Russell Smith (christened William Thompson Russell) achieved success as a landscape painter, theatrical designer, and illustrator of scientific works. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he emigrated with his family to western Pennsylvania in 1819. In 1827 he took up acting and scenery painting for a local theater group in Pittsburgh. There he secured a post as curator of the Lambdin Museum, and took painting lessons with its founder, the artist James Reid Lambdin. In addition to these commercial activities, Smith, around 1835, turned to landscape. Inspired by the work of Thomas Cole and Thomas Doughty, he became a devoted practitioner of the romantic-realist style of the Hudson River School. In contrast to the large canvases he produced for the theater, most of his landscapes are very small. Smith’s journal entries reveal that he was keenly observant of subtle changes in light and atmosphere, and took pains to record the exact weather conditions at particular times of day. His studies of selected segments of nature, painted largely in plein air during the summer months, served as a repository of motifs that he incorporated into finished paintings in his studio.

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 A Virginian by birth, Hugh Henry Breckenridge became a fixture in the vibrant late nineteenth century art community in Philadelphia, earning renown as both a painter and beloved teacher. A precocious artist from an early age, Breckenridge enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1887, launching an association that would endure for fifty years. A subsequent scholarship funded the artist’s first foreign study in Paris, where he received instruction from Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Louis Ferrier, and Jacques Doucet at the Academie Julian in 1892. While abroad, Breckenridge traveled extensively throughout Europe and was influenced by the work of master impressionists. A second European tour in 1909 awakened Breckenridge to the avant garde European trends of that period, including fauvism and, later, cubism.

Back in America, Breckenridge became an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1894, a post he held for decades. With his colleague Thomas Anshutz, he later established the Darby School of Painting in nearby Darby and eventually opened his own school in Gloucester, Massachussetts. Breckenridge maintained a waterfront studio in the seaside town, its coastline and landscape the frequent subjects for his canvas. Breckenridge also executed lucrative portrait commissions.

Breckenridge’s oeuvre reflects stylistic versatility, an abiding fascination with color, and signature brushwork, whether displayed in the impressionistic landscapes of his early and late career, or in the more modernist abstract works of his mid-life. He exhibited widely, garnering prizes, critical acclaim, and commercial success, and was a member of the most prestigious American art organizations; in 1913, he was named as associate of the National Academy of Design. In addition, Breckenridge enjoyed close associations with other leading artists of the day, including Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase, Arthur B. Carles, Walter Schofield, and John Marin, among others.

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Most striking in Newman’s oeuvre are her renderings of the people and places of Savannah. A series of market and street life scenes portray the rich Gullah culture of the state’s premier port city. Alive with luminous color and memorable characters, these watercolors exemplify both the enduring and endearing qualities of Newman’s art. They are at once naive and accomplished.

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Born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, McLean received his art education at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Daniel Garber, Charles Garner and Joseph Pearson. Though he has not been the subject of scholarly attention, recent market activity indicates that he was active during the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and that he painted a variety of subjects. Like Garber, his favorite motif seems to have been the landscape surrounding his home. His views of Blowing Rock and Smoky Hollow, composed with distinctive foreground trees, are particularly attractive. Like other artists of his generation, McLean vacillated between impressionism and more avant-garde methods, and though he continued to paint in an impressionist style throughout his career, he experimented with a variety of others, including cubism, often settling into techniques of decorative patterning while still maintaining a strong sense of realism.

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Born in Irwin, Ohio, but raised in Mechanicsburg, Hopkins studied at the Columbus Art School, and spent two years with Frank Duveneck at the Cincinnati Art Academy. He worked in New York as an illustrator in the early 1900s, and then spent a year in Paris at the Academy Colorassi. Afterwards he traveled in Japan, China, Ceylon, southern Europe and North Africa with his bride and fellow artist, Edna Bel Boise. The couple settled in Paris and remained until World War I forced their return to the United States in 1914. Soon after, Hopkins joined the Cincinnati Art Academy faculty. When Duveneck died in 1919, Hopkins took his place as head of the school. Hopkins specialized in genre scenes of beautiful women posed in sunlit rooms or outdoor gardens. He also painted the portraits of fashionable French and American ladies. But the subject that brought him the most acclaim is a series of pictures executed in 1916/1917, when he took a studio in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and painted "pictures along very different lines." These paintings include "A Mountain Courtship", which was awarded the Thomas B. Clark prize at the National Academy of Design in 1920. Other paintings in the series include "Market Day in the Mountains", "A Mountain Preacher", and "The Moonshiner".

