He usually finished his paintings in “one go” meaning plein-air, sometimes strapping his canvas to a tree on blustery days and standing knee-deep in snow. In the summers, he painted at Boothbay Harbor, Maine. He was also a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy and a skilled craftsman who built his own house, cabinets and restored antiques.

Redfield took his early training from a Mr. Rolf in order to pass the examination at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he studied from 1885 to 1889 under teachers including Thomas Anschutz, James Kelley, and Thomas Hovenden. A fellow student was Robert Henri, with whom he developed a strong friendship, and with whom he traveled to Paris in 1889.

In Paris, he studied at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux Arts and his teachers were Adolphe Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury. However, he wearied of the pervasive academic styles at these schools, and spent much time painting landscapes in the Forest of Fountainbleu outside of Paris. He also painted at Barbizon and Pont-Aven.

Married, he and his wife returned to Pennsylvania in 1898 and decided to settle in Center Bridge in Bucks County near New Hope. His presence in Bucks County was enough to lure many younger artists to the region making it a nucleus for the American Impressionist movement. Holding a special affection for this man, author and fellow-Pennsylvanian James Michener wrote that Redfield “had a cluttered workshop on the canal in which he did large landscapes, especially snow scenes, and made furntiture and delightfully desinged hooked rugs. I liked his work, and I liked him, a big Russian-bear kind of man.” (Folk 10)

He exhibited extensively throughout the country and abroad, and won an impressive array of awards, including a Bronze medal, Paris Exposition (1900); Bronze Medal, Pan-American Exposition (1901); Temple Medal (1903), Jennie Sesnan Gold Medal (1904), Gold Medal of Honor (1907), Lippincott Prize (1912), and Stotesbury prize (1920), all from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Silver medal (1904), St. Louis Exposition; Fischer Prize and Gold Medal (1908) form the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Honorable Mention (1908) and Third Class Medal (1909), Paris Salon; Palmer Gold Medal (1913), Chicago Art Institute; Hors Concous Prize (1915), Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco; Carnegie Prize (1918), Altman Prize (1919), and Saltus Medal (1927), National Academy of Design.

His paintings are included in numerous museums and public collections throughout the country, such as the Boston Museum of Art, Brooklyn Art Institute, Carnegie Institute, Chicago Art Institute, Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Towards the end of his life, he burned hundreds of paintings that he regarded as inferior. He died in 1965 in Center Bridge, Pennsylvania, and his work received little attention during the decade following his death. However, he has come to be regarded as a key American Impressionist and appreciated for his influence at New Hope.

Source:
Michael David Zellman, “300 Years of American Art”
Newman Galleries
Peter Falk, “Who Was Who in American Art”
Thomas Folk, “The Pennsylvania Impressionists”

Born in Kamenets-Podolsky, Russia, he emigrated with his family to Chicago in 1903, and first travelled from his home in Chicago to Paris in 1910 when he could afford the art training there that so many American artists felt was crucial to professional achievement.

He enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Academie Julian, but the turning point in his career was meeting Impressionist Frederick Frieseke at a cafe in Paris. Frieseke invited him to Giverny, where he first went in 1911, and from that time his style changed from Academic to Impressionist.

The small town with beautiful gardens and landscape vistas and quaint rural scenes was full of American artists including Frieseke and Richard Miller, with whom he painted. The atmosphere was one of encouraging artists to experiment with various styles of painting, and Ritman returned each year until 1929.

His style is both Impressionist and “Intimist,” genteel and reserved in tone, with single figures, especially attractive young women, in confined landscapes and interiors. He painted “en plein aire” but often within his own walled garden.

He first studied at the Ohio Mechanics Institute, and in 1874 began to paint with Frank Duveneck, an artist of the Munich School of direct, impasto brushwork, often in dark tones.  In 1875, Twachtman went to Europe and studied at the Royal Academy in Munich and in 1877, went with Duveneck and William Merritt Chase to Venice.  A year later, he taught at Duveneck’s school in Florence, and in 1881 went to Holland with Julian and John Weir.

