Wayman Adams was born in humble surroundings on a farm near Muncie, Indiana. His father was a livestock breeder and amateur artist whose own interest in painting encouraged his son’s early interest in art. In 1904 Adams enrolled at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, where he spent four years. In 1910 he accompanied William Merritt Chase and others on a study trip to Italy; in 1912 he made a similar trip to Spain with Robert Henri. An enthusiastic advocate of alla prima painting, Adams painted in the style of Chase and Henri, often completing a portrait in a sitting of three or four hours. At one point, he maintained studios in Indianapolis, New York City and Philadelphia. During the winter months he traveled to picturesque and exotic settings. In 1916 he made his first visit to New Orleans; thereafter, he spent several winters in the French Quarter, painting portraits and genre pictures of black subjects.

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West Fraser paints what he sees in front of him. He paints out of a love for the land and sea as well as all that they hold within, West began his career as a professional artist, after graduating from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Fine Art, as an illustrator. He quickly moved from commercial work to painting what he wanted, mostly in watercolor. The need to travel and paint new things would take him from Savannah, Georgia to Vinalhaven, Maine to San Francisco, California and many points in between, travel easel in tow, and finally he would return to the Carolina Lowcountry and make his home in Charleston, South Carolina. Returning to the coast gave West the opportunity to live out his dream of getting on a boat and recording in paint the pristine beauty of the coastal sea islands. Aboard his sailboat he discovered the joy of painting plein air, or painting from life. The change from large scale watercolors painted in a studio to small quick sketches painted on the bow of a sailboat also prompted West to begin to work in oil. His switch from watercolor to oil has produced some of the most light filled paintings done by any Southern artist living today. Although he no longer has the 36 foot sailboat, he continues to travel by land and sea to find new subjects to paint. Be it Cape Canaveral National Wildlife Refuge or Church St. on a rainy night, West looks to create a sense of place. West Fraser’s work hangs in both private homes as well as galleries and museums nationwide, notably the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina and the Springfield Museum of Art in Springfield, Ohio. He is holder of the John Young Hunter Award presented by the Allied Artists of America, the Mary S. Litt Medal from the American Watercolor Society, the Award of Excellence, Mystic International, Mystic Seaport Connecticut and Best of Show at the Guild of South Carolina Artists, Charleston, South Carolina.

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Born in Charleston, Walker was a successful itinerant artist who spent much of his life traveling around the South between Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana, creating paintings of rural and urban genre scenes, figures and landscapes. Following a route of major port cities, railroad towns, resort spots and hotels in the southeast, from Baltimore to Charleston to New Orleans, he found an eager and sustaining audience for his work among tourists and notable patrons throughout the region. Little is known about Walker’s early artistic training, but he first exhibited at the South Carolina Institute Fair in Charleston in 1850, at age twelve, and continued to show his work in the city. In 1861 he enlisted in the Confederate Army, and saw action in Virginia, where he was wounded. Walker was subsequently transferred back to Charleston, where he resumed art work as a draftsman and cartographer in the engineering corps until 1864. After the Civil War, Walker turned his attention to genre and landscape scenes of life, business and work in the South during Reconstruction. A virtuoso and prolific painter, with a charming, cultured personality, he was perhaps the most active chronicler of the post-bellum South, which he envisioned in a traditional picturesque mode of idealized scenes of city and country life, with sentimental figures, mostly black and rustic. Walker worked in a precise and detailed realism that he adapted to figure, genre or landscape subjects. He portrayed cabin scenes, field workers, and cotton pickers, as well as their city counterparts-market views, with fruit vendors, dock workers and newsboys. Most of his paintings were small-scale, making them portable and less costly for tourists. With an eye for the journalistic, descriptive view, Walker also painted large, detailed panoramas of southern working plantations, as well as city and river scenes in Charleston and New Orleans, several of which were published as lithographs by Currier and Ives. From the 1890s until his death in 1921, Walker concentrated his travel and work between Arden, North Carolina, Charleston, and Ponce Park, Florida.

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William Charles Anthony Frerichs was born on March 2, 1829, in Ghent, then a part of the Netherlands. He moved to The Hague as a child and entered the Royal Academy at the age of six, where he studied with the landscape painters Andreas Schelfhout and Bartholomeus J. van Hove, each man an important figure in Dutch art in the mid-nineteenth century. After three years of academic study at the University of Leyden, he returned to The Hague to graduate from the academy in 1846. He completed his professional education with training at the Royal Academy in Brussels, and made his Grand Tour of the continent in the late 1840’s, traveling to Paris, Rome, and Vienna. His work won prizes in several exhibitions during this time. Encouraged to pursue his artistic career in the United States, Frerichs left his homeland in 1850 for New York. In 1852 he exhibited a portrait at the National Academy of Design, and was elected to the New York Sketch Club. In 1855, recently married, he moved to Greensboro, North Carolina to take up the duties of Professor of Drawing, Painting, and French at the Greensboro Female College (now named Greensboro College). A fire in 1863 destroyed the college and all of Frerich’s paintings which were then in his studio. He taught briefly at Edgewood Seminary, a Presbyterian school also in Greensboro, before becoming art instructor at a Quaker college in New Garden, North Carolina. The Confederate Corps of Engineers drafted him to supervise mining in the Sauratown Mountains, an area familiar to him from sketching trips. During his North Carolina years Frerichs often rambled the Blue Ridge, the Great Smokies, and the Appalachians, doing sketches from which he would draw inspiration for full-size canvases for the remainder of his career. He was one of the first painters to venture into western North Carolina, which in the 1850s and 1860s was sparsely populated. These forests held for Frerichs the promise of the American wilderness, of which he had undoubtedly dreamed as a young painter in Europe. Soon after the conclusion of the Civil War the Frerichs family, hard-hit economically, decided to return to the northeast. The artist lived in the New York-New Jersey area for the rest of his life.

