Baltimore boasted a thriving art community in the second half of the nineteenth century. Even in the midst of the Civil War, the Maryland Academy provided professional training for aspiring artists and the Maryland Art Association regularly exhibited artists’ works. By far, the most popular of Baltimore’s numerous successful artists at mid-century was Andrew Way, who mastered not only his craft, but the marketplace as well. 

Born in Washington, D.C., Way studied to be a portraitist under John Peter Frankenstein in Cincinnati and Alfred Jacob Miller in Baltimore. He continued his education in both Paris and Florence before returning to Baltimore to launch his career. Way was able to earn a living as a portrait painter, but received little notoriety. At the encouragement of visiting artist Emanuel Leutze, he began pursuing still life painting, abandoning faces for fruit, flowers, fish, and bowl. In a short time, Way became known up and down the eastern seaboard for his still lifes, particularly his palpable, neoclassical renderings of grapes.

In addition to his own work, Way fostered the careers of others as a partner in Way and Perrigo, a Baltimore art gallery that displayed the efforts of such artists as Hugh Bolton Jones and Arthur Quartley.

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Andrew Melrose was born in Selkirk, Scotland, in 1836. Although few records exist of his artistic activities prior to the American Civil War, it is believed that he had immigrated to the United States as early as 1856. From 1865 through 1885, he worked from studios in Hoboken and Guttenberg, New Jersey, and during this time he frequently exhibited at the National Academy of Design. He also visited various parts of the United States, Great Britain, and Austria. In 1880 or 1881 Melrose traveled to western North Carolina, which he characterized as "The Land of the Sky." His work reflects his interest in landscapes rendered in a naturalistic, but painterly and romantic style, sometimes including genre details of rural life.

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Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1798, Ferdinand Pettrich learned the rudiments of carving from his father, the court sculptor to the King of Saxony. He perfected his skills in Rome, under Bertel Thorwaldsen, the famed Danish-born sculptor. In 1835 Pettrich and his wife sailed for the United States, settling first in Philadelphia, then in Washington, where he executed likenesses of famous Americans. Pettrich evidently met president Jackson in 1836. According to James G. Barber, Jackson may have granted Pettrich several sittings. For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

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Beyond a few sparse facts we know little about Bebie. He was born in Switzerland about 1800 and spent his youth as a shepherd. He evidently had little artistic training, although he had exhibited paintings in European galleries before his arrival in America in 1842. After a brief stay in Virginia he moved to Baltimore, and by 1850 he was listing himself as "H. Bebie, artist" in the city directory. He was a skillful limner, but more interesting than his portraits are the curious paintings that he did for his own enjoyment and refused to sell. Some have a strong European flavor, and most are charged with a surreal quality as well as a pervasive eroticism.

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Best known for her summer garden and beach scenes painted along the New England shore, Mabel May Woodward was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and, except for summers at Gloucester, Massachusetts and Ogunquit, Maine, spent most of her life there. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, she continued her education at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1900 she returned to Providence to join the faculty at her alma mater, where she taught for many years. Though Woodward has not been the subject of scholarly attention, we know from the titles of her works that she traveled often. In addition to summers along the east coast, she visited and painted in France, Italy and Holland. She also made at least one trip to the southern United States, stopping in Charleston, New Orleans and along the Florida coast. Though Woodward rarely dated her scenes, she usually identified their location in the title. The bold brushwork and bright palette are typical of Woodward’s style, described in 1938 as "a kind of impressionism . . . or a development of impressionism to a more descriptive painting." (Sisson, Providence (RI) Journal, 1938)

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Born in Vevay, Indiana in 1881, Will Henry Stevens enrolled in the Cincinnati Art Academy at the age of sixteen and continued his studies at Rookwood Pottery and the Art Students League, New York City. At the age of twenty he presented a one-man show in New York City and then decided to return to Indiana. In 1920 he visited the Charles H. Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, and became interested in Oriental art and culture, particularly Chinese Taoist concepts of harmony and nature. These principles are found in varying degrees in most of his subsequent work. In 1921 he joined the art faculty at Sophie Newcomb College, New Orleans, Louisiana, where he taught until he retired in 1948. Stevens had a mountain retreat in North Carolina, where he explored and painted mountain scenes. An innovator throughout his life, he began painting non-objective works in the 1940s under the influence of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Stevens exhibited his works in two galleries, one for his nature paintings and the other for his non-objective works. Stevens died in 1949.  

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To spend time with Adele Lemm’s art is to discover a sense of summer-the season’s color and heat, recreation and restoration, fun and fancy. For summers were all these things and more to Adele Lemm (1904-1977), a Memphis teacher-artist. Time spent by the cool New England coast meant relief from relentless Southern heat and fresh-air hours with her soft palette and dry brush. Those precious months also offered time to become the student, to hone her craft with masters such as Vaclav Vytlacil and friends like Hans Hoffman at the Provincetown Art Association. For Adele Lemm, summer was the beach, boats, birds, gardens, friends and frolic-and the chance to preserve all these joys with paint and pastels. Working in the Post Modernist era, Lemm approached traditional subjects with a contemporary perspective. Her pieces are warm-spirited, with a touch of whimsy applied to discernible subjects. Her landscapes and seascapes are idyllic, imbued with light and lightheartedness. An essentialist who omitted unnecessary details, she insisted on representation, on her strokes revealing a specific object that could be recognized as a flower, house or harbor. Adele Lemm’s passion for her art was borne out not only in her products, but also in her living. For a quarter of a century, Lemm was a dedicated and popular instructor at the Memphis Academy of Art. She exhibited at the National Academy of Women Artists’ annual show, winning five prizes, and at many galleries and museums throughout the East, including the Ward Eggleston Gallery in New York City, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the Delgado Museum in New Orleans.

