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Samuel S. Carr
1837–1908
BirthplaceEngland
Death placeBrooklyn, New York, United States of America
BiographySamuel S. Carr produced landscapes and occasional interior scenes that document middle-class life in Brooklyn, New York. Little is known of Carr's life. He was born in England and had arrived in New York by 1865, when he attended a class in mechanical drawing at the Cooper Union. Five years later he took up permanent residence in Brooklyn with his sister and brother-in-law, sharing a studio at the same address with painter Clinton Loveridge (1824–1915).
Carr exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the Brooklyn Art Association, and the Brooklyn Art Club, of which he served as president. Like Loveridge, he specialized in bucolic images of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, often populated by sheep; he also painted scenes of local beaches as the haunts of genteel families at leisure, and images of rural country life, particularly of children. Carr was evidently not a professional photographer, but he may have used photographs as an aid in painting his outdoor scenes, as suggested by the slightly frozen or stilted quality of the figures in many of his paintings. Indeed, photographers, using their cumbersome equipment, appear in several of his paintings of beach life.
Carr's work received some modest critical notice and he seems to have been moderately successful, for there is no evidence that he turned for financial support to illustration or teaching, two means by which many American artists of the time supplemented their incomes. At least one of his works was available in the form of an inexpensive reproduction, however, suggesting the wide appeal of his comforting images of contemporary life. As modest in their dimension as in their subjects, Carr's paintings combine euphemism with fidelity to local detail.
Carr exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the Brooklyn Art Association, and the Brooklyn Art Club, of which he served as president. Like Loveridge, he specialized in bucolic images of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, often populated by sheep; he also painted scenes of local beaches as the haunts of genteel families at leisure, and images of rural country life, particularly of children. Carr was evidently not a professional photographer, but he may have used photographs as an aid in painting his outdoor scenes, as suggested by the slightly frozen or stilted quality of the figures in many of his paintings. Indeed, photographers, using their cumbersome equipment, appear in several of his paintings of beach life.
Carr's work received some modest critical notice and he seems to have been moderately successful, for there is no evidence that he turned for financial support to illustration or teaching, two means by which many American artists of the time supplemented their incomes. At least one of his works was available in the form of an inexpensive reproduction, however, suggesting the wide appeal of his comforting images of contemporary life. As modest in their dimension as in their subjects, Carr's paintings combine euphemism with fidelity to local detail.