This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Birge Harrison has been described
as one of America's leading tonalist painters. His specialties
became
moonlit landscapes, pueblos, and Indian genre, but unlike many of his
Impressionist contemporaries, who liked to paint "en plein air," he
painted from memory and preferred a muted palette. He was
one of
the first generation of painters and teachers in the Woodstock, New
York art colony, which under his influence became a center of
Tonalist-style painting. He also became a part of the Byrdcliffe
Arts Colony,
affiliated with the Arts and Crafts Movement. In the 1880s, he
did
illustrations for Scribner's, magazine, which sent him on travels
around the world.
He first enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy
of Fine Arts and advised by John Singer Sargent, went to Paris in 1875.
He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with Alexander Cabanel, and in the
atelier of Carolus Duran. Then he traveled world wide for Scribner's
including to India, Australia, and the South Seas.
In England
he was influenced by the atmospheric effects of the works of John Crome
and John Constable, and he concluded that the highest achievement in
modern art was landscape painting.
He returned to New York,
where he taught landscape painting and was Director at the Art Students
League. Stressing the importance of the big vision and atmospheric
effects and mood in landscape painting, he founded the Woodstock Art Colony and made his home in that picturesque Dutch region of the
Catskills. He also painted New York City scenes and snow scenes.
From
1880, he made several trips West, living briefly in Espanola, New
Mexico and Santa Barbara, California. From 1906 to 1911, he served as
Director of a summer school at Woodstock under a program run by the Art
Students League, and he was credited with being a major positive
influence on the development of the Woodstock Art Colony.
Exhibitions include:
Expo Universale, Paris, 1889 (medal); Columbian Exposition (Chicago),
1893; Buffalo Exposition, 1901; Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St Louis), 1904; Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.
Collection: Luxembourg Museum (Paris).
Sources include:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
http://www.museum.cornell.edu/byrdcliffe/
Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940
| |
Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:
| BIRGE HARRISON (1854-1929)
Lovell Birge Harrison was a classically-trained artist, critic, and instructor who began his art studies at the Philadelphia Sketch Club and at the newly-founded school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, under the tutelage of Thomas Eakins. As a young man, Harrison and his two brothers, Alexander and Butler, expressed a strong desire to pursue careers as professional artists. Their father, Apollos Harrison, was a man of letters who had been a successful merchant prior to the outbreak of the Civil War and who later in life became an expert in horticulture, working as the Secretary and Treasurer of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. He clearly was interested in the fine and performing arts, but for monetary and cultural reasons he preferred that his sons find careers away from the struggles of the studio artist.
Nonetheless, Harrison enrolled in Eakins' classes at the Philadelphia Sketch Club and was one of a small group of first students to enjoy the rigorous training at the Pennsylvania Academy. Through his friendship with the portrait painter and well-known engraver, John Sartain, and because of the growing acceptance of the role of studio artists, Harrison was allowed by his father to continue his studies abroad at the studio of Carolus-Duran, who had also taught John Singer Sargent. In fact, it was Sargent who encouraged Harrison to study under the Frenchman.
Harrison's time in France was quite productive, and he exhibited a steady growth of skill. He continued his training at the artist's colony at Grez sur-Loing, and began to exhibit his works at the Paris Salon exhibitions, soon receiving one of the greatest honors for any student, when the French government purchased his painting titled November, shown at the Salon of 1881.
The artist traveled extensively over the next decade, touring the globe with stops in Japan, Australia, and throughout Europe. When he returned to the United States, Harrison, along with his first wife, Eleanor, spent several years in California and also made frequent visits to Charleston, South Carolina, and Quebec, Canada. The exact location and date of Sunburst at Sea are unknown, but this work has much in common with other views of the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina which offered one of Harrison's preferred vistas. Harrison was extremely fond of the city and he visited often in the years after 1908.
In terms of date, it is likely that Sunburst at Sea is one of a series of large-scale exhibition pastels Harrison executed between 1913 and 1915, when he was suffering from a bout of silver poisoning. His ailment rendered him unable to paint in oil, and he used the time to investigate alternate ways of expressing his art. Harrison was a devoted student of various media and their supports, and he outlined his particular interest in pastel in a 1915 article for Art and Progress:
During the past two years I have produced a series of paintings in pastel which are as sound and lasting as the best oil paintings while retaining the exquisite bloom and atmospheric quality which is the distinctive beauty of the pastel, a quality which is due, of course, to its soft-dry, unreflecting surface. ... After much search I discovered a gray paper almost identical to that used by Latour himself, which is still manufactured in France and imported from that country by certain New York color-men. Roberta Sokolitz
This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin Galleries, LLC.
|
Biography from Blake Benton Fine Art, Artists G - K:
| Born
in Philadelphia in 1854, Birge Harrison received his early artistic
instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1876 he met
John Singer Sargent in Philadelphia at the Centennial Exposition. Advised by him
to continue his studies under Sargent's own master, Carolus-Duran,
Harrison left for Paris in 1876. He enrolled in Carolus-Duran's atelier
in August 1877, and the following year attended Alexandre Cabanel's
classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
In 1882 Harrison received
official recognition when Novembre became one of the first paintings to
be purchased by the French government. At this time he spent his
summers working in Brittany and Giverny in Normandy. He traveled
extensively in India, Australia, Asia and Africa during which time he
did illustrative work for Scribner's, Century and Harper's magazine.
Upon returning to the United States, he painted tonalist-style landscapes and city scenes. A
critic once said "Harrison understood the narrative content in order to
emphasize the landscape's decorative and emotional elements. He
imparted a theme of transience in his works by the barrenness imparted
in his paintings." Often this melancholy mood was reinforced by a
solitary figure, often pensive and withdrawn.
Harrison then
left his early style of Tonalism for a more plein-air impressionist picked
up from Jules Bastien-Lepage with whom he studied with at Pont-Aven.
Then came another major breakthrough in his style when he was shown by
an unidentified Scandinavian painter the "secret of atmospheric
painting...[and] made clear to me... the importance of Vibration and
refraction in landscape painting."
In 1905, Harrison helped found
the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock, New York, and was later
credited as being one of the founding members of that art colony. Harrison was elected to
the National Academy of Design in 1910, the most prestigious honor that
could be bestowed on an American artist. He exhibited regularly at the
Society of American Artists, the National Academy of Design and the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1889 until his death in
Woodstock in 1928.
He became known for landscapes, cityscapes of New
York and Los Angeles, scense of Quebec, street scenes, and Indians.
|
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Birge Harrison is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exhibition 1915
Tonalism
|