This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Baltimore, Corner became interested in art while a student at Baltimore City College. Having decided upon his life's work and with the warm encouragement of his family, he began his studies under George B. Way, a local landscape painter. Upon graduation from the Maryland Institute, he became a pupil of J. Alden Weir and Kenyon Cox at the Art Students League in New York City. In the fall of 1888 he began studying at the Academy Julien in Paris under Benjamin Constant, Jules Lefebvre and Gabriel Ferrier. The year 1891 found him exhibiting a self portrait at the Paris Salon and also returning to Baltimore where he lived and worked the remainder of his life. Several of his still lifes were in the collection of the Haussner Restaurant in Baltimore.
Real life was quite different from the artistic student life of Paris however, and Corner felt the need for inspiration. "To do creative work," he wrote, "I need some incentive, such as an order, or the novelty and interest excited by some new suggestion or idea." The field of portraiture lent itself quite well to his inquiring personality and natural kindness. Of this profession, Corner once commented: "Portrait painting bears that same relation to ordinary painting as biography does to fiction. A biographer is obliged to stick laboriously to the facts. So is a portrait painter. A man must look like himself."
The artist is said to have stated a year before his death that during the 50 years of his professional activity, he had painted 434 portraits in addition to landscapes, costume studies, still life's and two murals in Baltimore. The artist thus emerged as a chronicler of Baltimore society, and his work is found in state houses, courts, libraries, colleges and hospitals.
"Art was my brother's passion and absorbed his life," wrote Mary Corner in a memoir of her brother, "yet he gave of his time to the city of Baltimore in continued efforts to develop its art appreciation. Because of his interest in youth, and in gratitude for what had been done to help him, he was always willing to draw on his limited time and strength by lecturing or lending pictures."
Written and submitted January 2004 by Edward Bentley, art collector and researcher.
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