Edward L. Custer

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Edward Luke Custer (born January 24, 1837 in Basel , canton Basel-Stadt , † January 9, 1881 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American painter who is assigned to the Düsseldorf School and Pre-Raphaelism .

Life

Lake Scene , 1875, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Samuel Foster Haven , 1878

Custer was the adopted son of the Frankfurt- born, homeopathic doctor Emil Custer (1820-1896) and the biological son of his Basel-born wife Nannette Tollmann-Spann (1813-1889), a trained pianist who made her first Marriage to the Vienna- born painter Michael Heinrich Spann (1806–1843) had three children. The family emigrated to the United States in the fall of 1846 . They settled in Syracuse , New York in 1847 , and in Manchester , New Hampshire in 1848 , where Custer's father was a doctor. Already in school, Custer stood out for his talent for drawing. As early as 1848 he exhibited his first paintings in the Boston Athenæum , which were still awkward scenes with farms and rural life. His parents sent him to Europe to study art , where he enrolled at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1860 . The Nazarene Andreas Müller and his assistant Ludwig Heitland were his teachers there until 1861 . In 1861 he went on a study trip to Basel, where he had members of his family. In May 1862, Custer graduated from the Munich Art Academy . In Munich he also took lessons from the Swiss landscape painter Johann Gottfried Steffan .

In 1863 he returned to Manchester. The following year, on May 2, 1864, he married his childhood sweetheart, Ruth Ann Porter (1837–1878), a Vermont- born teacher who worked at a local school. The couple then moved to Boston, where Custer opened a studio and made a living mainly from portraiture . His clients included the politicians Moody Currier , Colby Cheney , Frederick Smyth and Alonzo G. Smith as well as the anthropologist Samuel Foster Haven (1806-1881) and the physician John Barnard Swett Jackson (1806-1879). In addition, Custer was a passionate landscape painter , who developed a seemingly poetic colorism and detail realism with botanical accuracy in his pictures . He also created genre scenes , animal pictures and still lifes . He also tried his hand at history painting. He sent his works to the Boston Athenæum until 1869, as well as the National Academy of Design in New York City and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia . Accompanied by his wife, he went on a one-year trip to Europe in 1870, during which the couple visited various cities, museums and galleries in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. After his wife died of tuberculosis on February 12, 1878 after a two-year illness, Custer traveled to Europe again for a year. In May 1880 he married his second wife, Mary L. McClure of Cambridge , Massachusetts. Their marriage was short-lived as he died of a stroke on January 9, 1881, at the age of almost 44, after previously suffering from severe headaches. Custer was buried in Valley Cemetery in Manchester at the side of his first wife, whose portrait he had captured in a souvenir picture in 1880.

literature

  • George F. Willey (Ed.): State Builders: An Illustrated Historical and Biographical Record of the State of New Hampshire at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century . The New Hampshire Publishing Corporation, Manchester / New Hampshire 1903, pp. 380-381 ( digitized version ).
  • Art and Artists of Manchester . Manchester Historic Association Collections, Manchester / New Hampshire 1908, Volume IV, Part 1, pp. 116–117.
  • Custer, Edward L. In: Ulrich Thieme (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists from Antiquity to the Present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 8 : Coutan-Delattre . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1912, p. 218 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  • George C. Groce, David H. Wallace (Eds.): The New-York Historical Society's dictionary of artists in America, 1564-1860 . Yale University Press, New Haven 1957, p. 160.
  • Emmanuel Bénézit : Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays . Gründ, Paris 1976, Volume III, p. 302.

Web links

Commons : Edward L. Custer  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. No. 257 in the finding aid 212.01.04 Student lists of the Düsseldorf Art Academy , website in the archive.nrw.de portal ( North Rhine-Westphalia State Archive )
  2. ↑ 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. 428
  3. ↑ 01846 Eduard Custer , registration of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich
  4. ↑ “People You Should Know… Portraits from the Collection” . Special exhibit in the Millyard Museum's Charles F. Whittemore Discovery Gallery, Manchester / New Hampshire 2013, explanations on portraits No. 7 (self-portrait) and No. 8 (Nannette Tollmann-Spann Custer), PDF
  5. ^ Aurore Eaton: Edward Custer: A life lived for the sake of art . Article dated October 21, 2013 on newhampshire.com , accessed February 25, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Custer, Edward L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Custer, Edward Luke (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1837
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel , Canton Basel-Stadt
DATE OF DEATH January 9, 1881
Place of death Boston , Massachusetts