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for George Hitchcock
1850 - 1913
Educated at Brown and Harvard universities, George Hitchcock practiced law in the second half of the 1870s before taking up painting. He studied English watercolor techniques at Heatherley's School in London in 1879. He spent a year in Paris at the Académie Julian under Gustav Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre and, the next winter, studied at the Düsseldorf Akademie. He also worked for several summers in The Hague with the Dutch marine painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag and spent some time in Egmond-aan-Zee, a fishing village on the North Sea, where he settled in 1883. His close friend and fellow American painter Gari Melchers joined him there in 1884. Although Hitchcock usually wintered in Paris, he maintained a studio near Egmond for the rest of his life.
Pictures of the sea, fisherfolk, and peasants, rendered in a subdued gray palette, dominated Hitchcock's early works from Egmond. In 1887 he won acclaim in the Paris Salon with his painting A Culture des Tulips (1887, private collection), which depicts a peasant woman standing amid red, yellow, and white bands of tulips. After this success, Dutch flower sellers and idealized peasant figures in sparklingly lit tulip fields dominated his output. Especially in his landscapes, Hitchcock investigated the abstract patterns and brilliant colors of Holland's tulip fields. It was during his later years that he became known as the "painter of sunlight."
Pictures of the sea, fisherfolk, and peasants, rendered in a subdued gray palette, dominated Hitchcock's early works from Egmond. In 1887 he won acclaim in the Paris Salon with his painting A Culture des Tulips (1887, private collection), which depicts a peasant woman standing amid red, yellow, and white bands of tulips. After this success, Dutch flower sellers and idealized peasant figures in sparklingly lit tulip fields dominated his output. Especially in his landscapes, Hitchcock investigated the abstract patterns and brilliant colors of Holland's tulip fields. It was during his later years that he became known as the "painter of sunlight."
