From youth Charles Loring Elliott displayed a pronounced ambition to become an artist. His father, an architect, initially sought to dampen his enthusiasm. When the family moved to Syracuse, New York, in 1827, he was placed as a clerk in a local store, then sent to a private school, and finally taken into his father's office. None of these alternatives deflected his artistic desires, and in 1829 Elliott's father allowed him to go to New York to seek formal training. He arrived with a letter of introduction to John Trumbull and seems to have spent a month or two as his student. But as Trumbull was consistently discouraging, he began working in the studio of John Quidor. Elliott remained with Quidor for six months before deciding to return to the Syracuse area and commence a career as a portraitist.
Elliott's practice and reputation grew slowly. He found much patronage in the village of Skaneateles, just west of Syracuse, where he also executed several landscape paintings. In 1833 he was commissioned to paint the faculty of Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and there met and encouraged a Hamilton student, Daniel Huntington, who was then an aspiring painter. He first exhibited in an Academy annual exhibition in 1836; in 1839 he showed a portrait and a landscape at the Academy and later that year moved back to New York. Among his four works in the 1840 annual were two portraits of members of the Vanderbilt family. Elliott was not represented in the succeeding three annual exhibitions. But in 1844 five of his portraits were shown, including a full-length of William H. Seward, who later, as U.S. secretary of state, arranged for the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Thereafter, Elliott's portraits-in quantity-were seen in every annual except those of 1861 and 1867.
Shortly before his death in 1846, Henry Inman was reported to have said of Elliott: "When I am gone that young man will take my place. He has the true idea of portrait painting. If it were possible for me to live my life over again, in some respects I would change my style." Whether that prediction from New York's preeminent portraitist of the 1830s and 1840s was apocryphal, it proved to be true. Elliott quickly became the city's leading portrait painter, a position he held until he died. He spent most of his remaining years based in New York, but commissions allowed him to travel extensively in the eastern United States. He painted many of the nation's most prominent figures, including James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant.
Apparently, Elliott was as widely loved and admired for his geniality and kindness as he was respected for his artistic excellence. He also was well known for his fondness of drink, which seems only to have been conquered by his taking the pledge the year before his death. Perhaps the only fully reported instance of this aberrant aspect of his life occurred at the Academy. On the afternoon of April 12, 1860, Elliott appeared in the annual-exhibition galleries "in a drunken intoxicated condition, acting in a disorderly manner and making use of abusive and improper language in the presence of ladies." He proceeded to try cutting one of his works from its frame because he did not like the position in which it had been hung. Police were summoned to help subdue and remove him from the premises. The Academy brought suit against him, but eventually he apologized and the suit was dropped. Elliott had served on the Council from 1847 to 1848 and from 1852 to 1854; he again was elected to a year's term on the Academy's governing body in 1866.
Elliott's death, on August 25, 1868, elicited an exceptional public response: long articles reviewing his life and accomplishments appeared in the press, and a call was made to erect a monument to him in Central Park. (It was not built.) He died at a home he had recently purchased in Albany. The body was brought to New York, escorted by Samuel P. Avery, Charles Calverley, Erastus Dow Palmer, and a number of other friends and distinguished subjects of his portraits, and taken to the Academy. There it lay in state until the funeral arranged by the Academy and burial in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery. The Academy showcased thirty-six of Elliott's paintings in its winter 1868-69 exhibition. He was eulogized at the Academy's annual meeting on May 12, 1869:
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For Elliott we must all deeply lament. It is sad to remember that we shall no more grasp his cordial hand or hear the mellow tones of his voice ever ready for a kindly greeting, or meet the frank and manly glance of that glowing eye: an eye and a brow which told clearly of a strong intellect, a generous temper, and a warm heart. In him were marvellously blended a man's vigour, a woman's tenderness, and the gaiety and freshness of a child. He has passed away, but his name will be forever associated with the brilliant lifelike portraits which have so often graced our walls.
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JPH