His style changed from the dark sombre tones of the Munich School in 1883, when he went to Paris and studied at the Academie Julian with Jules Lefebvre and Louis Boulanger and became influenced by James Whistler’s Tonalism and the French Impressionists.  From that time, his style was characterized by low-key gray and green tones, almost monochromatic, and smooth texture.  In the 1890s, his paintings became lighter, and as he got older, his canvases became even brighter and more impressionistic, and he painted a number of winter scenes.  He purchased a 17-acre farm near Greenwich, Connecticut where he did many landscapes dealing more with the essence of nature than the reality.  He also taught summer classes at Gloucester and did some illustration work for Scribners.

In 1893, he won a Silver Medal from the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and in 1894 was commissioned by Charles Carey of Buffalo, New York to do a series of paintings of Niagara Falls, which was quite a change to his usual subjects of painting the woods of Connecticut.  The next year Major William Wadsworth of Genesco, New York commissioned him to do a series of four paintings of the western half of Yellowstone Park in Wyoming.  Arriving in September of 1895, he was so taken with the scenery and its contrast to his own environment that he did extra paintings for himself.

Source:
Michael David Zellman, Three Hundred Years of American Art
William Gerdts, American Impressionism
Peter Hassrick, Drawn to Yellowstone

A leading practitioner of American modernism, Marsden Hartley created some of the most uniquely powerful modernist expressions by any American artist.  Hartley (who was baptized Edmund Hartley) was born on January 4, l877, in Lewiston, Maine, to working class English immigrant parents. His bleak childhood was lightened by the family’s relocation to Cleveland, Ohio, a move that gave the young man the opportunity to attend the Cleveland School of Art.  In 1896, Hartley took private art lessons with John Semon, a follower of the French Barbizon School.  In the summer of 1898, he enrolled in an out-of-doors painting class conducted by Cullen Yates, a local, Paris-trained Impressionist.  At the end of the summer session, Yates held an exhibition of his students’ work. One of Hartley’s works caught the attention of a trustee of the Cleveland School of Art, who helped secure a scholarship to the school for the young artist. Other members of the school community also encouraged Hartley: his drawing teacher, Nina Waldeck, instilled in him a foundation for spiritual and mystical qualities and Anne Walworth, a school trustee, provided him with a five-year stipend to study in New York.

In the fall of 1899, Hartley moved to Manhattan to further his studies in art.  At first, he enrolled in William Merritt Chase’s School of Art. After one year of study with Chase, however, he transferred to the National Academy of Design, where he remained for four years. In 1902, the National Academy awarded Hartley the Suydam Silver Medal for still-life drawing.  That summer, Hartley went to a retreat in Center Lovell, Maine, where he painted mountain imagery in an academic and realist style.

In 1906, in an attempt to reestablish family ties, Hartley adopted his stepmother’s maiden name, Marsden and dropped his original first name two years later.  He began painting landscapes with a muted palette inspired by the American Impressionist John Henry Twachtman and the Barbizon painter George Inness.  Around this time, Hartley wrote to the publisher Thomas Mosler and asked for a job. He was invited by Mosler to spend the summer of 1907 at Green Acre, a mystic/intellectual retreat in Eliot, Maine.  Green Acre attracted artists, theologians, yogis, swamis, and Eastern mystics.  It was here that Hartley discovered a deep appreciation for Eastern religion.  Also during this time, art patron Mrs. Ole Bull, a visitor to the colony, gave Hartley his first exhibition at her home in 1907.

In 1908, Hartley moved again, first to Boston and then to Maine in the autumn of that year. He occupied an abandoned farmhouse near North Lovell and painted what he considered to be his first mature works.  In North Lovell, he developed a Neo-Impressionist style, using intense color and agitated brushstrokes similar to that found in the art of Maurice Prendergast. He also began using cloud and mountain motifs–imagery that would remain central to his body of work throughout his life.  Hartley also applied the stitch stroke of Swiss painter Giovanni Segantini in his Maine seascapes.  He showed these paintings to Prendergast who wrote to William Glackens in New York, inducing Glackens to show these works to his fellow artists of The Eight.

