A portrait and landscape painter, Lawton S. Parker was a member of the Giverny Group, Six relatively young American painters who, after study in Paris, fell under the spell of Claude Monet and lived and worked for a time near his studio home in Giverny, France.

A solid, academic painter to begin with, Parker adopted what some called a new kind of impressionism. Despite Monet’s influence, he did not see nature the same way as did the major French impressionists, nor did he use broken colors to convey a sense of light as they did. His was a more conventional approach, with his colors matched as closely as possible to those of nature.

Parker was born in Fairfield, Michigan in 1868. He started his long training at the Art Institute of Chicago, then went to Paris in 1889 to study at the Academie Julien with Bouguereau and Tony-Fleury. Back in New York City, he enrolled at the Art Students League and studied with Mowbray and William Merritt Chase. Then it was back to Paris for training in mural painting with Besnard and finally, in 1897, a stint at the Escole des Beaux Arts under Gerome. He also studied for a time with Whistler.

In 1913, Parker was the first American to be awarded the coveted Gold Medal at the Paris Salon. He died in Pasadena in 1954.

MEMBERSHIPS:
Allied Artists of America
Chicago Society of Artists
National Academy of Design
National Arts Club

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:
Art Institute of Chicago
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
National Collection, France

Francois Gall, Hungarian by birth, became an impressionist painter in the pure French tradition after he moved to Paris in 1936. He was born in Kolozsvar in the former region of Transylvania on March 22, 1912.

He began his artistic studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rome while working in menial jobs to secure a living. Support came in 1930 when the Hungarian government awarded Gall with a scholarship. Six years later: Francois Gall established himself in Paris and became a student of Devambez at the National Academy of Fine Arts.

The artist greatly admired the first generation impressionist and adopted their concepts for his own interpretations. Parisian scenes and portrayals of women engaged in typically feminine activities were among his preferred subjects, but his repertoire also included landscapes and still-life composition that were the trademarks of his works.

The artist participated in various Salon exhibitions in Paris and became a favorite with the public.

In 1963, he was honored with the Francis Smith Prize. He died in 1987.

Reference: E. Benezit, Dictionnaire des Peintres

George Lafayette Clough was a notable New York landscape painter of the nineteenth century. His numerous naturalistic landscapes are of the Hudson River School. Born in Auburn, New York in 1824, Clough was one of six children raised by a widowed mother.

Although he was basically self taught, Clough probably received some early training from local portrait painter Randall Palmer. Around 1844, Clough set up his own studio above a store in Auburn. Soon afterward painter Charles Loring Elliott came to Auburn to paint a commissioned portrait; he asked Clough to lend him the studio. Clough and Elliott became friends and Clough studied with Elliott in Auburn and New York City.

Clough went to Europe to study in the early 1850s. He copied paintings at the Louvre, and went to Holland, Germany and Italy. When Clough returned to America, he began to concentrate on landscapes. Pastoral landscapes were his primary subject. While most of his paintings depicted the area around Auburn, Clough also painted throughout Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio and New England.

During the 1860s and 1870s, Clough painted urban scenes, often using New York City as a subject. He also painted some genre scenes around 1870. Toward the end of the 1870s, Clough again concentrated on landscapes. All Clough’s paintings were rather academic. He painted sensitive, emotional scenes, with an emphasis on the natural lighting and atmosphere of each.

Clough died in Auburn in 1901.

MEMBERSHIPS:
Art Club Brooklyn Brush and Palette Club

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh

Part of a group of New York painters called “The Eight,” Ernest Lawson was fascinated by the urban environment of early 20th-century New York and also the bucolic landscape of the Hudson River. His style was close to pure Impressionism, and many of his works focus on the influence of human beings on the landscapes, quite often with the suggestion that someone has just been a part of the scene.

He also completed numerous snow scenes as well as depictions of the less-than-beautiful side of life that including squatter’s shacks, railroads and urban city views. Although he associated with the Social Realists led by Robert Henri, he did not adopt that subject matter as the focus of his painting. On his canvases, he used a palette knife and heavy impasto with bold, bright colors.

