Henry Inman (painter)

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Henry Inman , photo by Mathew B. Brady , circa 1845

Henry Inman (born October 20, 1801 in Utica , New York , † January 17, 1846 in New York City ) was an American portrait , miniature , genre , history and landscape painter .

Life

Inman was born in Utica, the son of English immigrants. His father was a brewer. In Utica, where he came into contact with portrait painting through a traveling portrait painter who gave him his first drawing lessons, the Inmans family was one of the first European immigrants. In 1812 she moved to New York City. From 1814 to 1820, Inman was a student of the portrait painter John Wesley Jarvis .

In 1821 he toured Louisiana with Jarvis . They stayed in New Orleans for a while. In 1822 he married Jane Riker O'Brian (1796–1873). The couple had six children, including the later portrait, genre and landscape painter John O'Brian Inman (1828-1896) and the later journalist and author Henry Inman (1837-1899). Together with Thomas Seir Cummings , who had previously been his student, he opened a portrait painting studio in New York City that same year. The partners divided their assignments, with Inman painting the portraits and Cummings painting the miniatures. In 1825/1826 Inman and Cummings were among the founders of the National Academy of Design , of which Inman served as its first vice president until 1831. In the years 1839 to 1842 and 1844 he held this office again.

Sequoyah , c. 1830, National Portrait Gallery (Washington)
Angelica Singleton Van Buren (Mrs. Abraham Van Buren) , 1842, White House Collection

In 1831/1832 Inman was a partner of the engraver and lithographer Cephas Childs , who helped him to market his portraits as prints. He lived in and near Philadelphia for about two years, teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts . In 1834 he served as director of this academy. For a short time he owned a farm in the nearby township of Mount Holly, New Jersey, which he sold again because he returned to New York with his family in 1834.

In the course of the economic crisis of 1837 he got into financial difficulties when it became apparent that he had speculated about land purchases. In 1844, accompanied by a daughter, he went on a long postponed trip to Great Britain , in order to do lucrative portrait commissions in London, including two portraits for the poet William Wordsworth , and to study landscapes in northern England and Scotland.

In 1845 he came home from this trip and died a few months later, suffering from chronic asthma for years . He left behind the commission for the monumental history painting The Emigration of Daniel Boone to Kentucky , which he wanted to create for the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington on the basis of already made sketches . On the day of his funeral, many people attended his funeral procession in the streets of Manhattan. A month later, the sale of 126 paintings after a memorial exhibition resulted in an amount of about $ 2,000 (around $ 60,000 in today's purchasing power) to support his widow and six children.

Inman was one of the most important American portraitists of his time. In the 1830s and early 1840s he was one of New York's most sought-after portrait painters. Of particular importance are the over one hundred copies of portraits of indigenous people from North America , which he created after originals by Charles Bird King and others for the purposes of lithographic reproduction as illustrations for Thomas L. McKenney's book History of the Indian Tribes of North America .

In addition to Thomas Seir Cummings and his son John O'Brian Inman, there were Frederick William Herring (1821–1899, son of James Herring ), Charles Wesley Jarvis (1812–1868, son of his teacher John Wesley Jarvis), Daniel Huntington , Thomas Le Clear ( 1818–1882), Edward Ludlow Mooney , William Sidney Mount and William Henry Powell among his students.

literature

  • William H. Gerdts : The Art of Henry Inman . National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 1987.
  • Inman, Henry . In: Matthew Baigell: Dictionary of American Art . Harper & Row, New York 1979, ISBN 0-06-433254-3 , p. 180.
  • William H. Gerdts: Henry Inman. Genre painter . In: The American Art Journal , 9, No. 1 (May 1977), pp. 26-48.
  • Inman, Henry . In: George C. Groce, David H. Wallace: The New-York Historical Society's Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564-1860 . Yale University Press, New Haven 1957, p. 340.
  • Theodore Bolton: Henry Inman. An Account of His Life and Work . In: The Art Quarterly , 3 (Fall 1940), pp. 353-375.

Web links

Commons : Henry Inman  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kevin J. Avery (et al.): American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art . Volume 1: A Catalog of Works of Artists before 1830 . Yale University Press, New Haven 2002, ISBN 0-300-09372-1 , p. 318 ( Google Books )
personal data
SURNAME Inman, Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH October 20, 1801
PLACE OF BIRTH Utica , New York
DATE OF DEATH January 17, 1846
Place of death New York City