In 1909, Hartley was introduced to Alfred Stieglitz, a meeting that would change his life forever and place him firmly within the progressive art circles of the time.  Stieglitz immediately arranged a one-man exhibition for Hartley at his gallery “291.”  A year later, in 1910, Stieglitz included work by Hartley in Younger American Painters, another exhibition organized at 291.  Inspired by Max Weber, who championed Paul Cézanne, as well as by a visit to the Havemeyer Collection in 1911, Hartley painted a series of still lifes that combined an emphasis on structural form with decorative elements and the brilliant colors he found appealing in the art of Matisse.

Beginning in 1912, Stieglitz financed several European excursions for the artist.  During the first, 1912, sojourn, Hartley visited Gertrude and Leo Steins’ famous salon, which provided him with a unique opportunity to meet important vanguard artists and writers and become intimately familiar with new works by Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso.  This exposure to advanced European art at the Steins’ home had a decisive impact on Hartley and inspired him to create paintings in a high-key, Fauve palette with flattened, heavily outlined forms in a cubist mode.

In May of 1913, Hartley left Paris for Germany and embarked on what is generally referred to in the scholarship as his first Berlin period. During this critical time in his artistic development, Hartley became friendly with Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, two influential artists who led Hartley to realize fully the importance of embracing spiritual values in painting. Hartley was given a solo show at the Galerie Goltz in 1913 and also exhibited Five Intuitive Abstractions at the prestigious Herbstsalon the same year.  His works had the distinction of being displayed alongside those by Kandinsky and Henri Rousseau.
Hartley returned to America in November 1913.

In 1914, he had his third one-man show at Stieglitz’s 291, and in the spring he departed for Germany for his second extended trip. During his second Berlin period, he worked on a group of symbolic still lifes and painted a series of German military works–known as the German Officer portraits. Hartley used symbolic objects in these paintings to represent psychic and physical characteristics of the subjects he portrayed.  Finding that the conditions in Germany had grown increasingly intolerable during the war, Hartley left Berlin, the city closest to his heart, in December of 1915.

Hartley’s transition back to New York was a difficult one, particularly because anti-German sentiment was at a peak there, and Hartley had a very strong allegiance to all things German. In 1916, Hartley executed a series of paintings called Movements and contributed to the Forum Exhibition, which was hosted by the Anderson Gallery.  He spent the summer in Provincetown where he painted abstract and semi-abstract, Cubist-oriented compositions of angular, flat planes with light colors.  During this time, Hartley was also actively engaged in writing poetry for the journals Others and Poetry.  In the winter of 1916-1917, he traveled to Bermuda where Charles Demuth joined him for several months. It was at this time that Hartley shifted from an interest in avant-garde issues towards working in a more representational mode.  Late in October 1918, Hartley moved to Santa Fe and then to California where he became involved with the literary community there.  In 1919, he returned to New York.

Hartley led a peripatetic life, and in keeping with his searching, restless spirit, he traveled again to Europe in 1921.  He began in Paris before venturing on to his beloved city of Berlin, which he then described as being “under cubist influence.”  Hartley, who remained in Berlin for two years, had secured the financial means to travel abroad by using the proceeds of a 1921 auction of his work, one organized by Stieglitz and Mitchell Kennerly of the Anderson Gallery.  In August 1925, Hartley moved on to the south of France, where he painted for next three or four years.

Despite feeling like an outsider in his native land, Hartley once again set up residence in the United States in 1930.  He exhibited his work to positive critical reception and enjoyed several sales from an exhibition that Stieglitz provided for him in December of that year.  In 1930, he worked for a time in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire where he executed paintings that document his fascination with the mountainous landscape of that region.  In 1931, he painted in Dogtown Common, an area outside of Gloucester, Massachusetts.  His Dogtown works, as they are commonly called, are distinguished by their emphasis on sculptural qualities and stark monumentality. In Dogtown, Hartley immersed himself in mystical and metaphysical literature and painted with a new optimism and energy. He attempted to clarify and simplify his art and his life goals.

