Van Gogh • Artist Biographies • Edward Lamson Henry
Edward Lamson Henry
| Birth Year : | 1841 |
| Death Year : | 1919 |
| Country : | US |
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Edward Lamson Henry was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia before going to Paris in 1860. There he studied for a while at the Academie Gleyre under Corot, at about the same time as did Renoir and Monet. He then traveled to Florence and Rome before returning to the United States in 1863. For the next two years, he sketched realistic Civil War scenes of soldiers and encampments. After the war, and after his election to the National Academy, he set up a studio in New York and specialized in anecdotal, narrative and historical genre paintings of New York, Philadelphia and, frequently the antebellum South -- often successfully reconstructing moments that occurred before he was born.
His carefully structured compositions allow an easy comprehension of the story portrayed. Extremely popular and successful, Henry had a long and satisfying career until his death in 1919. The source of Henry's popularity lay in his ability to recreate the past of America in historical scenes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was popular as well for his studies of life around his homes on Long Island and in the Catskills.