Alexander Lawrie

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Alexander Lawrie (born February 25, 1828 in New York City , † February 15, 1917 in Wabash Township in Tippecanoe County near West Lafayette , Indiana ) was an American landscape and portrait painter from the Düsseldorf School and the Hudson River School .

Life

Alexander Lawrie, one of six children of the merchant Alexander Lawrie Sr., who immigrated to New York from Scotland, and his American wife Sarah Coombes Lawrie, daughter of Captain Andrew Coombes of the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War , grew up early through his mother's hobby, flower painting Contact with art. His parents, however, vehemently contradicted his longing to become a painter. In 1842, however, they allowed him to do an apprenticeship with a New York wood engraver , which lasted until 1852. During the last few years of this apprenticeship, he learned to paint and draw portraits with crayons. He also studied at the National Academy of Design for some time . In 1852, around the time his parents, sister Mary, and brother Arthur moved to Wolf Mound Farm in White County, Indiana , a farm that Lawrie's brother John had chosen as the new family home in 1850 or 1851, Alexander Lawrie left to Philadelphia , where he established himself as a professional portrait painter and attended exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1852 and 1854 .

On August 11, 1855, Lawrie boarded  the SS Ariel steamship to Europe with his friend William Trost Richards . After a short time in Paris , Lawrie traveled on to Düsseldorf , at that time a preferred training location for American painters. There Lawrie took private lessons for 22 months with the German-American history painter Emanuel Leutze , who had become famous for the painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, created in 1851 . Like the Philadelphia landscape painter William Stanley Haseltine , who also went to Leutzes studio for training from 1855, Lawrie was a member of the Düsseldorf artists' association Malkasten in 1856/1857 . After a study trip to Florence , Lawrie returned to Philadelphia in October 1857 and resumed his painting there.

In 1860 Lawrie enrolled at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts as a student. On April 18, 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War , he signed up for three months as a volunteer with the 17th Infantry Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers in the Union Army . A good year after the end of this voluntary service, he enlisted on September 5, 1862 for an officer service with the 121st Infantry Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers. As captain of Company B, he fought in December 1862 in the Battle of Fredericksburg . Between January 20 and 25, 1863 Lawries Regiment took part in the so-called "Mud March" , a march operation accompanied by continuous rainy weather under the command of General Ambrose Burnside , which took place on muddy ground in the lowland of the Rappahannock River . Lawrie caught a bad cold , as a result of which he suffered from chronic kidney disease. Due to a medically certified unfit for military service, he was honorably discharged from military service on June 21, 1863.

In a recreational stay at Lake George (New York) , which he began in June 1863, he met some landscape painters from the Hudson River School . With Asher Brown Durand , one of the “fathers” of this group, he developed a particularly close artistic relationship in the following years. Richards, with whom he had traveled to Europe together in 1855 and with whom he had shared a studio since returning to Philadelphia, was also one of his closest circle during this time. Until 1864 he spent the summers in Elizabethtown (New York), the capital of Essex County in the Adirondack Mountains . In October 1864 he moved to New York City, where he stayed until 1878 , apart from a few trips to Philadelphia and summer stays in the Adirondacks and in the Hudson Valley areas . This time marks the zenith of his artistic work. With the exception of 1867 and 1874, he took part regularly in the exhibitions of the National Academy of Design until 1877. His paintings Autumn in the Hudson Highlands and Monk Playing a Violoncello were exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 .

In 1878, orders for portraiture, which he had increasingly turned to in the 1870s, declined so much in the wake of the founding crisis that Lawrie decided to move to Hartford (Connecticut) , where he stayed until 1881 despite the hardly better order situation . Then he lived in Indiana until 1887, interrupted by stays in New York (1884), Chicago (1885, 1886) and Battle Creek (1886). From August 1887 to 1895 he lived again in New York City, with the exception of a six-month, economically disappointing winter stay in Denver (1890/1891). After living in Indiana for a few years with his brother Arthur, with whom he eventually fell out, he returned to New York again. On July 18, 1898, he was given a place in a home for war veterans in Hampton, Virginia , where he lived until April 5, 1900. After a brief stay at Bellevue Hospital in New York, he returned to Indiana for the last time. On January 12, 1902, he was admitted to the Indiana State Soldiers' Home , a veterans home a few miles north of Lafayette, Indiana . Up until his death in 1917, he created over 150 portraits of generals from the War of Independence and Civil War there, mostly based on photographic originals.

In the New York City 1870s, the most successful years of his career, Lawrie was a member of the Athenaeum Club , Century Club, and the Artists' Fund Society. He served the latter as secretary from 1870 to 1873 . He was elected associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1868 (membership until 1874) and again in 1876 (membership until 1882). At their annual exhibition in 1876, his portrait painting Mrs. Henry Marks took a place of honor.

literature

  • Lawrie, Alexander . In: Hermann Alexander Müller : Biographical Artist Lexicon . Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1882, p. 323.
  • Victor E. Gibbens: Alexander Lawrie, Painter . In: Indiana Magazine of History , Volume 40, Issue 1 (March 1944), pp. 33-40 ( online ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bettina Baumgärtel , Sabine Schroyen, Lydia Immerheiser, Sabine Teichgröb: Directory of foreign artists. Nationality, residence and studies in Düsseldorf . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 434
personal data
SURNAME Lawrie, Alexander
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American landscape painter and portrait painter from the Düsseldorf School and the Hudson River School
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1828
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH February 15, 1917
Place of death Wabash Township, Tippecanoe County near West Lafayette , Indiana