A Guggenheim travel grant, which Hartley received in 1931, provided him with one year’s support to work outside of the country; Hartley chose to go to Mexico.  During his Mexican interlude, Hartley nurtured his fascination with pre-Columbian culture and painted works inspired by the country’s native past and infused with a new, spiritually symbolic significance.  Hartley’s year in Mexico proved to be a vitally important chapter in his career; for it was there that he attained a true connection with his mystical and spiritual roots.  This resulted in some of his most powerful paintings.  Through his Mexican works, Hartley reached an important bridge between his Maine and Berlin periods.

Hartley moved frequently between 1933 and 1937, from Bavaria to Dogtown and from Bermuda to Nova Scotia. In 1936, Stieglitz gave Hartley a one-person exhibition and one year later Hartley had his final solo show at Stieglitz’s gallery (by then renamed An American Place).  In 1937, Hudson Walker became Hartley’s new dealer and by 1938, Walker was already hosting several one-man shows of Hartley’s work at his New York gallery.  That same year, Hartley summered in Maine and started a series of portraits of Nova Scotia people.  These were primarily images of men painted with an emphasis on frontality and directness.  Hartley’s devotion to figure painting proved to be a critical success.

In 1939, Hartley lived and worked in Portland, West Brookville, and Bangor, Maine.  In October of 1939, he climbed Mount Katahdin and afterwards began a series of paintings based on this subject. He continued work on these paintings for the next three years.  In 1940, Hartley executed a series of figure paintings that were based on sunbathers and lobstermen, as well as a group of religious subjects and Maine landscapes.  Hartley’s work was taken up in 1941 by the Macbeth Gallery in New York.  Around this time, he began to devote much of his attention to his poems and essays and also focused on painting still lifes with monochromatic or seascape backgrounds.  In 1942, the dealer Paul Rosenberg began to represent Hartley.

Hartley’s last years were plagued by hearing loss, failing eyesight, and poor health in general.  He was quite ill and isolated the last twelve years of his life and died from terminal heart failure in Ellsworth, Maine, on September 2, 1943.

Hartley’s works are represented in major public collections around the world including: The Museum of Modern Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The National Museum of American Art; The Fogg Art Museum; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Columbus Museum of Art; and The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, E-O):

His American parents lived in Europe most of their lives and followed the social season between the capital cities. Traveling continuously with his parents, he showed early art talent and was encouraged by his mother, an amateur painter. In Rome at age 12, he studied with Carl Welsch, a German-American artist and in 1870 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. In Paris, he was accepted in 1874 at the Ecole des Beaux Arts but switched to the less academically oriented atelier of Carolus Duran, who had major impact on Sargent’s style. Duran was an adventurous portrait painter who blended realism with a certain freedom of style.

Sargent was also affected by portrait style of Velasquez, the Tonalism or mood painting of James Whistler, and Impressionism of Edgar Degas. He spent time at Monet’s home town of Giverny, absorbing Impressionist techniques there.

Sargent’s career ended in Paris with his painting “Portrait of Mme X,” 1884, because it was a startlingly accurate portrayal of a notoriously beautiful woman who was Sargent’s cousin. Some said the pose was provocative, but aside from the reputation of the subject, there seems little reason from a late 20th century perspective to find the work controversial.

From 1885 until 1925, Sargent lived primarily in London where his career as a portrait painter was highly successful, but he traveled frequently to the United States where he also had many portrait commissions, especially from upper class Bostonians. However by 1908, he was expressing much tiredness with the demands on his talents and the need to flatter his subjects. He began to limit himself to charcoal portrait sketches and also painted murals. In the early 1890s, he began a twenty-five year mural project for the Boston Public Library and painted murals at the Widener Library.

