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George Curtis
1826–1881
BirthplaceWayland, Massachusetts, United States of America
Death placeChelsea, Massachusetts, United States of America
BiographyGeorge Curtis was a marine painter whose work manifests the concern for calm horizontality and crystalline light typical of mid-nineteenth-century New England coastal landscape painting. Details of Curtis’s biography remain sketchy despite recent scholarly investigation. The artist was born in Sudbury, Massachusetts, into a distinguished New England family impoverished by the death of his father. Curtis appears to have been an active member of Boston’s bustling community of artists, beginning around 1840. In 1843, he started a long career as a painter of theater sets for the Boston Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts, where he began exhibiting his easel paintings the following year.
Evidence suggests that Curtis may have worked with the older, English-born landscapist Edward Seager (1908–1886), who had a studio nearby in Boston’s Tremont Row. Around 1840, possibly with or at the suggestion of Seager, Curtis made a sketching trip to Missouri, apparently visiting St. Louis. Resulting riverside and wilderness sketches reveal the influence of landscape painter Thomas Cole, the first artist to capture the primal wildness of the American hinterland. In 1844 and 1845, Curtis visited Europe. Stopping in England, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, he varied his coastal and marine works with views of cathedral interiors. He may have revisited Europe again for a two-year period following his marriage in 1848.
By the 1850s, Curtis was well established as a painter in Boston. In addition to painting stage sets, he found private patrons for his easel paintings, often small marine and harbor views. He painted numerous commissioned ships’ portraits in the midst of the strong market for such works in Boston in the 1850s. In the following decade Curtis widened the exposure of his works, which were exhibited not only in Boston and New York but in Cincinnati, Chicago, and Montreal. His style matured, characterized by a refined evocation of glowing light and calm atmosphere that scholars have dubbed luminism. Like many other practitioners of this mode, he was attracted to the flat coastal scenery and clear light of Newport, Rhode Island, where he worked in 1863. In 1867, he produced numerous views of the polar regions, perhaps the result of a visit to the Arctic.
In his final decade, Curtis reduced the size of his already-small easel paintings, experimented with a variety of supports, including wood panel and paper, and expanded his range of subjects to include the lucrative yacht club racing picture. He partnered with a New York City printing firm to produce a chromolithograph (a colored reproductive print) of one such work. Curtis was apparently a relatively successful artist who was esteemed by his peers, but following his death he slipped into an obscurity perpetuated by the relatively small number of his works that have found a home in public institutions.
Evidence suggests that Curtis may have worked with the older, English-born landscapist Edward Seager (1908–1886), who had a studio nearby in Boston’s Tremont Row. Around 1840, possibly with or at the suggestion of Seager, Curtis made a sketching trip to Missouri, apparently visiting St. Louis. Resulting riverside and wilderness sketches reveal the influence of landscape painter Thomas Cole, the first artist to capture the primal wildness of the American hinterland. In 1844 and 1845, Curtis visited Europe. Stopping in England, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, he varied his coastal and marine works with views of cathedral interiors. He may have revisited Europe again for a two-year period following his marriage in 1848.
By the 1850s, Curtis was well established as a painter in Boston. In addition to painting stage sets, he found private patrons for his easel paintings, often small marine and harbor views. He painted numerous commissioned ships’ portraits in the midst of the strong market for such works in Boston in the 1850s. In the following decade Curtis widened the exposure of his works, which were exhibited not only in Boston and New York but in Cincinnati, Chicago, and Montreal. His style matured, characterized by a refined evocation of glowing light and calm atmosphere that scholars have dubbed luminism. Like many other practitioners of this mode, he was attracted to the flat coastal scenery and clear light of Newport, Rhode Island, where he worked in 1863. In 1867, he produced numerous views of the polar regions, perhaps the result of a visit to the Arctic.
In his final decade, Curtis reduced the size of his already-small easel paintings, experimented with a variety of supports, including wood panel and paper, and expanded his range of subjects to include the lucrative yacht club racing picture. He partnered with a New York City printing firm to produce a chromolithograph (a colored reproductive print) of one such work. Curtis was apparently a relatively successful artist who was esteemed by his peers, but following his death he slipped into an obscurity perpetuated by the relatively small number of his works that have found a home in public institutions.