Appleton, Thomas Gold (31 March 1812–17 April 1884), writer and artist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Nathan Appleton, a merchant, and Maria Theresa Gold. Nathan Appleton, whose family had settled in New England in 1635, helped develop Lowell, Massachusetts, into an industrial center and amassed a fortune that made it possible for Thomas to pursue his interests freely. After a year at the Boston Latin School and three at the Round Hill School conducted by Joseph Green Cogswell and ...
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Banvard, John (15 November 1815–16 May 1891), panoramist, scene painter, and poet, was born in New York City, the son of Daniel Banvard, a building contractor and amateur artist of French ancestry. His mother’s name is unrecorded. Banvard attended school until he was fifteen; an early talent for drawing was nurtured by his father. His youthful enthusiasm for poetry was encouraged by ...
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Theresa Leininger-Miller
Bennett, Gwendolyn (08 July 1902–30 May 1981), writer and artist, was born in Giddings, Texas, the daughter of Joshua Robin Bennett and Mayme F. Abernathy, teachers on a Native American reservation. In 1906 the family moved to Washington, D.C., where Bennett’s father studied law and her mother worked as a manicurist and hairdresser. Her parents divorced and her mother won custody, but her father kidnapped the seven-year-old Gwendolyn. The two, with her stepmother, lived in hiding in various towns along the East Coast and in Pennsylvania before finally settling in New York....
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Robert J. Scholnick
Benson, Eugene (01 November 1839–28 February 1908), art critic, painter, and essayist, was born in Hyde Park, New York, the son of Benjamin Benson. His mother’s name is not known. He went to New York City in 1856 to study painting at the National Academy of Design; he also learned portraiture in the studio of J. H. Wright. Taking up residence at the New York University Building, he formed close friendships with several other artists who lived there, most notably ...
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Anne Huber Tripp
Chaplin, Ralph Hosea (30 August 1887–23 May 1961), radical labor editor and artist, was born in Cloud County, Kansas, the son of Edgar Chaplin and Clara Bradford, farmers. Hard times forced his family to leave Kansas when Chaplin was an infant, and he was raised in Chicago, where his family moved frequently and struggled against poverty....
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E. E. Cummings. Reproduction of a self-portrait in oils. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-108318).
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Richard S. Kennedy
Cummings, E. E. (14 October 1894–03 September 1962), poet and painter, was born Edward Estlin Cummings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Edward Cummings, a Unitarian minister of the South Congregational Church in Boston, and Rebecca Haswell Clarke. Cummings’s mother encouraged him from an early age to write verse and to keep a journal. He was educated at the Cambridge Latin School and at Harvard College, where in 1915 he received his A.B., graduating magna cum laude in Greek and English; he received his A.M. from Harvard in 1916. In his last year of college, he became intensely interested in the new movements in the arts through his association with ...
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John W. Frick
Dunlap, William (19 February 1766–28 September 1839), dramatist and painter, was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, the son of Samuel Dunlap, a merchant, and Margaret Sargent. Dunlap had little formal schooling. He received his education first from his mother and later from a series of tutors. He gained a love of writing and the arts from Thomas Bartow, an aged recluse who read to Dunlap from the classics and introduced him to drawings illustrating the works of Virgil, Homer, and Milton....
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Constance Koppelman
Frost, Arthur Burdett (17 January 1851–22 June 1928), illustrator, painter, and author, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of John Frost, a bibliographer, and Sarah Ann Burdett, a painter. He was eight years old when his father died, and by the time he was fifteen he was working, first for a wood engraver and then for a lithographer. During these early years he took evening classes at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, working briefly under ...
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Kahlil Gibran Photograph by F. Holland Day, c. 1898. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-48305).
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Patricia Jobe Pierce
Gibran, Kahlil (06 January 1883–10 April 1931), poet and painter, was born Gibran Khalil Gibran in Besharri, Lebanon, the son of Khalil Gibran, a gambler and olive grove owner, and Kamila Rahme, a peddler. The boy was named by prefacing his father’s name Khalil with the surname of his paternal grandfather, thus Gibran Khalil Gibran. Although in later years Gibran fabricated stories of his family’s origins and their years in Besharri, factual accounts (particularly Gibran and Gibran, ...
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Earl Edmondson
Grosz, George (26 July 1893–06 July 1959), artist and poet, was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany, the son of Karl Groß and Maria Schultze. Grosz spent most of his childhood in Stolp, Pomerania, where his father, a failed restaurateur, became steward of a Freemasons’ Lodge. After his father’s death in 1900, his mother moved for two years to Berlin, where the family lived in meager circumstances; she then took a position as manager of an officers’ club in Stolp. As a boy, Grosz became fascinated with America, especially through the stories of ...