In July 1918, he became a part of the War Artists Memorial Committee of the British Ministry of Information and went to France, in the vicinity of Bavincourt, at age 62 to record battle scenes and military figures. Working in both oil and charcoal, it was written about him that he “accepted his surroundings completely and went about his work as though quite accustomed to military life.” One of his associates wrote that he “came to wonder if Sargent had any idea how dangerous an exploding shell might be, for he never showed the least sign of fear.” (Mount 293)

His last years he devoted to Impressionist watercolors of European scenes and architecture. He found watercolor to be the most pleasureable outlet for his tremendous energy and compulsions to sketch what he saw around him. He was a man who lived for his work and aside from general socializing had had little private life beyond his family. He never married although “he had at times adored certain women, momentarialy finding in them a reflected image of what he sought” (Mount 323).

A major retrospective of Sargent’s portrait painting was held at the Tate Gallery in London in Fall, 1998.

Source:
Matthew Baigell, “Dictionary of American Art”
Charles Merrill Mount, “John Singer Sargent”

Homer had no formal artistic training until he was apprenticed to a lithographer, J.H. Bufford, but Homer disliked lithography and got work as an illustrator for Ballou’s Pictorial.  From 1859 to 1883, he worked from New York for Harper’s Weekly, and from October 1861 to May, 1862, was one of their Civil War illustrators.  He served as a special correspondent to cover the outbreak of the War, and attached to the Army of the Potomac, and filled his sketch book with informal studies of uniforms, weapons and the daily activities of the individual soldiers.  From this period, he gleaned subject matter that ultimately became some of the outstanding paintings of the Civil War.

He also studied at the National Academy of Design where Frederick Rondel was a major influence, but during the early years of his career, illustration was his “bread and butter.”

After the Civil War, he traveled and studied in Europe for several years including France from 1866 to 1867, where he shared a studio in Montmartre with fellow artist Albert Warren Kelsey.  Several small paintings are extant from that period as are the three illustrations for Harper’s Weekly that had helped to finance his trip.

He returned to New York and settled for thirteen years in New York where his studio proximity to that of Eastman Johnson, genre painter, was a major influence. Many of Homer’s early New York paintings were of leisurely figures in landscape, reflecting his time in France influenced by the Impressionists.  For much of his residency in New York, he lived and worked in the famous Tenth Street Studio Building, and became increasingly exploring in his subject matter–rural life, childhood remembrances including summers at Lake George, Saratoga Springs, and the Adirondack Mountains.  One of his most famous paintings, Snap the Whip from 1872, owes much to French plein-air painting and to the genre style of William Sidney Mount.  In 1873, he began working in watercolor, and many of his most acclaimed works are in that medium.

From 1881 to 1882, he was in England near Tynemounth on the rugged coast of the North Sea at the small fishing village of Cullercoats, and he began doing scenes, harsher in tone, of figures struggling heroically in landscape.  There he worked almost exclusively in watercolor.

Settling permanently in the seclusion of Prout’s Neck, a remote area on the coast of Maine, he strove not only for solitude but for the closest approximation he could find in the United States to that same English coast.  At Prout’s Neck, he was able to indulge his love of the outdoors, his fascination with the moods of the weather and the people in the landscape. He traveled all over for seascapes, boating, and sporting scenes and also made several trips to Caribbean Sea locations including Bermuda, the Bahamas and Cuba, where he did a number of marine scenes ominous in tone.

Homer never married and in his most productive years lived a highly secluded life, seemingly content according to his letters and family accounts.  In 2004, the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine began a two-year campaign to raise 12 million dollars for acquisition, preservation and endowment of Homer’s studio at Prouts Neck.

