One of the leading Impressionist landscape painters of the early twentieth-century in America, William Posey Silva was born in Savannah, Georgia, where he attended Chatham Academy. He studied engineering at the University of Virginia, and was a partner in his family's hardware and china business in Chattanooga, Tennessee from 1887 to 1907. Then at the age of 48, he left the business and traveled to Paris to study at the Academie Julien and with the artist, Chauncey Ryder, in Picardy, France. During this time, he refined the lyrical Impressionist style that would characterize his work. Silva exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1908, and visited Italy, Spain and England while abroad. Returning to New York in 1910, he studied with Arthur Dow in Massachusetts, and then moved to Washington D.C. form 1911 to 1914, before settling permanently in Carmel, California. During his career, Silva made frequent trips to the Southeast, working in Charleston and Savannah, as well as places in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
While visiting Charleston in the 1920s, he joined other notable artists of the Renaissance era in painting luminous views of Magnolia Plantation, which he evocatively termed the "Garden of Dreams." Silva painted in plein-air, rapidly sketching intimate canvases like these small scenes of Magnolia Gardens, which capture the lushness, colors, and atmosphere of the lowcountry landscape in different moments of time and light.
Biography courtesy of The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/charleston
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