1854 - 1929
Birge Harrison, a younger brother of the marine painter Alexander Harrison, began his artistic instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, in 1874. On the advice of John Singer Sargent, whom he met two years later at Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition, he went to Paris in 1876 and soon enrolled in the atelier of Sargent's master, Charles Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran. In 1878 Harrison began four years of study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel. He first exhibited in a National Academy annual in 1881 and was included again in 1882 and 1883, the year he joined the Society of American Artists. Beginning in 1889, he also participated regularly in annuals at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Harrison began painting en plein air by the early 1880s, joining an international group of artists working at Pont-Aven and Concarneau in Brittany and at Grez-sur-Loing in Normandy. His rustic peasant subjects in atmospheric, pastoral settings from those years reveal a high regard for the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage. He received official recognition for these subjects when November (1881, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie de Rennes, France), his Salon entry of 1882, became one of the first American paintings purchased by the French government. The limited palette and melancholic mood in early paintings such as this one later became hallmarks of Harrison's Tonalist landscapes.
Following this brief but stunning success, Harrison's health failed. He traveled the world, writing and illustrating articles for Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Scribner's, and the Atlantic Monthly from such exotic locales as India, Australia, and the South Seas.
After Harrison returned to the United States in the late 1890s, he settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and began specializing in subdued landscapes and city scenes. He emerged as a leader among the Tonalists, who sought to capture in their paintings the poetic effects associated with twilight and gray and rainy weather. As Harrison wrote, "The effect under which a subject is painted has come to mean more . . . than the subject itself-the 'mood' more than the motive."
Around the turn of the century, the artist relocated to Woodstock, New York, to establish an experimental school of landscape painting based on his Tonalist theories. In 1903 he resumed his participation in Academy annuals and continued to be included until 1927. In 1906 he helped found and direct the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock, conducting experimental-painting classes there until 1911. His lectures were collected in the volume Landscape Painting (1909). The Academy's eulogy of the artist cited the book as "a standard work for students."
Harrison began painting en plein air by the early 1880s, joining an international group of artists working at Pont-Aven and Concarneau in Brittany and at Grez-sur-Loing in Normandy. His rustic peasant subjects in atmospheric, pastoral settings from those years reveal a high regard for the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage. He received official recognition for these subjects when November (1881, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie de Rennes, France), his Salon entry of 1882, became one of the first American paintings purchased by the French government. The limited palette and melancholic mood in early paintings such as this one later became hallmarks of Harrison's Tonalist landscapes.
Following this brief but stunning success, Harrison's health failed. He traveled the world, writing and illustrating articles for Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Scribner's, and the Atlantic Monthly from such exotic locales as India, Australia, and the South Seas.
After Harrison returned to the United States in the late 1890s, he settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and began specializing in subdued landscapes and city scenes. He emerged as a leader among the Tonalists, who sought to capture in their paintings the poetic effects associated with twilight and gray and rainy weather. As Harrison wrote, "The effect under which a subject is painted has come to mean more . . . than the subject itself-the 'mood' more than the motive."
Around the turn of the century, the artist relocated to Woodstock, New York, to establish an experimental school of landscape painting based on his Tonalist theories. In 1903 he resumed his participation in Academy annuals and continued to be included until 1927. In 1906 he helped found and direct the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock, conducting experimental-painting classes there until 1911. His lectures were collected in the volume Landscape Painting (1909). The Academy's eulogy of the artist cited the book as "a standard work for students."
