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(b. Oakland, CA, 1893; d. Shiraz, Iran, 25 Jan. 1977).

American historian of Iranian art. While studying mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, Ackerman met and eventually married Arthur Upham Pope, with whom she had taken courses in philosophy and aesthetics. In 1926 she and Pope organized the first ever exhibition of Persian art at the Pennsylvania Museum and helped create the First International Congress of Oriental Art. In 1930 Ackerman was stricken with polio but taught herself to walk again. They were instrumental in preparing the 1931 Persian Art Exhibition at Burlington House, London, and the Second International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology, as well as the Third Congress in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1935 and the exhibition of Iranian art at the Iranian Institute in New York in 1940. She visited Iran for the first time in 1964, when the shah of Iran invited Pope to revive the Asia Institute; it was associated with Pahlavi University in Shiraz until ...

(b Beirut, 1925).

Lebanese painter and writer active in the USA. Daughter of a Greek Christian mother and a Syrian Muslim father, Adnan was educated in Lebanon before going on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley. For many years she taught aesthetics at Dominican College, San Rafael, CA; she also lectured and taught at many other colleges and universities. During the 1970s Adnan regularly contributed editorials, essays, and cultural criticism to the Beirut-based publications Al-Safa and L’Orient-Le Jour. In 1978 she published the novel Sitt Marie Rose, which won considerable acclaim for its critical portrayal of cultural and social politics during the early years of the Lebanese Civil War. Adnan published numerous books of poetry, originating in her opposition to the American war in Vietnam and proceeding to encompass topics as diverse as the landscape of Northern California and the geopolitics of the Middle East. Her poetry served as the basis for numerous works of theater and contemporary classical music....

American, 19th century, male.

Born 1807, in Sparta (New York); died 1844, in Sparta (New York).

Painter. History painting, religious subjects.

Frederick Style Agate was the elder brother of Alfred Agate and one of the first members of the National Academy of Design in New York. His paintings ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 26 October 1945, in Beaumont (Texas).

Painter. Scenes with figures, religious subjects.

John Alexander is the leader of the Houston school known as Fresh Paint. His religious paintings have a theatrical quality, with bright colours and a sometimes primitive style. Several of his paintings are of fantastical scenes....

American, 19th century, female.

Painter.

E. Alkinson lived in Boston in the second half of the 19th century. She specialised in religious painting and exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1877.

American, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 1779, in Charleston (South Carolina); died 1843, in Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Painter. Biblical subjects, literary subjects, mythological subjects, portraits.

Washington Allston was intended for a career in one of the professions and studied classics at Harvard. However, his Romantic artistic tastes took him over and he was deeply moved by Schiller and by Fuseli's illustrations to Boydell's ...

(b Tehran, Jul 10, 1939).

American sculptor of Iranian birth. Armajani studied in Iran at the University of Tehran before immigrating to the USA in 1960 to complete his studies in philosophy at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN, where he settled permanently. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1967. Armajani used the language of vernacular architecture in his sculpture to create spaces into which the viewer moves, sometimes being literally surrounded by the sculpture. Cellar doors, back stairways, loading docks, benches, bridges, porches, gazebos, and other such homely architectural elements are the inspiration for his sculptures and installations. Early in Armajani’s career he was on the faculty of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he lectured on philosophy and conceptual art, but he left teaching in 1975 to concentrate exclusively on his sculpture.

Armajani stated repeatedly that his intention was to create a “neighborly” space, that is, a space that brings people together. His public sculpture is perhaps best thought of as social sculpture, in the sense meant by postwar German artist Joseph Beuys: a community-seeking, politically progressive, public art. Armajani’s many commissions include the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis (...

(b. Istanbul, June 11, 1938).

American historian of Islamic art. Atıl earned her PhD at the University of Michigan, with a dissertation on an illustrated Ottoman Book of Festivals. In 1970 she was appointed Curator of Islamic Art at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, a post that she held for 15 years. An extraordinarily energetic and prolific curator, she organized many notable exhibitions based on the Freer collection as well as traveling exhibitions of Mamluk art, the age of Süleyman the Magnificent, and of the Kuwait collection of Islamic art. Between 1985 and 1987, Dr. Atıl was Guest Curator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. With the opening of the Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute in 1987, she was appointed Historian of Islamic Art at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, a position she held until her retirement in 1993.

Canadian, 19th century, male.

Born 2 November 1828, in St Andrews (New Brunswick); died 9 January 1901, in Providence (Rhode Island).

Painter, draughtsman, watercolourist, engraver, photographer. Portraits, religious subjects, genre scenes, landscapes, seascapes, still-lifes.

Bannister's father was form Barbados and his mother was Scottish. He was born in Canada right after slavery was abolished. He went to live in New York were he was a sailor and settled in Boston in ...

Christian Nonconformist denominations, basically Calvinist in theology. The Baptist tradition has roots in 16th-century Swiss Anabaptism and among the English Baptists of the 17th century. Their distinctive beliefs include baptism by immersion of self-professed believers, the separation of Church and State, the priesthood of all believers and a stress on biblical authority. Congregationalists, related to the European Reformed tradition and English separatists, are distinguished by the congregational form of church government and freedom for all believers using the Church and commonwealth as instruments of a theocratic society. Churches were established in North America in the early 17th century: the Congregationalists (Pilgrims and Puritans) in 1611 and 1623 and the Baptists in 1638–9. Both traditions made missionary inroads in Africa and the East, while Baptists also found converts in Europe, notably in 19th-century Russia. By the second half of the 20th century there were more than 50 groups of Baptists in the USA. American Congregationalists became part of the United Church of Christ in ...