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A descendent of Warner Washington, a first cousin of the nation’s first president, William Dickenson Washington is best-known for such important icons of Southern culture as "The Burial of Latane" and "General Marion and His Men in Pee Dee Swamp". The artist was born in Clarke County, Virginia, then moved in 1834 with his family to Washington, D.C., where his father had secured employment with the post office. Beginning as a draftsman in the U.S. Patent Office, Washington studied painting with Emanuel Leutze in 1851-52 in Washington, and from 1853-56 in Dusseldorf. At the time of his arrival at the German academy, Eastman Johnson was in his second year. While there, the two artists may have made some study trips together, or with Leutze, who traveled extensively. In any case, Washington’s portrait and genre style is close to that of Johnson. Whether this developed as a result of their shared experiences and training, or whether Washington consciously emulated the older artist’s style, is unknown. Washington returned to the District in 1854 and remained until 1861. A successful portrait and historical painter, he exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, and with the Washington Art Association. Washington served as a civilian draftsman during the Civil War and was in England from 1865-66, and New York from 1866-68. He was appointed professor of fine arts at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington in 1869, where he was one of the first art instructors of Washington artist Richard Norris Brooke. He died suddenly in Lexington the following year. He was thirty-six years old.

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West was born in 1788 in Lexington, Kentucky, and maintained a long association with the families and history of the lower Mississippi River valley. Although largely self-taught, he had spent time with Thomas Sully in his studio in Philadelphia around 1807-10, and had first-hand exposure to the works of Gilbert Stuart. Their influences on his early portrait style are revealed in the formal rendering of figure and details, as well as the painterly treatment of drapery and simple, atmospheric background. Born in Virginia, Hinds (1780-1840) moved to Mississippi territory and settled in Jefferson County. He was a lieutenant, and then captain in the Jefferson Dragoons (1806-1808) and thereafter was a captain and major in the Mississippi Dragoons cavalry battalion. A friend and brother-in-arms of General Andrew Jackson, he led his unit during the Creek War, and commanded the cavalry at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, for which he was presented the eagle-head sword so prominently portrayed in West’s portrait. 

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William Louis Sonntag was born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1822. In the 1840s Sonntag moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to study art, and he was associated with the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Art. His idealized paintings of American wilderness and visionary paintings of imagined European ruins were commercially successful and he traveled twice to Europe in the 1850s to improve his skills. Sonntag settled in New York City and joined the National Academy of Design, where he exhibited his works for forty years. His mature works identify him with the Hudson River school of landscape painters. A romantic and a naturalistic painter of his surroundings, Sonntag also created idealized paintings of Roman ruins, recalling his European trips of earlier years.

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William Halsey is one of South Carolina’s foremost modern artists, well known for his vibrant, abstract style in paintings, collage and sculptures done over six decades, beginning in the 1940s. He was born and lived in Charleston, and continually explored the area’s rich visual and cultural environment as inspiration for his art. Halsey received early lessons and advice from the Charleston Renaissance artists, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner and Edward I.R. Jennings. From 1935-39, Halsey studied at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and upon graduation was awarded a Paige Fellowship, and traveled with his wife, the artist Corrie McCallum, to Mexico. Settling with his family in Charleston in 1945, Halsey continued to build his reputation as an artist by exhibiting in one-man and group shows, regionally and nationally. Halsey’s early paintings of city-scapes, landscapes, still-lifes, and portraits are rendered in a bold, graphic modernist style derived from a Cubist tradition of exploring form in lines, planes and color. He subsequently developed his art into a personal, painterly expressionism, most often with bold coloring, abstracted forms and motifs.

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Willliam Posey Silva was born in Savannah, Georgia, but spent most of his early life in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he ran his family’s hardware business. Although he had exhibited paintings as a teenager, he did not take up art seriously until he was about fifty years old, at which time he sold his business and moved to Paris to study painting. Within two years his paintings were good enough to be accepted at the Paris Salon. Upon his return to the United States he settled in Washington, D.C. and had exhibitions of his paintings in Boston, Charleston, and Knoxville. A visit to Carmel in 1913 persuaded Silva to move there, and he built a studio near the ocean which he occupied for the rest of his career. From this home base Silva made frequent trips east and abroad. In 1922-23 he revisited Europe and painted in England, France, Italy and Spain. In 1924 he was back in Charleston and painting at Magnolia Gardens. A true impressionist who admired the works of Monet and Manet, Silva worked outdoors, striving to capture the bright vigor of nature in broad, colorful swatches of paint.

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William Robinson Leigh was born 23 September 1866 in Maidstone, West Virginia. As a youth he studied art at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore from 1880 to 1883, and then traveled to Germany, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy, Munich. Leigh remained at the Academy until 1896, and studied with Nicholas Gysis, Ludwig Loeffler, and Karl Raupp, from whom he learned sophisticated techniques in landscape, genre, and figure painting. Leigh returned to the United States and settled in New York City, where he worked until 1906. In that year, he undertook a lifelong dream to move to the western states to paint genre studies of the lives of Native Americans, cowboys, miners, and trappers on the fast-disappearing American frontier. From that time until the end of his life, Leigh was famous for his western scenes. His works were highly successful as original paintings, and were frequently reproduced as illustrations for books and periodicals. Active as a painter, illustrator, and muralist until the end of his life, William Robinson Leigh died in New York City, 11 March 1955, at the age of eighty-eight years.

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