Lemuel Everett Wilmarth (1853-1918) was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1835, and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Lemuel Everett Wilmarth was trained as a watchmaker. Though he pursued this craft for a time, he doggedly studied art at night, first in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and later at the National Academy of Design in New York City.

Wilmarth turned permanently to art in 1859 and went to Germany to study in the Munich Royal Academy of the Fine Arts. After three and a half years in Munich, he went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and was the first American to study under the famous painter Gerome. He remained two and a half years. Wilmarth's genre scenes, perhaps influenced by his earlier profession, were meticulously detailed and exactingly finished. On his return to the United States, he became active in teaching and organizing classes at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts. Because of this work, he was made the first full-time instructor in the National Academy of Design School.

The history of art institutions in America has been marked by the conflict between the desire for respectability and the admiration of independence. The National Academy of Design, for instance, wasfounded as a reaction against the American Academy of the Fine Arts, but it has been the source of further offshoots over the years. Wilmarth himself, despite his position, accompanied a group of dissident National Academy students away from the Academy between 1875 and 1877. After that brief rebellion, he returned to stay with the Academy until 1889. He died in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York.

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