Charles Courtney Curran

Following a few years of study at the Cincinnati School of Design, Charles Courtney Curran moved to New York City, enrolled at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, and soon began to exhibit successfully. In 1889 he spent a year in Paris studying at the Académie Julian before returning to New York and a career as a prolific portraitist and teacher at the Cooper Union. During his lifetime, Curran was considered a “painter of the ideal figure” and was renowned for his genre scenes of domestic interiors and his outdoor images of the “new” women, the embodiment of female independence, health, and vigor. Curran had a home at the artists’ colony Cragsmoor, near Ellenville, New York.