Frederick A. Chapman

The Perils of our Forefathers . Engraving by John C. McRae based on a model by Chapman (after 1850)

Frederick Augustus Chapman (often spelled Frederic ; born April 18, 1818 in Old Saybrook , Connecticut ; died January 26, 1891 in Brooklyn , New York ) was an American painter .

life and work

Chapman tried his hand at first as a merchant in Boston . Around 1850 he moved to New York to study painting with Samuel FB Morse . In the same year he exhibited works in the gallery of the American Art Union . From 1859 to 1861 he was the first president of the Brooklyn Art Association .

His work is very diverse in the choice of motifs. It includes portraits, but also landscape and history paintings, the best known at the time was probably Washington's Headquarters at Newburgh, New York (1865), which is now in the Union Club of the City of New York is located. Several of his oil paintings depict scenes from the American Civil War ( The Battle of Chancellorsville ), others those from the development of the American West ( Indians Before a Teepee 1868). Several of his pictures were also sold as engravings, such as The Perils of our Forefathers and Raising the Liberty Pole , and some also as color wall picture prints (chromolithographs), such as The Receding Race and The Discovery of the Hudson . He also created some designs for stained glass in Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn. In old age he shifted increasingly to book illustrations.

literature

• Chapman, Frederick Augustus . In: Appleton's Annual Cyclopædia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1891 . D. Appleton & Co., New York 1892. p. 612 (obituary).
• Chapman, Frederic A. In: Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels: The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West . Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1976. p. 109.
• Catrin Ritter: Chapman, Frederic A. . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 18, Saur, Munich a. a. 1997, ISBN 3-598-22758-2 , p. 198.