The Associated Press reported that on May 5, 1998, Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft Corporation, paid $30 million for Lost on the Grand Banks, the last major seascape by Winslow Homer still in private hands.  The price paid at a secret private sale is easily a record for American art according to The New York Times, citing anonymous art experts. The ‘Times’ had the following:

“The seller, John Spoor Broome, a businessman from Southern California, would not discuss the price or buyer.  Broome bought “Lost on the Grand Banks” from his grandmother in the 1940s.  The painting measures nearly 32 by 50 inches and portrays a dramatic image from 1885 of two fishermen in a choppy sea peering over the side of their small boat. ”

Sources:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art
Art-Talk, November-December 2004
Associated Press, May 1998

He was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England, and his father was a hand-loom weaver.  In 1844, his family emigrated to Philadelphia where in 1853, he apprenticed to a wood engraving firm and sketched designs on blocks.  He also studied with his older brother, Edward, a marine and historical painter, whose studio he shared.

In 1860, he made his first trip heading west, going to Lake Superior.  Shortly after, he and Edward went to England where both brothers were heavily influenced by copying paintings of landscapist J.M.W. Turner.  In 1866 and 1867, he returned to Europe and studied the tonalist painting style of Corot and did studies of Venice.

In 1871 at age 34, he began the subject matter that challenged him for the remainder of his life. He traveled West with geologist F.V. Hayden on the Hayden Survey to the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone River. Returning he moved his studio to Newark, New Jersey, and began doing huge panoramic paintings from his sketches.

In 1872, he sketched in Yosemite and other parts of California, and in 1873, explored the Grand Canyon with Major Powell’s survey team.  The United States Congress bought two paintings from these trips for $10,000 each.  From 1881 to 1911, he traveled nearly every year, often in the West, and also painted in Florida and Europe.

In 1916, he settled in Santa Barbara, California where he died in 1926, having spent the later part of his life painting from sketches he made from earlier travels.  His popularity never declined, and he was an active artist well into his 80s.  By the time of his death, many of his favorite painting areas were protected in national park land.

Although he is credited as a great documentary painter, he did not intend his paintings to be literal records of what he saw.  He was committed to mysticism, a personal spiritual vision that caused him to find inspiration in nature.  He said: “All my tendencies are toward idealization. A place as a place has no value in itself for the artist” (Samuels 333).  On his deathbed, at age 90, he envisioned on his ceiling future landscapes to paint and expressed ongoing disapproval of modernist, abstract art.

Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Peggy and Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West

Breck grew up in the Boston area. He obtained his art training at the Munich Royal Academy, learning rapid brushstroke and dark Tonalism. Beginning in 1886, he studied at the Academie Julian in Paris, and soon became one of the original settlers of the important Impressionist art colony in Giverny, France.

John’s brother, Edward Breck, wrote of John’s experience in Giverny, in an article of March 8, 1895 in the “Boston Evening Transcript”. He describes the summer of 1887, when John, Edward, their mother, as well as Theodore Robinson, Theodore Wendel, and Blair Bruce were the original American colony in Giverny. Curiously, Edward Breck’s account of their discovery of Giverny does not mention Monet, and rather that the town was a ‘chance’ happening, based on the region’s charms, although it is doubtful Breck was completely unaware of Monet when he went there.

However, of the many American painters who spent time at Giverny in 1887, Breck and Robinson “were the two who became closest to Monet” . . . For a time Breck must have appeared as Monet’s most promising artistic heir among the Americans. (Gerdts 48-49). His “Garden of Giverny” is one of the first Impressionist flower garden paintings among the American artist.

In 1888, in Giverny, Breck began to paint by moonlight. He carried this moonlight theme to Venice in 1896 and 1897 (Santa Maria della Salute by Moonlight). It was said at the time that his style marked the turning of a new chapter in painting. At Giverny, Breck not only came to know Monet, he also became romantically involved with his stepdaughter, Blanche Hoschede-Monet. Monet intervened, however, and the disappointed suitor Breck left Giverny in 1890 and returned to Boston via England and California.

Breck’s achievements as an American artist constituted some of the earliest fully realized impressionistic paintings in this country. His works influenced the positive movement of Impressionism that occurred in the Boston area in the late 1880s and 1890s.

