Born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1852, Charles Graham was a self-taught painter, draftsman, and cartographer. As a young man he worked as a mapmaker for the Northern Pacific Railroad in Montana and Idaho. By 1874 he had embarked on a career as a scenery painter in Chicago and New York City. He joined the staff of "Harper’s Weekly" magazine in 1877 and contributed illustrations to the magazine until 1892. On assignments for "Harper’s", Graham traveled the American West, and in 1886 he toured the post-civil War South with his fellow-artist Horace Bradley, creating drawings that were published in a series of articles on the "New South." Graham left "Harper’s" in 1893 and was a freelance illustrator for the "New York Herald", "Collier’s" magazine, and the "American Lithograph Company". He was the official artist of the Chicago World Columbian Exposition of 1893.

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Charles Volkmar is best known today as a ceramic artist, but in the mid-1860s, at the outset of his career, he was very much the model of an aspiring landscape painter. The prevailing taste at that time still favored the Hudson River School. Eager to establish himself as a professional artist, Volkmar assimilated characteristics of the style, including a preference for landscape as subject matter and the use of a horizontal format, dark palette and tight brushwork. Born in Baltimore, Volkmar received his initial art education at the Maryland Institute. In 1861 he went to Paris, where he remained for nearly fifteen years. Many of his American subjects were painted in Europe, along with Barbizon and other French scenes.

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 A native Charlestonian, Chevis Clark paints his coastland home with both affection and feeling. After serving in the Navy, he completed his art training at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Returning to Charleston, he continued to expand the range of his artistic talents and began teaching at the Gibbes Art Gallery School. In 1969, he was selected for the Navy Combat Art Program under whose auspices he completed "Replenishment at Sea," which is now part of the Navy Combat Art Collection in Washington, D.C. His works are represented in many private and public collections and he was won many awards including first, second and third prize awards in the Carolina Art Association and the Guild of South Carolina Artists state exhibitions. RS

From the exhibition catalogue, The Bicentennial: An Interpretative Approach, South Carolina National, 1976.

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A native of Staten Island, New York, Edmund Ashe studied at the Metropolitan Art School and at the Art Students League with Charles Vanderhoof and John Stimson. Described as a "darn fine pen and ink man who later took up painting" (Tarrant, p. 11), he began his career as an illustrator, producing drawings for various magazines, including Colliers, Harper’s, Scribner’s, and St. Nicholas. Ashe also painted "Gibson Girl" watercolors and provided illustrations for such books as In Camp with a Tin Soldier by John Kendrick Bangs (1892); and Richard Harding Davis’s works, Her First Appearance (1901), Ransom’s Folly (1902), and The Bar Sinister (1903). 

From 1896 until 1909, during the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Ashe served as the White House artist-correspondent for Leslie’s Weekly, the New York Tribune, and the New York World. During this period, he also taught at the Art Students League and at William Merritt Chase’s New York Art School, where he met and befriended Robert Henri. In 1905, Ashe moved to Westport, Connecticut and, together with George Hand Wright, was a founder of the art colony that developed there. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Silvermine Guild in Norwalk. Active in several arts organizations, including the New York Watercolor Club and Society of Independent Artists, Ashe was one of the first members of the Society of Illustrators, having joined in the first month of the club’s founding in 1901. 

Ashe taught illustration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh from 1920 until 1939, eventually becoming Head of the Department of Painting and Design. During off hours, he applied himself to genre scenes of the local steel industry, creating a number of expressive, nearly hallucinatory images of the workmen and their powerful machinery. Credited with capturing the "extraordinary picturesqueness of the Pittsburgh community" (quoted in Schruers, p. 2), he was a regular exhibitor with the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. Ashe’s work was also highlighted in faculty shows. Shortly before his retirement, he painted murals representing the main industries of Pittsburgh—steel, coal, and petroleum—for the rotunda of the Steidle Building at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. His work is also represented in the Steidle Collection, established by Edward Steidle in 1929. 

Ashe’s earliest oils, such as Capital, were rendered in an impressionist style. During the first decade of the twentieth century, however, he adopted a more progressive realist approach. Thereafter, his paintings assumed a darker tonal range and broader brushstrokes, reminiscent of the work of Robert Henri and the Ashcan school. 