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Marsden Hartley Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1939. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LOT 12735, no. 490 P&P).
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Hartley, Marsden (04 January 1877–02 September 1943), artist, essayist, and poet, was born Edmund Hartley in Lewiston, Maine, the son of Thomas Hartley, a spinner in a cotton mill, and Eliza Jane Horbury. His childhood was marred by the death of his mother in 1885, at which time her eight children were separated. Hartley remained with his father and an older married sister, Elizabeth, in Auburn, Maine, until 1889, when his father remarried Martha Marsden, an Englishwoman, and moved with her to Cleveland, Ohio. (In 1908 Hartley dropped his first name and decided to call himself Marsden, his stepmother’s maiden name, which he had adopted in 1906.) Left behind with Elizabeth, Hartley dropped out of school at fifteen and worked in a shoe factory. In 1893 he moved to Cleveland, where he joined his family and took a job as an office boy in a marble quarry....
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Susan Elizabeth Ryan
Indiana, Robert (13 Sept. 1928–19 May 2018), painter, sculptor, and poet, was born in New Castle, Indiana, and adopted in infancy as Robert Clark, the only child of middle-class parents Earl Clark and Carmen Watters. Earl was a petroleum industry manager but during the Depression took whatever jobs he could, even pumping gas, as the family moved from house to house (twenty-one in all, the artist later recorded). Robert’s parents divorced when he was ten and, being intellectually ambitious, he eventually went to live with his father in Indianapolis so that he could attend the highly rated Arsenal Technical High School. After graduating as valedictorian in ...
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Martha K. Baker
Jamison, Cecilia Viets (1837?–11 April 1909), painter and writer, was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, the daughter of Viets Dakin and Elizabeth Bruce. Her Tory family had left the United States during the American Revolution. They resettled in Nova Scotia, where her paternal relatives had lived, including her great-grandfather, the Reverend Roger Viets, who was vicar general of Canada. When she was a teenager, she and her family moved back to the United States, settling in Boston. There and in New York she attended private schools, where she studied to be an artist....
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Ronald D. Rarick
Johnston, Thomas (1708?–08 May 1767), engraver, organ builder, and decorative painter, was a prominent . His parentage and place of birth are unknown. Several artists and artisans named Thomas Johnston (or the variant Johnson) were active in eighteenth-century America and England, and early references sometimes confuse them. Nevertheless, his is one of the better-documented careers among craftsmen of colonial Boston....
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Liberman, Alexander (04 September 1912–19 November 1999), sculptor and painter, was born Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman in Kiev, Russia, the son of Semeon Liberman, a well-regarded timber industry analyst for both the czarist and Bolshevik governments, and Henriette Pascar, a half-gypsy who directed the first state-run children's theater in Moscow. During the early years of the Russian Revolution, chaotic conditions in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where Liberman spent his early childhood, were reflected in an unruly temperament, which forced his parents to school him at home. In 1921 Semeon Liberman received permission from Lenin to take his son abroad, where Alexander was sent to boarding schools in England and France. His mother accompanied him to England, while his father continued to work in Moscow before finally and permanently leaving for France, where the family was reunited in 1926....
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Georgia B. Barnhill
Linton, William James (07 December 1812–29 December 1897), wood engraver, printer, and poet, was born in London, England, the son of William Linton, an accountant and provision broker, and Mary Stephenson. In 1818 the Lintons moved to Stratford, where he attended Chigwell School, learning some Greek and Latin and reading illustrated miscellanies and novels, including those of Sir Walter Scott. He moved to London in 1828 in order to serve an apprenticeship with George Wilmot Bonner, a wood engraver. Subsequently he worked for two leading engravers, William Henry Powis and John Thompson, and then from 1840 to 1843 for John Orrin Smith. His work appeared in the ...
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Virginia M. Kouidis
Loy, Mina (27 December 1882–25 September 1966), poet and artist, was born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London, England, the daughter of Sigmund Lowy, a tailor, and Julia Bryan. Loy received little formal education but at age seventeen was sent to art school in Munich. In 1901–1902 she returned to England, where she studied with the English painter Augustus John and began to exhibit her painting. It was also during this time that she met her first husband, art student Stephen Haweis (Hugh Oscar William Haweis). In 1903 Loy moved to Paris to study painting, married Haweis, and changed her name to Loy, a change, she remembered, that she “adopted in a spirit of mockery,” in response to her husband’s old and distinguished family name, which was pronounced ”Hoyes“ (Burke, pp. 66, 97). Loy and Haweis had three children; the first daughter died in infancy, the son in his teens....
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