JAMES CARROLL BECKWITH

(1852-1917)

 
James Carroll Beckwith was a landscape, portrait and genre painter whose work was basically academic, but showed a strong impressionist influence in later years. He is best known for his portraits and genre paintings, which earned him the highest recognition in 1881 - 1883. He was perhaps more talented in mural painting, but portraiture paid the most money during his lifetime, so he painted portraits.

Born in Hannibal, Missouri in 1852, Beckwith, who intensely disliked his first name, James, moved with his parents to Chicago, where he began to study art with Walter Sherlaw in 1868. In 1871, he moved to New York City, to study at the National Academy of Design under Lemuel Wilmarth. He also taught for many years at the Art Students League. His influence on a younger generation of painters has been compared to that of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1873, he went to Paris to study for several years in the atelier of Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran. He also studied for brief periods at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and with Leon Bonnat. A fellow student and close friend in Paris was John Singer Sargent with whom he shared a studio for a time. In 1877, they helped Carolus-Duran paint a large ceiling decoration in the Louvre.

Beckwith has received several awards including Honorable mention at the Paris Exposition of 1889 and Gold Medal at the Atlanta Exposition,1895. In 1893, Beckwith painted many murals in Paris and Chicago. He lived in Italy from 1910 to 1914 and painted many plein-air studies of monuments, buildings, and landscapes. Although he was in poor health for two years before his death in New York City in 1917, Beckwith continued to paint almost until the end.

(From the ASKart archives.)