Born in Nova Scotia, he spent his boyhood in Ontario because his father, a doctor, had taken a job in Kansas City and Lawson decided not to move until he turned age 15. When he joined his family, he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. The next year he travelled in Mexico with his father and worked as a draftsman and studied at the Santa Clara Art Academy. In 1890, he went to New York to enroll in the Art Students League and from 1892-1894, spent time at the summer school of Cos Cob, Connecticut with his friends and Art Students League teachers John Twachtmann and J. Alden Weir and other Impressionist painters at that art colony. There, he first painted “en plein air”, meaning outside in the ‘open air’, and reportedly his exposure to new ideas at Cos Cob shaped the remainder of his career. From Weir, he heard these comments: “You are trying to get the whole world on one canvas. Simplify everything and stick to your first impressions.” (Spencer, 165)

From 1893 to 1898, he was in France which included study in Paris at the Academy Julian with Jean Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. In Paris, he shared a studio with Somerset Maugham, who used him as the prototype for Frederic Lawson in his novel, “Of Human Bondage.” In France, Lawson studied only briefly at the Academy and spent most of his time painting in the countryside pursuing his new love of working “en plein-air”. Returning to New York City in 1894, he settled there for many years, living from 1898 in Washington Heights, which then was a rural area with much wooded landscape and grazing animals. He painted the bucolic landscape around him, especially the Hudson River in winter, and generally led a quiet life although he continued to travel including back to France and to Spain and throughout New England including Cos Cob, Connecticut and Cornish, New Hampshire. He also returned to Kansas City to teach at the Art Institute in 1926 and the Broadmoor Academy in from 1927 to 1928.

In 1908, he participated in the 1908 exhibition of “The Eight” at Macbeth Gallery. Unlike Henri and the other Social Realists of “The Eight,” Lawson preferred vistas to intimate views and was the only artist in that exhibition who painted landscapes rather than street life. His affiliation with The Eight was interesting because most members of the group, excepting the highly individualistic Maurice Prendergast, were in rebellion against the prettiness of Impressionist landscape painting which, Lawson, of course represented.

In 1912-1913, he was one of the founders of the National Association of Painters and Sculptors. This organization planned the 1913 Armory Show that remains famous in art history for being a large-scale introduction of modernist art to the American public. In 1917, he was elected a Full Member of the National Academy of Design. In his later years, he moved frequently because he was troubled with personal, financial and health problems. He taught briefly in Hartford, Connecticut and was distraught because he could earn so little money. In 1939, near Miami, Florida, he died from drowning, which some thought suicide. From 1931, he had visited Florida regularly to seek help for his chronic arthritis and in 1934 had moved there.

Source: Michael David Zellman, “300 Years of American Art”
Peter Falk, “Who Was Who in American Art”
Harold Spencer, (Intro), “Connecticut and American Impressionism”

Josephine Paddock was born in New York City in 1885. She was a versatile painter of oil, watercolor (portraits, genre, and city scenes) active in New York. Her sister Ethel Louise Paddock, born two years later would also become an accomplished artist.

Josephine Paddock would study at the New York Art Students League under the tutelage of Henri, Chase and Cox. Josephine and her sister Ethel frequently summered at the art colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

They often exhibited their paintings together during there vacations. Josephine exhibited nationally, as well as internationally; including the National Academy of Design, NYC, Art Institute of Chicago, Paris Salon, 1951, Royal Institute of London, Berkshire Museum of Art, Parrish Museum, South Hampton, N. Y. In 1913 at Armory Show in New York City she exhibited two small, sketchy watercolor sketches of swans.

The landscapes of Walter Launt Palmer, particularly his snow scenes, were popular prizewinners throughout a long professional career that began before the artist was 20.

Born in 1854, in Albany, New York, the son of sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer, Walter Palmer grew up with art and artists. His first lessons, in his teens, were with portraitist Charles Elliott and Hudson River School landscapist Frederic Church.

Palmer’s work was first accepted for the National Academy of Design show in 1872, when he was only 18. After a European tour in 1873, Palmer continued art studies in Paris until 1876. One of his masters was Emile Auguste Carolus Duran, whose influence is seen in the controlled tonality that modified the academic tightness of Palmer’s early work. Subtlety of color, texture and light became characteristic of all of Palmer’s work.

Known primarily for his Colorado landscapes, Charles Partridge Adams was a painter who traveled around the west to explore his perspective of the vastly changing landscapes.

Born in Franklin, Massachusetts in 1858, Adams moved to Denver, Colorado at a young age with his mother and two sisters. Poor health caused the move, as one of his sisters suffered from tuberculosis. Adams got a job at the Chain and Hardy Bookstore in Denver where he met Helen Chain, a former student of Hudson River School artist George Inness. Working with Chain was his first and only formal training in painting. In 1881 Adams camped out in the Rocky Mountains with another young artist for three months, resulting in numerous sketches and paintings.