Until his 1939 retirement to Charleston, Ashe continued to spend the summer months in Westport, traveling with George Wright and others to various locations, including the Maryland shore, where he made sketches for Boat in from Baltimore. He also continued to exhibit in New York. In 1929, a selection of his paintings of the people of the Cumberland Mountains was shown with great success at the Ferargil Galleries, his principal dealer there. A reviewer wrote: "Possibly no finer record of the mountaineers has appeared than Mr. Ashe has created. . . . They are drawn as a skilled photographer might catch them and placed in settings chosen by an eye trained to harmonious color and well-proportioned design" (quoted in Schruers, p. 2). While all of these pictures were well received, Useless, a sober portrait of a young Cumberland boy, seems to have been one of the artist’s favorites, for he showed it in Pittsburgh two years later, in an exhibition highlighting the work of the faculty of the College of Fine Arts, the first time the staff had been invited to exhibit as a group. In that exhibition, the canvas was titled Useless: A Mountain Boy (Exhibition of Works, p. 1). NRS

Sources:
Exhibit of Works By the Faculty of the College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute of Technology, February 8 to February 26. No year given; probably 1931.
Schruers, Eric John.
www.ems.psu.edu/museum/Steidle/artists/Ashe.html
Tarrant, Dorothy. A Community of Artists: Westport-Weston, 1900-1985. Connecticut: Westport-Weston Arts Council, 1985.

 

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Born in Rhineland, Germany, Beyer received his academic training at Düsseldorf Academy and traveled to America in the wake of the German Revolution of 1848. He worked briefly in Newark, New Jersey, and Philadelphia and then traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he collaborated on the creation of a large panoramic landscape. He also painted panoramic views of the German Revolution of 1848 and of Italian scenes. In the 1850s Beyer and his wife began to frequent the healing springs of Virginia. During his visits, he painted several panoramic landscapes, including this 1854 view of Lewisburg. The artist published a portfolio edition of Virginia scenes in "The Album of Virginia: An Illustrated Description of the Old Dominion" (Richmond, Va.: 1857). Beyer returned to Germany, probably before the outbreak of the Civil War, and died at Munich in 1865.

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Born at Heilbronn, Wurtemburg, in the second or third decade of the nineteenth century, Edward Everard Arnold had settled in New Orleans by 1850. In New Orleans city directories he is listed variously as a lithographer, fancy painter, sign painter, artist, and painter of portrait, landscape, and marine subjects from that year until his death, which occurred on October 14, 1866. In 1850 he was in partnership with artist James Guy Evans. A rare survival of their collaboration is the painting of a frigate being tossed wildly about on the high seas, titled British Shop in a Storm (Groves Collection, New Orleans). Unfortunately, what was to have been their most ambitious project, a panoramic view of the city of New Orleans, was never carried out.

It is for his ship portraits, scenes of naval engagements, and other events on the high seas that Arnold is best remembered. One New Orleans newspaper, impressed by his work in this line, reported, "We have seen, recently, some beautifully modelled steamers, and admirably executed sailing vessels by Arnold; superior in style and perfect finish, to any which have preceded them. Arnold executes them as beautifully as economically."1

George Pandeley heeded the recommendation, commissioning from Arnold a portrait of the New Orleans-Mobile mail steamer Louise for his friend J. Hopkins, Louise’s commander.

The War Between the States presented new challenges for Arnold’s brush, which he met admirably. He produced vivid pictorial accounts of two of the South’s most devastating naval defeats including Battle of Port Hudson (National Museum of American History). A second version in the Anglo-American Art Museum, Baton Rouge, Louisiana portrays the fateful events of the night of March 14-15, 1863, by which U.S. Rear Admiral David Glasgow Farragut succeeded in gaining control of the Mississippi River, thereby cutting the South in two. After Farragut won the Battle of Mobile Bay one year later, Arnold undertook a painting of the Admiral’s mighty fleet steaming into the strategic Gulf port preparatory to attack. So successful was the subject that here again Arnold was called upon to produce another canvas nearly identical to it. One version was formerly in the collection of the Medford Historical Society, Medford, Massachusetts. The other, which artistically the more pleasing of the two, is owned by Robert M. Hicklin, Jr., Inc. Painting the Confederate defeats at Port Hudson and Mobile Bay, Arnold recorded two of the South’s most devastating losses of the entire War, which taken together, effectively left the Confederacy cut off from foreign trade, upon which its very survival depended.

