company of William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham, is one of America’s first artists to find the black man a suitable subject for portrait and genre painting and to portray the black with dignity. Spending several years in the South immediately preceding and during the War Between the States, Wood developed a sympathy for blacks and their dream of freedom. Significantly, Wood may have been the first white American painter to depict free blacks on contrast to the enslaved servants who had appeared as accessory figures in their masters’ portraits as early as the eighteenth century. Wood was born in Montpelier, Vermont, November 12, 1823. The family was not wealthy, and the young Wood was obliged to work in his father’s carpentry shop. He spent some time as a youth in Boston, where he had relatives, and there he may have studied with portraitist Chester Harding. Embarking upon his own career as an artist, he worked as a portrait painter in Quebec, Washington, D.C., and from the fall of 1856 in Baltimore, Maryland. In Baltimore, Wood painted his first portraits of blacks, depicting free men and women who made their living on the city’s streets. His subjects included Moses, The Baltimore News Vendor and Wife of Old Moses (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and Hindoo John with his wares, a basket of apples, hanging on his arm. Wood sailed for Paris in 1858 with every intention of staying in the French academies and in private ateliers. Once there, he pursued a more independent path, sketching in the Louvre and the Galleries Luxembourg. He made the grand tour, visiting Rome, with which he was deeply impressed, and London. Returning to the United States after six months abroad, Wood decided to pursue his career in the South. He settled first in Nashville in the fall of 1859 and remained there through the first year of the War Between the States. He sketched the Federal gunboats that attacked that city in June of 1862. After a brief return to his Vermont home in the summer of 1862, Wood relocated to Louisville, Kentucky, where he made a living as a portrait painter through the war years. Before leaving Louisville, Wood painted a series of pictures which treated the role of the black in the War Between the States. Three of these –The Contraband, showing the runaway slave, eager to enlist, The Recruit, in which the black man stands proud in his new uniform, and The Veteran, a grizzled, tattered, one-legged specimen of war-weary humanity — when exhibited together at the National Academy of Design in 1867, won Wood his election to that prestigious institution. Wood decided at this time to turn his efforts from portrait to genre painting, and with this redirection he moved to New York City. He threw himself into the bustling art world he found there, while he spent summers at Athenwood, the home he built for himself at Montpelier. In watercolors and oil paints he rendered contrasting aspects of urban and rural life: the darkened street setting of The Drunkard’s Wife; the warm conviviality to be found inside The Village Post Office and the playful children in the hayloft of Uncle Ned. There were rewards to establishing himself in New York. Five years after his arrival Wood was honored with election to full Academician status in the National Academy of Design. He subsequently served as vice-president and president of the Academy. He was elected president of the American Watercolor Society as well. Amid the various administrative duties thrust upon him, Wood also found time to teach. One of his students was the wife of Columbia University professor John W. Burgess. Burgess and Wood became close friends, and out of this friendship came the financial backing for establishment of the Wood Art Gallery at Montpelier, Vermont, the artist’s gift to his hometown. To fill its walls, Wood traveled to Europe and painted copies after the Old Masters. More significantly to the art appreciative public of today, the Wood Art Gallery houses more than 2,000 original paintings, drawings, and watercolors by Thomas Waterman Wood, one of America’s most popular artists of the nineteenth century. Cynthia Seibels

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.

 

Noted tonalist Walter Clark was educated as an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before pursuing an artistic career. After completion of his class work at MIT in 1869, he traveled extensively in Europe studying art and architecture. He would eventually expand his travels to include the Far East as well. Returning to New York, Clark entered the National Academy of Design in 1876, where he took instruction from Lemuel Wilmarth and Jonathan Hartley. In 1881, he came under the tutelage of George Inness at the Art Students League. Inness would have a profound influence on Clark, and the two artists occupied adjacent studios in the Holbein Building for many years.

Best known for his subdued, pastoral landscapes of Long Island, Chadds Ford, and other East Coast destinations, Clark enjoyed a successful career and distinguished reputation. He exhibited at the National Academy for nearly four decades, earning the Inness Gold Medal in 1902. He was featured in other important exhibitions as well, including shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Art Institute of Chicago, Boston Art Club. Brooklyn Art Association, and the 1893 Chicago and 1904 St Louis World Fairs. Clark was a member of the most prestigious art associations of the day.

Encouraged by his friends John Twachtman, Edward Potthast, and Joseph DeCamp, Clark began working in an impressionist vein in the 1890s. He spent summers painting in the art colonies at Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut; Gloucester, Massachusetts; and Ogunquit, Maine. The father of artist Eliot Candee Clark, the two shared an aesthetic sensibility and studio space in New York’s Van Dyke building.

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.

 

 

Distinguished by his Southern heritage, Walter Biggs is considered one of the foremost American illustrators. He was born in Elliston, Virginia, where he spent his youth before moving to the city of Salem when he was ten. He attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute for one year, but left to study art in New York City. There, he enrolled at the Chase School (later known as the New York School of Art), studying with William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, Luis Mora, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Edward Penfield.

While a student, Biggs roomed with George Bellows and was also acquainted with Rockwell Kent and Guy Pène du Bois. He embraced a loose impressionistic technique and rich colors, but cited Henri as a key influence. Daunted by the challenge of earning a living as a painter, Biggs decided to pursue illustration as a career and soon met with success. His colorful illustrations appeared in such popular journals as Harper’s, Redbook, Scribner’s, Good Housekeeping, The Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan, and Vogue.

Prodigious in his output, Biggs created numerous illustrations and other pieces for his own pleasure. He most often worked in watercolor and pursued colloquial Southern subjects, particularly street views, as in Southern Scene. Biggs’ technical mastery and refined sense of narrative is clearly evident in this depiction of two African American gentlemen, decked out in fine attire, promenading through a park. The scene also reflects Biggs’ particular penchant for social realism and for conveying a feeling of the moment, clear evidence of his study with Henri. 

Biggs participated in several art organizations, including the American Water Color Society; Philadelphia Water Color Club; Allied Artists of America; Society of Illustrators; National Academy of Design; and Salmagundi Club. He taught at the Grand Central School of Art and Art Students League. The recipient of numerous awards for his work in watercolor and oil throughout his career, he was nominated to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1963. 

Biggs returned to Salem in the 1950s, where he lived out the remainder of his life; he maintained a studio in New York into the 1960s, however, and traveled there often. He left most of his work to the city of Salem and to Roanoke College, where he was artist-in-residence for many years. 

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.

A landscape artist in the American tonalist tradition, Thompson created southern views in a light-filled post-Impressionist style. He was born in Palatka, Florida, and moved with his family to Massachusetts, where he studied at the New England School of Design. In 1930 he moved to the South Carolina/Georgia lowcountry. He was head of the Beaufort Art School, the Savannah Arts Club, and Association of Georgia Artists. From 1940-1941, he taught art at Coker College. In 1942 Thompson moved to his wife’s native Mayesville, South Carolina, where he continued to paint at his home and studio, "Road’s End in the Pines," in the Salem Black River community of Sumter county. In the 1930s and 1940s, he exhibited at Gibbes Art Gallery, Telfair Academy, Coker College, and the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, and in New York City at the Macbeth, Milch and Ainslie galleries.

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.