William Henry Furness (painter)

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William Henry Furness junior (* 1827 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † March 4, 1867 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American portrait painter from the Düsseldorf School .

Life

Charles Sumner , 1856

Furness, the eldest of four children of the Unitarian preacher and abolitionist William Henry Furness (1802–1896) and his wife Annis Pullen Jenks Furness (1802–1885), was the brother of the translator for German literature Annis Lee Furness Wister (1830–1908), des Shakespeare scholar Horace Howard Furness and the architect Frank Heyling Furness (1839–1912). After school he started to work in a counting room. When he told his father after a year that he was tired of this work, the latter encouraged him to pursue his interests and take up the profession of painter, whereupon Furness began without having completed an academic degree. As a portrait painter, he first worked in Philadelphia and shortly afterwards in Brooklyn . In 1850 he settled in Boston. In those early days, Furness only painted with crayons , and enjoyed the popularity of many distinguished citizens in Philadelphia and Boston. The critic Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1813–1871) said that his painting in this technique was similar to that of Seth Wells Cheney (1810–1856).

In 1852 Furness went to Europe. In 1853 and 1854 he lived in Düsseldorf and took private lessons with the German-American history painter Emanuel Leutze during this time . In 1853 he also studied under Heinrich Mücke at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . In the same year he was a member of the artists' association Malkasten . With Worthington Whittredge at the helm, with Enoch Wood Perry , John Beaufain Irving II., Henry Lewis and William Dickinson Washington , all friends from the Düsseldorf colony of American painters, he went on a sociable study trip to the Nahe during this time . He also visited Dresden , Munich and Venice . On October 9, 1859, he married Hannah Kay (1836-1897) in Philadelphia. He seems to have lived there with her until the end of 1863 or early 1864. The couple had a daughter. By spring 1864 at the latest, Furness moved into the studio in the Boston Studio Building . It was in this studio house that he met Elihu Vedder . In the remaining years of his life he moved between Boston and Philadelphia. From 1860 to 1865 and in 1867, the year he died, he took part in annual exhibitions at the National Academy of Design in New York City , as well as exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts , the Artists' Fund Society in Philadelphia, the Boston Athenæum and Washington ( DC) Art Association . Posthumously, some of Furness' oil portraits were shown in the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 .

literature

Web links

Commons : William Henry Furness Jr.  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Naomi Tanabe Uechi: Evolving Transcendentalism in Literature and Architecture. Frank Furness, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright . Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne 2013, ISBN 978-1-4438-4288-4 , p. 12 ( Google Books )
  2. ↑ Bettina Baumgärtel , Sabine Schroyen, Lydia Immheiser, 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
  3. ↑ John IH Baur (Ed.): The autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, 1820-1910 . Brooklyn Museum Press, Brooklyn 1942, p. 30 ( digitized version )
  4. ↑ Hannah Kay Furness , website in the findagrave.com portal , accessed on May 12, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Furness, William Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Furness, William Henry Junior (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American portrait painter from the Düsseldorf School
DATE OF BIRTH 1827
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH March 4, 1867
Place of death Boston , Massachusetts