Gray Bartlett was fifty-two years old in 1937 and still in the engraving business. He had not worked with a sketch pad and canvas for three decades. But in the next fourteen years, until his death, he achieved a lifelong goal and became a foremost western artist.

He grew up with a love for art and a love for the West. Born in Rochester, Minnesota, his parents moved to Colorado when he was a youth. By the time he was sixteen he was working as a cow hand on the open range, sketching western scenes in a battered sketchbook he carried in his saddlebags. These sketches were later transferred to canvas.

At first his ambition was to be a rancher, for the wide-open life in the west seemed to suit him well. Then he began to realize how strongly he felt about his sketches and paintings of the West, and he soon became aware that his true ambition was not ranching, but to be an artist. He left the cattle country to study at the Greeley Art School in Greeley, Colorado, and on a scholarship at the Chicago Art Institute.

The death of his mother forced a decided change in the course of his life. He gave up his art training and went to work as a commercial artist, employed by various photo-engraving companies, to help support the family. He had many such jobs in Denver and other western and Midwestern cities. After marrying, he borrowed $1,800.00 and bought an interest in an engraving firm. The business prospered and, in 1937, Bartlett retired and moved to California where he returned to his first love – art.

His desire to paint came back stronger than ever. Despite being neglected for so many years, his skill with a brush and his eye for color did not fail him, and his early sketches refreshed his memory. With his camera and notebook he traveled extensively in Colorado, Utah, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, capturing the West he remembered so well as a boy. At times he lived among the Indians, while maintaining studios in Los Angeles and in Moab, Utah.

His paintings of the Southwest are in many western collections, including the Santa Fe Railway Collection, Arizona State University, and the California State Library. Bartlett died of a heart attack suffered while in his studio in Los Angeles.

The son of a lithograph salesman, Berninghaus was educated in St. Louis grammar schools. Even then he sold spot news sketches to the local newspapers. In the tradition of an earlier era of painters he began work in lithography in 1889 and as a printing apprentice in 1893 – meanwhile, he attended night classes at St. Louis Society of Fine Arts for three terms. Established first as an illustrator and then as a largely self-taught fine artist, he was in the course of getting his first one-man show in St. Louis in 1899.

That year he was the guest of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad on a junket to Colorado. Intrigued by tales of Taos he made a brief side trip twenty-five miles by wagon to the still-untouched village. He returned to Taos each summer after that staying for longer and longer periods until he settled there permanently in 1925. A member of the prestigious Taos Society of Artists, his paintings were of the Pueblo Indians, the Spanish Americans, the adobes, the mountains, generally with at least one horse. With his practice as a lithographic artist and illustrator, his approach was direct and objective, showing the Indians as they were rather than posed or as nostalgic stereotypes. His technique was to work out of doors, painting on the scene. After he moved to Taos, his style became more modern. His compositions were more complex, his colors richer, and frequently he painted from memory at his easel within his studio.

Known as one of the greatest Taos pioneer painters, his works are highly sought after today and are held by many important private and museum collections including the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Museum of New Mexico, Philbrook Art Center, City Art Museum St. Louis, Gilcrease Museum, the Eiteljorg Collection and the Anschutz collection.

In 1859, at the age of 29, Albert Bierstadt accompanied a government expedition on a painting trip that would establish him as one of the most popular landscape artists of his time. He traveled with his sketch pad, paints and canvas on the back of a mule, past the Missouri River and deep into the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming. There he found his greatest subject matter, the mysterious, magnificent, forests, plains, indigenous wildlife and peoples of the West. His later journey from 1863 to 1870 to California proved to be a culmination of his Rocky Mountain efforts.

Born in Germany, Bierstadt spent his childhood in New Bedford, Massachusetts. As a young child he returned to Europe for sophisticated art studies and extensive travel through the countryside and Alps of Germany and Italy. Following his 1859 trip to Wyoming, Bierstadt moved to New York from which he would make many excursions west – as far as California where he painted the first known rendition of Yosemite Valley in 1864. That same year, the artist’s The Rocky Mountains sold for $25,000, the highest price yet paid for a work of art. Today, that painting is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Bierstadt’s popularity introduced him to many famous people of the time, including the poet Longfellow, The Grand Duke Alexis of Russia and President Rutherford Hayes. Throughout his lifetime he traveled back and forth across the continent and to Europe with his wife Rosalie. Today, nearly every state owns a Bierstadt painting, either in public or private collections.