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Birge (Lovell) Harrison

Birge Harrison was one of a group of gifted young American painters, among them John Singer Sargent and Abbott Thayer who studied in Paris in the 1870's and later helped to win serious recognition for American art in the eyes of the art world. He was known principally for poetic winter landscapes and street scenes. He was also the pivotal figure in the growth of the art colony at Woodstock, New York, where the Art Students League established a school of landscape painting in 1905. Harrison headed this school.

Harrison was born in Philadelphia in 1854. After school he worked first as a farmer, then went into business with his father for two years. In 1876 he met Sargent, who persuaded him to come to Paris to study art. He stayed in Paris for six years, studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

In 1883, illness forced him to abandon Painting for several years. To regain his health, he traveled widely. On his trips he often wrote and illustrated articles for popular magazines. Harrison admired the work of the French impressionists, but disliked their use of intense color and the aggressiveness of their brushwork. He was far more attuned to the evocative style of the Barbizon painter's.

Harrison had a romantic concept of nature and its moods. He believed nature should be the source of inspiration for artistic expression. He avoided strong contrasts; his edges were soft. In 1909, Harrison published a book, Landscape Painting, which became a standard text for many years. In it he quotes Millet as saying, "Technique should always hide itself modestly behind the thing expressed." He adhered to this theory all through the years that he lived and painted in Woodstock.

Memberships:
National Arts Club
National Institute of Arts and Letters
New York water Color club
Philadelphia sketch Club
'salmagundi Club
Union International des Arts et des Lettres

Public Collections:
Art Institute of Chicago Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee
Detroit Institute of Arts
Philadelphia Museum of Art
St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton

Birge Harrison was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on October 28, 1854. He was the director of the Art Students League in New York and the brother of artist Alexander Harrison. Beginning in 1880, he made the first of several trips to the west, while residing in Woodstock, New York. After a brief stay in Australia, in 1891, he moved to Santa Barbara, California where he would live for the next five years. While there he did some of his most important works and made the transition from figure painter to landscapes. In 1910 he was voted into the National Academy of Fine Arts. He is best known for his moonlit scenes and Native American genre. Harrison died in Woodstock on May 11, 1929.

Biography courtesy of DeRu's Fine Arts, www.antiquesandfineart.com/derus

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