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(b Pittsburgh, PA, May 25, 1874; d Albuquerque, NM, June 6, 1960).

American painter and illustrator. Raised in Dayton, OH, Blumenschein showed an early aptitude for music, art, and sports. Upon graduating from high school, he began training as a musician on a violin scholarship at the Music Academy of Cincinnati. Blumenschein left the Academy after a year and enrolled in the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where he received a prize for illustration in Fernand Harvey Lungren’s class. In 1893, he moved to New York City and enrolled at the Art Students League, where his instructors included John Twachtman and Kenyon Cox. Over the course of the next 15 years, he moved back and forth between New York and Paris, periodically visiting other locales, including Taos, NM, Italy, and Giverny. He twice enrolled at the Académie Julian (1894–6 and 1899), where he studied with Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. In 1905, he married artist Mary Shepard Greene (1869–1958), and, with the birth of their daughter in ...

(b Roxbury, MA, Sept 14, 1867; d New York, NY, Dec 23, 1944).

American illustrator. Gibson’s graphic creation, the “Gibson Girl,” became a symbol of upper-middle-class American womanhood from 1890 to 1914. The Gibson Girl’s appearance and dress were widely imitated and her popularity helped shape social attitudes at a time when women’s roles were undergoing dramatic changes.

Growing up in Massachusetts and New York City, Gibson entered the Art Students League at 16, studying there for two years. In 1885 he left school to make a living as an illustrator. Gibson drew in pen-and-ink, his medium for the rest of his career, but his early sketches were stiff and labored. In 1886 he sold his first drawing for $4 to Life, a weekly humor magazine. Emulating the draftsmanship of the British cartoonists John Leech, Charles Keene, George Du Maurier and Phil(ip William) May, Gibson developed a freer and more economical style. He successfully sold arch scenes of politics and society to Life...

(b Brooklyn, NY, Oct 27, 1877; d White Plains, NY, July 13, 1949).

American painter, illustrator and lithographer. As an organizer of the Armory Show (1913) alongside Arthur B. Davies, he played an integral role in unveiling European modernism to the USA. While he painted landscapes of Maine, Cézanne-inspired still lifes and a series based on the American West, his expressive portraits of circus and vaudeville performers remain his best-known works.

In 1901, he trained at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, but soon transferred to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich where he studied under Barbizon painter Heinrich von Zügel (1850–1941) until 1903. Upon returning to New York in 1903, he worked as an illustrator for publications such as Life and Puck, exhibited at the Salmagundi Club (1905) and organized artists’ balls for the Kit Kat Club. Working in an Impressionist style, he participated with Robert Henri in the Exhibition of Independent Artists (1910)....

(Bainbridge)

(b Norristown, PA, July 5, 1864; d Philadelphia, PA, Nov 20, 1942).

American painter, illustrator and teacher. Born in Norristown, near Philadelphia, McCarter enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1879, at the age of 15. Of the several hundred students who moved through the classes of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy, none would move as far, stylistically and temperamentally, from their teacher as McCarter. Though later he would regard the five years he studied there as “years lost,” his training was sufficient to earn him a post drawing imagery for the Philadelphia Press.

In 1887 McCarter sailed to Europe for further studies under Léon Bonnat and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and an apprenticeship to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the medium of lithography. On his return to the United States, McCarter, grounded in the international style of graphic arts, settled in New York to a prosperous career and continued transatlantic travels as an illustrator for McClure’s, Harper’s, Century...

(b Petersburg, VA, March 20, 1867; d New York, NY, June 29, 1940).

American painter and illustrator. Raised by an invalid mother and largely absent father, Myers lived in Philadelphia, Trenton and Baltimore during his difficult childhood. He moved to New York City in 1881, where he found employment painting signs, interiors and theater screens. Myers began his formal artistic training at Cooper Union in 1887. A year later, he enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied for the next eight years. His most notable instructors were George de Forest Brush and Kenyon Cox, whom Myers described as conservative forces that he reacted against. By the mid-1890s, his artistic output largely consisted of drawings, pastels, watercolors and etchings. He was a fine draftsman who successfully captured the energy of the urban life that he observed in the Lower East Side and other working-class neighborhoods. Gallery owner William Macbeth encouraged him to turn his focus to oils in 1902. Myers subsequently exhibited his paintings at the Macbeth Gallery in ...

(b Wilmington, DE, March 5, 1853; d Florence, Nov 9, 1911).

American illustrator and writer. Along with such figures as Edwin Austin Abbey, Arthur Burdett Frost and Charles Stanley Reinhart, Pyle was instrumental in raising American book and magazine illustration to a higher level, and inaugurating what is often termed the “Golden Age” of American illustration. Pyle was born in Wilmington, DE, counting among his ancestors some of the original Quaker settlers of the place. His mother, who encouraged his interest in literature, art and fantasy, introduced him to fairy tales, as well as to classic stories such as Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. After graduating from high school, Pyle attended a small private art academy in Philadelphia for three years, his only formal training. This was run by a Francis Adolf van der Wielen (b 1847), a graduate of the art academy in Antwerp, who was a stern taskmaster in matters of academic technique.

In 1876, Pyle produced an illustrated article on the wild horses of Chincoteague that was accepted by ...