James Fairman

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James Fairman in uniform during the Civil War

James Fairman (* 1826 in Glasgow , Scotland , United Kingdom ; † March 12, 1904 in Brooklyn , New York City ) was an American officer in the United States Army in the Civil War , landscape painter , art teacher and art critic .

Life

Fairman was the grandson of the Swedish medalist Carl Gustaf Fehrmann (1746-1798) and the younger of two sons of the officer Laurenz Fehrman, who had fought under Jean Baptiste Bernadotte in the coalition wars, had fled from Sweden to Scotland after Bernadotte changed sides and in Glasgow Mary Farquharson Black had married. He lost his father at a young age. The widowed Scottish mother decided in 1832 to emigrate to New York City with her two sons. In 1842, Fairman, who under the guidance of his older brother had shown talent for drawing at an early age, began to attend the National Academy of Design , initially only in evening classes, then for about 18 months as a regular student. There he was promoted by the history and portrait painter Frederick Styles Agate (1803-1844). First he learned watercolor painting , then he was trained in the techniques of oil painting . At the age of 18 he started his apprenticeship as a bookbinder at Harper’s in Manhattan .

In 1851 he went on a stormy sea voyage to London to visit the Great Exhibition . He later referred to the pictures exhibited there as his "revelation". In the next ten years of his life, which he characterized in retrospect as "provisional and preparatory," he was involved in the abolitionism movement in the United States . In doing so, he discovered his talent for speaking. He attended a course from the New York attorney Edward Delafield Smith (1826-1878) to learn to argue better. In order to “search for religious truth” he was also instructed in Latin and “New Testament Greek”. When a political dispute broke out in New York City in 1858 over whether to remove Bible teaching from the public school curriculum, Fairman successfully ran for the Party of Continuing Bible Teaching. He won a seat on the responsible committee of New York City and then sought - but unsuccessfully - to get a seat in the United States Congress .

The contacts he made in the political environment later helped him in his military career. When the Civil War broke out in April 1861 , he immediately became captain of Company B of the 10th New York Volunteers. However, after four weeks he was released because he was said to have tried to recruit his own regiment. The rest of the year he tried to recruit the 4th Excelsior Regiment for Daniel E. Sickles . After he had barely achieved success in this activity, he applied to McComb's Plattsburg (97th New York) Regiment. There he was committed to the rank of colonel . After only three weeks of training, this unit set up in March 1862 under George B. McClellan took part in the peninsula campaign . During the siege of Yorktown , Virginia , in 1862, there were four military trials against Fairman over disputes with subordinate officers . In one of these proceedings, he was reprimanded because he had insulted his superior William High Keim as a "Pennsylvania Dutchman who has no idea and only owes his position to political influence". When disputes and criticism of Fairman's leadership style continued, he was asked to resign, which he then submitted. On September 25, 1862 he was discharged from the army.

Eagle Cliff, Manchester-by-the-Sea

Then Fairman turned back to the brush and easel and opened his own studio in New York City . One of the first works to emerge was the painting Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way , inspired by the Manifest Destiny ideology , which he immediately presented to John C. Frémont , a prominent politician of the Radical Republicans . Until 1871 he sent exhibitions of the National Academy of Design and the Society of Painters in Watercolor with his works. Several disputes, in which he was also involved as an artist, cemented his reputation for being a contentious outsider. In addition to painting, he was active in literature and gave lectures, around 1867 on behalf of the Cooper Union . His painting Sunset in the Androscoggin Valley, Maine won first prize at an exhibition in St. Louis in 1867 .

View of Jerusalem , 1871

In 1871 he left the United States. He traveled to Europe and from the end of 1871 stayed for several months in Palestine . Attracted by the Düsseldorf school of painting , in particular Adolph Tidemand , Carl Johann Lasch , Ludwig Knaus , Eduard Gebhardt , the brothers Andreas and Oswald Achenbach , August Weber and August Leu , he went to Düsseldorf in 1872 , where he settled down for the next three years Atelier opened. In March 1872 he was one of the signatories of a charity campaign by Düsseldorf artists in favor of those affected by the Great Fire of Chicago . He then moved to Paris , where he also stayed for three years, and also to London . He therefore spent the 1870s - apart from short trips home to the United States to sell his paintings - exclusively in the Old World. During this time he traveled to France , Belgium , Norway and various parts of the UK. The exhibitions, which took place in larger cities on the American east coast during his home visits, were media-effective events to which Fairman invited journalists and at which he gave lectures with a populist concept. In these lectures, which were primarily aimed at an audience of art laypeople, he regularly did not fail to attack the established and academic art scene.

In 1881 Fairman returned to the United States and briefly settled in Chicago . For one year he took on a teaching position at Olivet College in Olivet (Michigan) . He then moved back to New York City, where he died in his studio in 1904 and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery .

Fairman's painting is shaped by the romantic approach to landscape of the 19th century. In terms of fine painting, he avoided traces of brushstrokes on his paintings. His special handling of sunlight prompted art historians to locate him in Luminism .

literature

Web links

Commons : James Fairman  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eduard Maria Oettinger: Moniteur des dates. Biographical-genealogical-historical world register. Ludwig Denicke, Leipzig 1869, p. 70 ( books.google.de ).
  2. ↑ Thomas P. Lowry: Curmudgeons, Drunkards and Outright Fools. Courts-Martials of Civil War Union Colonels . University of Nebraska Press, Mechanicsburg / Pennsylvania 1997, pp. 141-143 ( books.google.de ).
  3. ↑ 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. 430
  4. ↑ Düsseldorfer Volksblatt , issue No. 33 of March 16, 1872 ( digitized version ).
  5. ↑ Gerald M. Ackerman, p. 76 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Fairman, James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Civil War officer, landscape painter, art teacher, and art critic
DATE OF BIRTH 1826
PLACE OF BIRTH Glasgow , Scotland , United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1904
Place of death Brooklyn , New York City