Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait

The Intruder

1864

William Mason Brown was born in Troy, New York, where he studied for several years with local artists, including the leading portraitist there, Abel Buel Moore. In 1850, he moved to ...

Thomas Fransioli, born in 1906 in Seattle, Washington, trained as an architect at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked as an architect before his service in World War II. Largel...

Joshua Shaw was a farmer’s son, born in Billingborough, Lincolnshire, and orphaned at the age of seven. After a boyhood of privation, he tried a number of occupations, until he finally apprenticed to a sign painter and found his métier. Shaw went to Manchester to study art, and by 1802 was in Bath, painting landscapes. In that year he began to exhibit his work at the Royal Academy in London. Essentially self-taught, Shaw achieved an impressive level of competence and versatility, producing portraits, floral compositions, still lifes, landscapes, and, cattle pieces. Shaw continued to send works for exhibition at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the Suffolk Street Gallery, all in London, until 1841. (Although Shaw is regularly mentioned and frequently illustrated in a host of general books on American art history, as well as included in numerous historical survey exhibitions, the only monographic study of this artist is Miriam Carroll Woods, “Joshua Shaw [1776–1860]: A Study of the Artist and his Paintings” [M.A. thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1971]. Apart from short biographical sketches in various dictionaries and museum collection catalogues, the two most interesting references, both contemporary, are John Sartain’s personal recollections in The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, 1808–1897 [1899; reprint 1969] and an article in Scientific American from August 7, 1869, “Joshua Shaw, Artist and Inventor.” The article quotes extensively from an autobiographical document in the possession of Shaw’s grandson that Shaw prepared for William Dunlap...

Thomas Satterwhite Noble, who studied in France with Thomas Couture for three years, adapted his master’s genre style to American subjects. Born on his parents’ plantation in Kentucky in 1835, Noble was the son of a wealthy rope manufacturer. His early upbringing in Lexington, the center of that state’s slave trade in the antebellum South...

Both spare and dynamic, Karl Hartman’s hyper-saturated countrysides and surreal depictions of Americana perfectly match the vividness of our late-summer h...

Karl Hartman gives primacy to the sparsity of form in his Mid-Western prairie landscapes. Simple and earnest, saturated primary hues and decisive lines ad...

Both spare and dynamic, Karl Hartman’s hyper-saturated countrysides and surreal depictions of Americana perfectly match the vividness of our late-summer heatwave. Hartman’s tightly c...

Both spare and dynamic, Karl Hartman’s hyper-saturated countrysides and surreal depictions of Americana perfectly match the vividness of our late-summer heatwave. Hartman’s tightly c...