American, 20th century, female.

Born 1878, in New Haven (Connecticut); died 1945, in Almora (India).

Painter. Religious subjects, flowers.

Achsah Barlow Brewster studied at the New York School of Art and at the Art Students League. In 1905 she was in Paris. She married the artist Earl Brewster in ...

(b 1845; d 1908).

American interior decorator and founder of the first tapestry factory in the USA. He worked for Herter Brothers (see Herter, Christian) on the decoration of a series of grand houses, notably William H. Vanderbilt’s house on Fifth Avenue, New York, and William Welsh Harrison’s Grey Towers Castle (now part of Arcadia University) in Philadelphia. When the Vanderbilt house was completed in 1882, Christian Herter returned to Germany and Baumgarten took over the company. In 1891 he started his own company, William Baumgarten and Company, Inc., and in 1893 complemented his interior decoration business with a tapestry factory in his Fifth Avenue premises. He recruited weavers and dyers from the Royal Windsor Tapestry Manufactory (which had closed in 1890), including five weavers from the Foussadier family. The factory’s tapestries include one at Grey Towers (1898).

American, 20th century, male.

Born 2 September 1911, in Charlotte (North Carolina); died 12 March 1988, in New York.

Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, lithographer, screen printer, engraver, collage artist, newspaper cartoonist, illustrator, art theorist. Religious subjects, figure compositions, local figures. Humorous cartoons, frontispieces, stage sets...

(b New York, Feb 7, 1875; d Monaco, Jan 19, 1968).

British mining consultant and collector of American birth. He was educated at the Columbia School of Mines and at Princeton University; by the age of 28 he was the consulting engineer and assistant general manager of the Guggenheim Exploration Company. In 1913, two years after the death of his first wife, he settled in London and became established as a mining consultant. He married Edith Dunn and bought Baroda House in Kensington Palace Gardens. With one of his associates, Herbert Hoover, later President of the USA (1929–33), he reorganized the Kyshtin mine in the Urals. The Selection Trust Ltd, which he established in 1914 to develop and finance profitable mines throughout the world, made great headway after World War I, and he remained its chairman until 1960. He was naturalized as a British citizen in 1933. In his youth he began collecting a range of items, including Western manuscripts and Chinese snuff bottles, but his main passion was collecting Islamic manuscripts and paintings, early Bibles and rare books, Impressionist paintings, French and Russian gold snuffboxes, 18th-century watches, clocks, and stamps. His interest in the Islamic arts of the book, particularly manuscripts of the Koran, was stimulated by frequent visits to Cairo, where he wintered between the wars. Although he had no knowledge of Arabic, Persian, or Turkish, he was keen to give scholars access to his collection and loaned manuscripts to many exhibitions. In ...

American, 19th century, male.

Born 1837, in Philadelphia; died 26 May 1879, in Philadelphia.

Painter, illustrator. Religious subjects, landscapes.

George Frederick Bensell studied painting in Philadelphia for three years with John Lamblin. He sometimes painted landscapes, but concentrated on biblical scenes. Among his biblical paintings are: ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1908.

Painter. Religious subjects, genre scenes, portraits.

At the Salon des Tuileries in 1934, Julien Binford exhibited The Disrobing of Christ, Crucifixion, and Portrait of the Author.

New York, 18 Dec 1991: Trying on the Green Dress (oil on canvas...

American, 19th – 20th century, female.

Born 1851, in Exeter (New Hampshire); died 1922, in St-Cloud (Hauts-de-Seine), France.

Painter, draughtswoman. Genre scenes, mythological scenes, religious scenes.

Elisabeth-Jeanne Gardner studied in Paris under the direction of William Adolphe Bouguereau and later became his wife. She took part in the Paris Salon of ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born in Pittsburgh.

Sculptor. Religious subjects, figures.

Robert Brennen produces figurative sculptures in wood and metal, often on religious themes. These display fine craftsmanship and great technical skill. Brennen has exhibited in the USA, Greece, Italy, Germany and France. He has received numerous awards, including: in Rome in ...

(b Berlin, Aug 11, 1909; d London, Nov 10, 1996).

German scholar of Byzantine, East Christian and European illuminated manuscripts. He took his degree in 1933 at the University of Hamburg in the heady community of the Warburg Library (later Institute) under the tutelage of Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Immigrating with the Warburg staff and library to London in 1934, he served from 1940 to 1949 as the Institute’s Librarian and from 1944 to 1965 as Lecturer, Reader and then Professor of Byzantine art at the University of London. In 1965 he came to the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, becoming in 1970 the first Ailsa Mellon Bruce Professor. He retired in 1975 to London, where he died in 1996.

Buchthal is best known for his Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1957), which laid the foundation for the now well-established art-historical field of Crusader studies. It exemplifies both his originality and the methods that made his scholarship so durable. Fundamental among these were his holistic approach to manuscripts, giving as much attention to ornament, liturgical usage, text traditions, palaeography and apparatus as to miniatures, and his relentlessly keen visual analysis. Aided by a powerful memory, he worked from original monuments, developing exceptional acuity in dissecting the formal components of their images. Mobilized in his dissertation, published in ...

American, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 1834, in Malden (Massachusetts); died 1919, in Newton Upper Falls (Massachusetts).

Painter, sculptor. Historical subjects, religious subjects, figures, portraits, landscapes.

Darius Cobb was the twin brother of Cyrus Cobb. The works for which he is known include portraits of ...