Posts in Category: 19th Century
John Frederick Kensett
John Frederick Kensett, March 22, 1816–December 14, 1872, was an American landscape painter and engraver associated with the second generation of the Hudson River School.
He attended Cheshire Academy and learned engraving in the shops of his father, Thomas Kensett, and his uncle Alfred Daggett; he later worked with the engraver Peter Maverick. From 1840 to 1847 he studied art in Europe, including drawing at the École Préparation des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Kensett traveled with Asher B. Durand, John W. Casilear, and Thomas P. Rossiter, and maintained close ties with fellow landscape painters including Benjamin Champney. He took no formal pupils, though the National Academy of Design notes his guidance of James Suydam. His works are represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Jean-Antoine Houdon
Jean-Antoine Houdon, March 20, 1741–July 15, 1828, was a French sculptor born in Versailles. He studied with René-Michel Slodtz, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, won the Prix de Rome in 1761, and continued his training at the French Academy in Rome from 1764 to 1768. There he studied classical sculpture and human anatomy.
Houdon became known for portraits marked by close observation and naturalism. His subjects included Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington; he traveled to the United States in 1785 to model Washington. He was elected to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and later taught there. His work spans portrait busts, monuments, and mythological and allegorical sculpture.
Houdon’s sculpture is represented in major collections including the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Musée Fabre. He worked for patrons in France and abroad, including Catherine II of Russia, and maintained connections with Enlightenment figures and American diplomats in Paris.
Tom Roberts
Tom Roberts, March 8, 1856–September 14, 1931, was an English-born Australian painter. Born in Dorchester, Dorset, he emigrated to Melbourne with his family in 1869. He studied at the National Gallery School under Thomas Clark and at the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1881 to 1884.
Returning to Melbourne in 1885, Roberts painted landscapes, portraits, and scenes of rural work. He worked with Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, and Charles Conder in the group known as the Heidelberg School, and helped organize the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition in 1889. He later painted the opening of Australia’s first Commonwealth Parliament.
Roberts spent much of 1903–1923 in England before settling permanently at Kallista, Victoria, where he continued painting landscapes until his final years. He died there in 1931. His works are held by the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps
Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, March 3, 1803–August 22, 1860, was a French painter and printmaker born in Paris. He studied with Étienne Bouhot and Abel de Pujol and developed his technique through independent study.
Decamps traveled to the eastern Mediterranean in 1828. His paintings of Ottoman subjects attracted attention at the Paris Salon of 1831. He also made hunting scenes, landscapes, animal subjects, drawings and lithographs.
Decamps worked in Paris and Fontainebleau and participated in the Exposition Universelle of 1855. He died at Fontainebleau in 1860. His works are held by the Wallace Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other public collections.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, March 1, 1848–August 3, 1907, was an Irish- and American-born sculptor who became one of the leading figures in late nineteenth-century American art. Born in Dublin and raised in New York, he trained as a cameo cutter before studying art in Paris and Rome, where he absorbed both classical and Renaissance models that shaped his mature style.
After returning to the United States, Saint-Gaudens built a distinguished career as a sculptor of public monuments, portrait reliefs, and ideal figures. His major works include the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston, Standing Lincoln in Chicago, the Adams Memorial in Washington, and the Sherman Monument in New York, and he also designed the celebrated 1907 twenty-dollar gold piece.
In his later years Saint-Gaudens worked from Cornish, New Hampshire, while continuing to supervise important public and private commissions. His art combined technical refinement, historical seriousness, and a strong sense of form, and his monuments and reliefs helped define the highest ambitions of American sculpture at the turn of the twentieth century.
William Degouve de Nuncques
William Degouve de Nuncques, February 28, 1867–March 1, 1935, was a Belgian painter born in Monthermé, France. His family settled in Brussels in 1874. After briefly attending the art academy in Ixelles, he developed largely through independent study. Jan Toorop and Henry de Groux were important early associates, and he shared a studio with de Groux.
He exhibited as a guest at the final Les XX exhibition in 1893 and subsequently at La Libre Esthétique. In 1894 he married the painter Juliette Massin, whose sister was married to Émile Verhaeren. His work included Symbolist nocturnes in oil and pastel, Mediterranean landscapes painted during his stay in Mallorca from 1899 to 1902, and Belgian winter landscapes.
After living in the Netherlands during the First World War, he returned to Belgium in 1919. Following Massin’s death that year, he stopped painting for several years. He later settled in Stavelot, where he died. His works are held by the Kröller-Müller Museum, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Musée d’Orsay, and Centraal Museum.
Frederick Catherwood
Frederick Catherwood, February 27, 1799–September 27, 1854, was an English artist, architect and explorer born in Hoxton, London. He trained with the architect Michael Meredith and attended classes at the Royal Academy, where he encountered the teaching of John Soane. He subsequently studied ancient architecture in Italy, Greece and Egypt and worked with Joseph Bonomi.
Catherwood traveled through Central America and Yucatan with the American writer John Lloyd Stephens in 1839–1840 and 1841–1842. His drawings of Maya architecture and sculpture supplied illustrations for Stephens’s travel books, published in 1841 and 1843. In 1844 he published Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, a folio of 25 lithographs based on his drawings.
In his later years Catherwood worked on railway projects in British Guiana, Panama and California. He died in the sinking of the steamship Arctic off Newfoundland in 1854. His surviving drawings are held by the Brooklyn Museum, Yale Center for British Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art; his published images remain records of Maya monuments before subsequent deterioration and restoration.
Giuseppe De Nittis
Giuseppe De Nittis, February 25, 1846 – August 21, 1884, was an Italian painter born in Barletta. He studied drawing with Giovanni Battista Calò and Vincenzo Dattoli, then attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. He joined the Scuola di Resina and became associated with Adriano Cecioni and the Macchiaioli.
He moved to Paris in 1868, worked with the dealer Adolphe Goupil, and exhibited at the Salon. His subjects included landscapes, city streets, and contemporary social life, painted in oil and pastel. A friend of Edgar Degas, he participated in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and also painted views of London.
De Nittis spent his final months in France and died at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1884, aged thirty-eight. His work is held by the Pinacoteca Giuseppe De Nittis in Barletta, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer, February 24, 1836–September 29, 1910, was an American painter, watercolorist, and illustrator born in Boston and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He apprenticed with the lithographer John H. Bufford, later studied briefly at the National Academy of Design, and took painting lessons from Frédéric Rondel. He moved to New York in 1859 and worked as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, reporting on the Civil War.
Homer painted scenes of military life, rural communities, children, fishing, and the coast. He visited France in 1866–1867, began working extensively in watercolor in 1873, and ended his magazine illustration work in 1875. He lived in Cullercoats, England, in 1881–1882, where he depicted the local fishing community.
In 1883 Homer settled at Prouts Neck, Maine, continuing to make painting trips to the Adirondacks, Canada, Bermuda, Florida, and the Caribbean. He worked there until his death in 1910. His paintings and watercolors are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Clark Art Institute.