Arnold, in the Old World manner, painted a black band at the bottom of these canvases on which he inscribed the names of the ships with their commanders, and the subject, location, and date of the action, so that there is no ambiguity as to what is portrayed. Arnold infused these and other scenes with great drama while never sacrificing his careful, controlled attention to detail and accuracy. Nearly a century and a half later viewers of his paintings can feel as if they were eyewitnesses to these perilous events.

In addition to the public collections mentioned above, Arnold’s work is represented in The Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia; Florence Museum of Art, Science and History, South Carolina; Shelburne Museum, Vermont, and the Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts.

1The Daily Orleanian, April 2, 1851.

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Born into Brahmin society, Lizzie Boott was a serious painter intent on a professional career. She studied for several years with William Morris Hunt in Boston and with Thomas Couture outside Paris before spending the summer of 1879 with her tutor and future husband, the artist Frank Duveneck. Through 1886, she regularly exhibited landscapes, portraits, still lifes and figure paintings.

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Widely recognized as the matriarch of the Charleston Renaissance, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner created images of her native city that would, over time, come to be viewed as the quintessential aesthetic definition of picturesque Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry. "From my earliest days, the beauty of Charleston has been a conscious blessing," Verner acknowledged. "I owe my native city incalculably much."

The daughter of a rice broker, Verner began drawing as a child. She studied locally with Alice Ravenel Huger Smith before spending two years under Thomas Anshutz’s tutelage at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Returning to her native city in 1903, she married E. Pettigrew Verner and raised two children. During this period, she studied informally, painting scenes of Charleston in her spare time and studying Japanese printing techniques. In 1923, she took up etching and, two years later, established her own studio. Verner was a frequent exhibitor, and her work was acquired by such notable institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and others.

The 1930s marked the high point in Verner’s career as an etcher and the onset of her interest in pastels. During a 1937 visit to Japan, Verner studied ink painting with a Japanese master and explored the idea of applying pastel crayons to raw silk while it was still wet, which allowed her to work in modulated layers of color. Once the silk had dried, she added the final touches. She called the process Vernercolor. Pastel became Verner’s favored medium as it ideally combined the elements of drawing and painting.

A founding member of the Charleston Etchers Club, Verner was a respected leader in the city’s art community. Along with Alice Smith, Anna Heyward Taylor, and Alfred Hutty, she played a pivotal role in Charleston’s dramatic mid-century cultural renewal. Her works showcased Charleston’s natural beauty and charm, including: live oaks draped in moss; tall cypress trees in abandoned rice preserves; colorful flower women; and the streets and alleyways of the city, a favorite motif. An extremely articulate artist, Verner taught, lectured, and authored four books illustrated with her etchings. She also illustrated DuBose Heyward’s Porgy and Bess.

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Elliott Daingerfield was born at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina. As a youth he took art lessons and served as a photographer’s apprentice. He continued his artistic education in New York City, where he studied with William Satterlee (1844-1908), and made the acquaintance of George Inness. In the mid-1890s Daingerfield began to create religious paintings that reflected English Pre-Raphaelite influences in themes and techniques. His personal religious convictions also influenced the content of his paintings throughout the course of his life. In 1902 he secured a commission to paint murals for the lady chapel of the Church of Saint Mary in New York City. An art scholar as well as a painter, Daingerfield wrote books on art theory, and studies of the art of George Inness and Ralph Albert Blakelock. He was professor of painting at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.

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A painter of streetscapes, florals, and interiors, Emma Lampert Cooper was born near Rochester, New York. She studied at the Cooper Union Art School and the Art Students League in New York, and at the Delecluse Academy in Paris. Returning to Rochester, she taught at the Mechanics Institute from 1893 and was active in the art life of the city until her marriage to the painter Colin Campbell Cooper in 1897. After traveling in Europe for a period of time, the couple settled in New York City. There, working in an impressionist style, she turned to her husband’s favorite theme, the architectural treasures of New York and other historic cities.

Like most plein air painters, the Coopers traveled constantly in search of subjects. In the spring of 1913, they visited Charleston, South Carolina. Though nothing is known about their stay, their visit is recorded in Colin’s paintings of some of the city’s most historic and cherished structures, including St. Philip’s Church, Charleston. During their trip, they also visited Beaufort, a small coastal town about seventy miles south of Charleston, noted for its picturesque buildings, alleyways, and streets. Emma’s Old Beaufort, South Carolina is of a subject that she and Colin both painted, probably side-by-side and on the same day. The fluent brushwork and radiant color are typical of her vivacious style.

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