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Esteemed draftsman James Wells Champney was best known for his refined drawings and illustrations. Over the course of his varied career, he worked in an array of media, achieving particular recognition for his watercolors and pastels, and for his numerous translations of works by the Old Masters. Born in Boston to the painter Benjamin Champney, he took art lessons at the Lowell Institute and apprenticed with the wood engraver Bricker & Russell in 1859. He served in the Civil War beginning in 1862, but following a bout with malaria, was discharged. He returned to Massachusetts to pursue professional art and also taught drawing at an exclusive female academy in Lexington.

As part of his education, Champney studied painting in Europe. Arriving back in America in 1872, he embarked on a career as an illustrator and began a major commission for Scribner’s Magazine. Working in conjunction with author Edward King on a series of articles entitled "The Great South," the assignment took Champney to every major city in the South, covering about twenty thousand miles and producing over five hundred sketches. The graceful lines, fine detail, and scrupulous accuracy seen in this view are typical of Champney’s black and white drawings.

 

 In his work, Champney undertook a wide range of subjects—including landscapes, portraits, and travel sketches—most often working directly from the subject. His focus shifted to portraiture later in his career, when he began depicting society sitters and prominent individuals of the theater. He also produced mural decorations for the Hotel Manhattan in New York and was an amateur photographer. From 1872 to 1903, Champney served as a professor of art at Smith College, when he began working in pastel. From that time forward, he worked almost exclusively in this medium and came to be considered the best pastellist of his day. 

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Richardt was a highly prolific artist who worked both in Denmark and in the United States, where he traveled in the 1850s and later settled permanently in 1873. Born in Brede, outside Copenhagen, he trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Art, and was known in his native country for architectural and landscape views of important castles and ancient manor houses. The artist’s first four-year American sojourn from 1855 to 1859 resulted in thirty-two large paintings of Niagara Falls, for which he is best known in America. In January of 1859, following extensive sketching trips by canal boat, steamer, and rail throughout the eastern half of North America, Richardt mounted his Gallery of Paintings of American Scenery at New York’s National Academy of Design. Among other views, the exhibition included paintings of Grace Church on lower Broadway in New York; the Hudson River; Cape May, New Jersey; the White Mountains of New Hampshire; the upper reaches of the Mississippi River; Virginia’s Natural Bridge; and, significantly, six paintings depicting Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, noted in the catalogue as “the first collection of views from this wonderful Cave, ever exhibited.” Returning to Copenhagen, Richardt exhibited his American collection in 1860, later traveling in Italy and England. Finally, in 1873 he emigrated to the United States, stopping at Niagara Falls and settling in California. There he was drawn to coastal scenery, to redwood forests and mountains, including Yosemite Valley, and to city views in San Francisco and Oakland. During the last twenty years of his life he exhibited and sold works to the public, and taught drawing and painting. Richardt died in 1895 at his home in Oakland. His pictures are found today in many museums in this country and Scandinavia.

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Gilbert Gaul was born in New Jersey, and studied in New York at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. He maintained a long association with the academy, exhibiting in annual shows from 1877-1902, becoming the youngest member to attain academician status at age 27. His skill in creating military, western and genre paintings, as well as illustrations for "Century" and "Harper’s Weekly", earned him extraordinary success in popular and official art circles in the late nineteenth century. Gaul’s descriptive views of Civil War battle action, and his many sentimental and anecdotal genre scenes of American soldiers, farmers, hunters, and adventurers were based on the solid academic realism of his training. In 1881 Gaul inherited a farm in Van Buren County, Tennessee, where he built a cabin and studio. While continuing his military and genre work, he also began to explore more pastoral views of nature that evoked the beauty of the woodland countryside. His experience of the landscape and culture of the south continued to inform his art throughout his career.

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A painter of landscapes, portraits, and genre pictures, Gladys Nelson Smith was raised on a farm near Chelsea, Kansas. She began to draw at an early age and in 1912 matriculated at the University of Kansas, where she majored in fine art. In 1918 she married a fellow classmate and followed him to various locations. In 1924 the couple settled in Washington, D.C., and Smith refined her skills at the Corcoran School of Art. Although Smith spent her early life in the mid-west, she came to artistic maturity in the nation’s capital, and her paintings are strongly identified with its life and landscape. In the 1920s she was chiefly admired for her paintings of children. In the 1930s she recorded the quaint charms of Georgetown and other local scenery. In 1936 the Smiths bought an 86-acre farm in Frederick County, Maryland, which became their weekend retreat. It was used in many of Smith’s subsequent landscapes. An avid gardener, Smith had a particular interest in flowers and became known in the 1940s for her floral still lifes, often studied in her own garden.

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Harriett Cany Peale was the wife of Rembrandt Peale and an active member of the Peale family’s Philadelphia artistic dynasty. She was born circa 1800 and wed Peale in 1840. During the mid-nineteenth century she exhibited her works, many of which were copies of her husband’s original paintings, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art and the Artists’ Fund Society. Peale painted still life, portraits, and domestic genre paintings.

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