From the old country to the new world, and from the mill towns of the northeast to the farmlands of the American south.
[This article originally appeared in the Boston Tab newspaper in May 1999] Contemporary Boston is a city of many great museums. The history of museum keeping in Boston had its modest beginnings in 1791, with the arrival from Philadelphia of one Daniel Bowen, age thirty-one, a close friend of the patriot-painter Charles Willson Peale of …
Continue reading Daniel Bowen: Boston’s Pioneer Museum Keeper
We next turn to John Trumbull, the third and last of our “Patriot Painters. Trumbull became America’s first great history painter.
Gilbert Stuart, Self Portrait In the case of Gilbert Stuart, the second of our painters, we are dealing with a more talented artist, one of the greatest portrait painters of all time, but a much less intellectually-engaged or public-spirited figure than Charles Willson Paine. Like Peale, Stuart grew up in relative poverty. His father, Gilbert …
Continue reading The Patriot Painters, Part 2: Gilbert Stuart, 1755-1828
The three artists of the Revolutionary Era and Early National Period’s that I call The Patriot Painters--- Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and John Trumbull, created works that became American icons.
Boston’s Allston section is said to be the only community in the United States named for an artist---the great Romantic painter Washington Allston (1779-1843). This is of course is no small distinction. Allston “Self-Portrait, completed in 1805. By the 1820s this European trained painter was regarded as the greatest artist America had yet produced, having …
Born in 1738, the son of recently-arrived Irish Protestant immigrants, John Singleton Copley was raised in cramped quarters over the family’s tobacco shop on Boston’ Long Wharf.
Local Historian North & South 