This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| An artist who claims to have painted from life "the portraits of seven Presidents of Republics and two Popes, August Benziger was born in Switzerland but followed his father to New York City where the father moved in 1852. His father was the head of a famous publishing company, which had been publishers to the papacy in Rome for 400 years, and he went to America to establish a branch of the publishing house.
August Benziger studied art in Munich and Vienna, but his father discouraged him from an art career and steered him towards chemistry. Benziger took "leave of the paternal roof" and went to live with a friend of his father's in Paris. Shortly thereafter, he did a portrait of the host, and it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. This led him to study with William Bouguereau and then with Leon Bonnat at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
Among Benziger's notable subjects are American Presidents McKinley, Taft and Roosevelt, and financial tycoon J.P. Morgan and Charles Schwab. For the Senate Wing of the United States Capitol Building, he did an oil portrait of Senator Shelby M. Cullom, a chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Source:
Charles Fairman, Art and Artists of the Capitol of the United States of America, P. 356-357
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