This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Submitted by Georg R. Sheets,
Author, Writer, Speaker, Historian
Horace Bonham (1835-1892)
Horace Bonham was admitted to the Bar and worked as a newspaper editor and a congressional aide before he went to Europe in February 1869 to study painting. He visited the great museums, met artists and sketched scenes wherever he traveled.
He acquired a studio in Munich and studied there with an artist he identified in letters home as "Otto". This was the same period in which Gustave Courbet first visited Munich, a city that was rivaling Paris as a Mecca for artists. But it was much later than the visit to Germany of Eastman Johnson, the American painter whose work bears even more likeness to Bonhams painting than some others who painted "real life scenes of real life people."
Late in 1869 Bonham returned to his home in York, Pennsylvania determined to be a painter. He painted portraits of family members and created "genre" scenes, using the common folk who lived around his elegant townhouse near Centre Square as models.He worked through compositions and developed a keen sense of storytelling, completing many sketches and studies before developing canvases with a more finished air, concentrating on facial expression, costume detail and warm painterly tones to set a mood and draw the viewer into the action.
His painting, "Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit," was purchased by the Corcoran Art Museum in 1899 for its permanent collection. This oil painting depicts a group of well-known locals gathered around a platform where apparently a cockfight is in progress. The painter includes himself in the scene distinguished by his formal dress, which includes a top hat and a pair of spectacles poised on his nose for best effect. The other men present are dressed in everyday clothes, many representing lower class occupations. This painting differs from some of the other scenes of its kind in not showing the cockfight and spotlighting the expressions of the thirteen characters looking on.
Bonhams work often reflects a sense of humor and an empathy with his subjects pulled from their daily routines. Examples can be found in his paintings and sketches like, "The Gossips" "The Scissors Grinder," "Threading the Needle." His sketches of residents like the locally famous African- American, Squire Braxton, and the tough looking Billy Bullfrog are also prime examples.
Between 1879 and 1885 Bonham exhibited his work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Academy of Design, New York, the Lydian Art Gallery, Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.The PAFA also has one of his works in its permanent collection.
Horace Bonham and a twin brother, John Milton Bonham, were born on the family farm just west of York on Nov. 26,1835. As a child Bonham was tutored by a Quaker woman and then entered the York County Academy. At age 14 he enrolled in the Dickinson Seminary in Williamsport, PA, and then joined his twin brother at the Wesleyan Institute in Middletown, New York, to prepare for enrollment at Yale. Horace was struck with typhoid fever and then a terrible skin infection and spent months recuperating. He then entered Lafayette College and graduated just after his father died in 1856.
His father wanted him to be a lawyer, and to carry out the parents wish he read law with a local barrister and was admitted to the Bar. Instead of building a practice, however, he purchased a weekly newspaper, "The York Republican." He edited this paper for several years and then started a small daily, "The York Recorder."
His heart was not in newspaper work so he pursued an appointment working with the local congressional district. He served in that position during Lincolns first term in office, but after the President was assassinated, Bonham was replaced by the incoming president in spite of a non-partisan movement to keep Bonham in the office.
After his study tour in Europe in 1869 he married Rebekah Lewis, a birthright Quaker from Baltimore. The couple purchased a home on the main street of town and had four daughters. Mary was born in 1872 but died of meningitis not long after her first birthday. Following Mary were Elizabeth, Amy and Eleanor. Elizabeth, the last surviving daughter, inherited the family home, filled with an accumulation of several generations of family possessions. (On his maternal side Bonham traced his lineage to a passenger on the Mayflower).
When Elizabeth Bonham died in 1965, the house became the property of The Historical Society of York County, now the York County Heritage Trust. The Trust operates the Victorian townhouse as a House Museum. Amidst Bonham Family heirlooms, the public is invited to view the art of Horace Bonham including portraits, "genre scenes," landscapes and other drawings, watercolors, sketches, photographs and illustrations. Still other Bonham works can be seen at the York County Heritage Trust Museum, a five-minute walk east of the Bonham House.
Sources:
Prowell, George R., History of York County, Pennsylvania, Vol. II, J.H. Beers & Co., p. 20, Chicago, 1907.
Fielding, Mantle, Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers From Colonial Times through 1926, Paul A. Stroock, Flushing, NY, 1960.
Sheets, Georg R., To the Setting of the Sun: The Story of York, Pennsylvania, Windsor Publications, Woodland Hills,CA, 1981. (Photograph of Horace Bonham, page 107; Color plate Portrait of daughter, Mary Lewis Bonham, page 162; text references, pages 107,108, 110, 160, 163.
Also:
Conversations, Letters and E-mails with Justine Landis, Manager of the Bonham House Museum, York, Pennsylvania, Nov. 2001.
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