1824- 1879 William Morris Hunt Gallery Hunt's father's family were among Vermont's founders and largest landowners; his mother's a family of wealth and prominence in Connecticut. Hunt attended Harvard but withdrew in his junior year. Following the untimely death of his Congressman father from cholera, Hunt's mother Jane took him and his brothers to Switzerland, the South of France and to Rome, where Hunt studied with Couture in Paris and then came under the influence of Jean-François Millet, from whom he learned the principles of the Barbizon school. The Hunt family remained in Europe for a dozen years. Afterwards, leaving Paris, he painted and established art schools at Newport, Rhode Island, where he had relatives, Brattleboro, Vermont, Faial Island in the Azores, where he had family connections and finally at Boston, where he painted, taught art and became a popular portrait painter. The companionship of Millet had a lasting influence on Hunt's character and style, and his work grew in strength, in beauty and in seriousness. He was among the biggest proponents of the Barbizon school in America, and he more than any other turned the rising generation of American painters towards Paris. On his return in 1855 he painted some of his most handsome canvases, all reminiscent of his life in France and of Millet's influence. Such are The Belated Kid, Girl at the Fountain, Hurdy-Gurdy Boy, and others ?C but the public called for portraits, and it became the fashion to sit for Hunt; among his best paintings of this genre are those of William M. Evarts, Mrs Charles Francis Adams, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, William H. Gardner, Chief Justice Shaw and Judge Horace Gray. Sadly, many of Hunt's paintings and sketches, together with five large Millets and other art treasures collected by him in Europe, were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.  Related Paintings of William Morris Hunt :. | Boston artist William Morris Hunt | Portrait of Charles Sumner | Judge John Lowell | Portrait of Charles Sumner | Study of a Female Head |
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Childe Hassam
1859-1935 Childe Hassam Locations Frederick Childe Hassam (b. October 17, 1859, Dorchester, Boston, Massachusetts ?C d. August 27, 1935, East Hampton, New York) was a prominent and prolific American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and the museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs in his career, and was a founding member of The Ten, an influential group of American artists of the early 20th century. His most famous works are the ??Flag?? paintings, completed during World War I. Hassam (pronounced HASS'm;) (known to all as Childe, pronounced like child) was born in his family home in a suburb of Boston in 1859. His father Frederick was a cutlery merchant and descended from a long line of New Englanders, while his mother Rosa was a native of Maine. He demonstrated an interest in art early in his life. He had his first lessons in drawing and watercolor while attending the Mather public school, but his parents took little notice of his nascent talent. A disastrous fire in November 1872 wiped out much of Boston??s commercial district including his father??s business. To help out the family, Hassam dropped out of high school and his father lined up a job for him in the accounting department of publisher Little Brown & Company. His poor aptitude for figures, however, convinced his father to allow him to pursue an art career, and Hassam found employment with George Johnson, a wood engraver. He quickly proved an adept draftsman (??draughtsman?? in the Boston directory) and he produced designs for commercial engravings, such as images for letterheads and newspapers. Around 1879, Hassam began creating his earliest oil paintings but his preferred medium was watercolors, mostly outdoor studies.
Adolph Friedrich Vollmer
(17 December 1806 - 12 February 1875) was a German landscape and marine painter and graphic artist. He and his contemporary, the painter Christian Morgenstern, were pioneers in Hamburg of early Realism in painting. As son of a bookkeeper to a Hamburg merchant, Vollmer grew up in humble circumstances.[3] Determined to become a painter against the wishes of his father,[4] he became an apprentice to the brothers Suhr who owned a graphic workshop producing panorama prints. For one and a half years Vollmer travelled throughout Germany with one of the brothers, Cornelius Suhr, as had been Morgenstern before him. In 1826 he was introduced by the Hamburg art-dealer Ernst Harzen to the wealthy aristocrat and supporter of the arts, Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, who was patron to many young Hamburg artists among them Morgenstern and Otto Speckter. Probably on Rumohr advice Vollmer completed his studies under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He then moved to Munich from where he undertook journeys to Lake Konstanz, to the Austrian and Swiss Alps, to Venice, to Le Havre and to the Netherlands. In 1839 Vollmer returned to Hamburg and settled there. One of his sons, Johannes Vollmer, became a prominent architect of protestant churches; a grand-son was the art historian and encyclopaedist Hans Vollmer who, for many years, edited the Thieme-Becker Kenstler Lexikon. Vollmer became blind in 1866.
Pier Leone Ghezzi
(Rome, 28 June 1674 - Rome, 6 March 1755) was an Italian Rococo painter and caricaturist active in Rome. Caricature of composer Antonio Vivaldi by Pier Leone GhezziGhezzi was born in Rome. His father, Giuseppe Ghezzi, (1634-1721), also trained Antonio Amorosi, and was a secretary to the Roman Accademia di San Luca. Pier Leone himself joined the Academy in 1705 and he executed a painting, the Allegory of Gratitude, to be donated to the institution, as was customary. He was the godson of Carlo Maratta. Pier Leone is known for his frescoes in the Villa Falconieri of Frascati. His pen and gouache caricatures are much freer in emotion than his state portraiture, and often depict named individuals or professions in satirical fashion.