TitleThe Boat Builders
Artist
Edward Henry Potthast
(American, 1857 - 1927)
Daten.d.
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 30 × 40 in.
Framed: 37 5/8 × 47 5/8 × 3 1/8 in.
SignedSigned at bottom right: "E. Potthast"
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, December 3, 1906
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1021-P
Label TextBorn to German parents, Edward Potthast left school as a teenager to work in the Cincinnati lithography firm of Ehrgott and Krebs. Potthast left Ehrgott and Krebs in 1879 for the Strobridge Lithography Company. By 1882, however, he had saved enough money to go to Europe, where he studied at the royal academies of Antwerp and Munich and in Paris at the Academie Julian. Potthast left Cincinnati permanently in 1895, opening a studio in New York. There he produced illustrations for magazines such as Century, Harper's, and Scribner's. On the strength of his genre paintings, he won the National Academy's Thomas B. Clarke Prize in 1899 and was elected an Associate. Late in life, Potthast developed a specialty of coastal scenes, which he painted during summers in Gloucester and Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Ogunquit, Maine.