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Scottish-born Alexander Charles Stuart was an accomplished ship portrait and marine painter who worked primarily on navy bases and shipyards along the Delaware River, as well as in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. In an 1896 account of his life, Stuart recorded that he had grown up in Glasgow, then a major shipbuilding city, and studied engineering and medicine before serving with the English army in the Crimean War (1853-56) and Indian Mutiny (1857-60). He immigrated to Chester, Pennsylvania around 1861. Upon his arrival in America, Stuart first served in the marines and then joined the Union navy, when he began to create ship paintings and watercolors.

Stuart became a United States citizen after resigning from the navy in 1866. Thereafter, he worked primarily as an artist and illustrator for the merchant shipbuilding companies of John Roach & Son in Chester from 1872 to 1880 and then with Harlan & Hollingsworth in Wilmington, Delaware through the late 1880s. During this time, he became well known for documenting many of the early iron steamships built by these firms in the latter nineteenth century.

In 1882, Stuart began traveling to New York to establish his reputation as an artist there, but was unsuccessful. The following year, he left for Florida, settling first in St. Augustine and then in Eustis where he worked primarily as a physician around 1883 to 1884. Stuart returned to the Wilmington area from 1886 to 1895 and then moved with his daughter to Camden New Jersey. Although his fortunes declined in his final years, he continued to paint marine subjects until his death in 1898. 

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A central figure in the Charleston Renaissance, Alfred Hutty was born in Grand Haven, Michigan. He grew up in Kansas City and Leavenworth, Kansas, earning an art scholarship at the age of fifteen. He worked as a stained glass designer in Kansas City and St. Louis, where he attended the St. Louis School of Art. Inspired by the landscape art of Birge Harrison, Hutty determined to devote himself to painting and, in 1907, traveled to Woodstock, New York to study under Harrison. He established himself as a regular resident of the Art Students League summer art colony there. During this time, he continued design and production of stained glass for Tiffany Studios in New York City.

Hutty first visited Charleston in 1919, looking for a place to spend the winter, when he famously wired his wife, back in Woodstock: "Come quickly, have found heaven." He returned to the city from 1920 to 1924 to teach at the school of the Gibbes Museum and thereafter divided his time seasonally between homes and studios in Charleston and Woodstock. In Charleston, he embraced the friendship, collaboration, and activities of local printmakers and other cultural leaders, such as John Bennett and DuBose Heyward, whose 1936 novel, {Lost Morning}, features an artist modeled after Hutty. He began etching in Charleston in 1921 and was a founding member of the Etchers’ Club in 1923. Hutty earned a national reputation as a printmaker in the 1920s and the following decades.

Hutty’s work reveals his varied artistic roots in the social realism of the Midwest, as well as the picturesque landscape traditions of Woodstock and Charleston. He produced numerous street views of Charleston’s high-style and vernacular architecture.

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Though Boisseau worked from life, he was also involved in photography, and by 1852 he was listed as a daguerreotypist in Cleveland, Ohio. He also advertised as a portrait and landscape painter, art teacher and art dealer. In 1860 he made his way to Montreal, and opened the first of three consecutive photographic studios, the last in 1868. While little is known about his later life, he exhibited portrait and genre pictures at the Royal Canadian Academy as late as 1884. Several, such as French Quarter Statuette and Doll Peddler and The Grandmother, depict New Orleans subjects. He died in Buffalo, New York, in 1901. NRS

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Born in Paris, Alfred Boisseau trained under Paul Delaroche. Though the details of his life are obscure, he probably began his studies around 1840. Delaroche’s was the most popular atelier at the time and the one attended by the best French students. His style, which he naturally passed on to his pupils, was a fusion of the academic neoclassical school and the subject matter of the romantics, resulting in "historical" paintings so highly finished they were nearly photographic in their realism. Delaroche achieved this through his dedication to drawings, possibly augmented with daguerreotypes —a practice that many of his students, including Boisseau and the better-known Jean Leon Gerome would successfully adopt the following decade.

Boisseau began his career in New Orleans, where he lived and painted from 1845 until 1849. One of the earliest artists to establish a studio there, he was likely drawn to the city by his brother, who was serving as secretary to the French consul. Fascinated by native Americans, as well as blacks and Creoles, he painted a number of ethnic subjects, several of which were exhibited at the 1848 Salon. One of these, Louisiana Indians Walking Along a Bayou (1847; New Orleans Museum of Art), which shows a group of Choctaws walking in a wooded area, presumably to the French market, is perhaps the most famous antebellum genre painting done in Louisiana. Boisseau may have been led to the subject by the example of George Catlin, whose "Indian Gallery" had won the praise of such famous writers and artists as Baudelaire, George Sand, and Delacroix when it was exhibited in Paris in 1845.