Breck’s close association with Monet can be seen in pictures Breck completed of Monet’s houseboat and garden, which were shown in Breck’s first one-man art show in Boston, in 1890, at the St. Botolph Club, the year of his return to America. From that time on, he created some of his most memorable works, many of them focusing on sites along the Massachusetts coastline.

He died in 1899 at the age of thirty-nine.

Source:
Elaine Adams, ‘In the Land of Casanova’, California Art Club Newsletter, February 2003
William Gerdts, “Lasting Impressions”

He studied at the McMicken School with Thomas Noble (1870-1881); in Antwerp with Polydore Beaufaux and Charles Verlat (1881-1882); in Munich with Nikolaus Gysis (1882-1883), Ludwig vonLoefftz, Carl vonMarr and Alexander vonWagner (1883-1884); in Paris at the Academie Julian with Lefebvre and Boulanger (1885-1888), Cormon (1887) and possibly with Paul Laurens (1888); art lessons at the Cincinnati Art Academy (1887).

He was an illustrator for book companies and magazines (1878-1891).

Memberships include Allied Artists of America; American Water Color Society (1895; Brd. of Directors); Art Club of Philadelphia (1898); Cincinnati Art Club (1891); Dragonfly Club, Cincinnati (1886-1889); Fine Arts Federation of NY (1910-1917); League of American Artists; Lotus Club (life member, 1912); National Arts Club, life member; National Academy of Design, ANA 1899 and NA 1906; N.Y. Water Color Society; N.Y. Society of Painters; Painters & Sculptors Gallery Assoc.; Salmagundi Club; Soc. of American Artists; Soc. of Men Who Paint the Far West (1911-20); Society of Western Painters (1897-1898); Societe des Artistes, Paris.

Awards include a medal at the Royal Academy, Munich (1885); Thomas B. Clark Prize, NAD (1899); Evans Prize, AWCS (1901); Gold Medal, AWCS (1902); Inness Prize, SC (1903, 1906); Silver Medal, St. Louis Univ. Expo. (1904); Morgan Prize, SC (1904); Hudnut Prize, AWCS (1914); Silver Medal, Pan-Pac. International Expo., San Francisco (1915), Griscom Prize, AWCS (1926); Osborne Purchase Prize, AWCS (1927).

One-man exhibitions include Barton’s Art Store, Cincinnati (1892); Montross Gallery, NY (1903); Traxel Art Gallery, Cincinnati (1903); Katz Galleries, NYC (1903); Macbeth Galleries, NY (1912); Young’s Art Gallery, Chicago (1912, 1920); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Wash., D.C. (1924); Feragil Galleries, NY (1924); Closson Galleries, Cincinnati (1926); Grand Central Art Gallery, NY (1927).

Memorial & Retrospectives include Traxel Art Gallery (1927); Grand Central, Closson, Feragil Galleries (1928); Hirschl & Adler Galleries, NY (1962, 1968); Cincinnati Art Museum (1965); Ira Spanierman Gallery, NY (1966); Chapellier Galleries, NY (1968); The Taft Museum (1968); Corcoran Gallery of Art (1973); L.A. County Museum of Art (1975); touring show from J.B. Speed Art Museum, to Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, to Beaumont Art Museum, TX (1985-1988).

Potthast’s brother named his son Edward Henry Potthast (1880-1941) and Potthast’s namesake became his student. Uncle and son painted together in Potthast’s New York City studio for years and traveled to Holland to paint there as well. The two men hung side by side at exhibitions starting in 1911, and when Potthast died his namesake inherited a great many of his paintings. Over the years both men’s canvases were intermingled and when the nephew died, all the paintings in the studio were sold, almost all bearing the same signature but having been painted by TWO men named Edward Henry Potthast.

Pierce, Patricia Jobe, “Edward Henry Potthast, More Than One Man,” International Fine ARt Collector, Premiere Edition, 1991.