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William Sidney Mount (1807-1868)

Aliases: William Sydney Mount

Professions: Genre Painter; Portrait painter; Still life painter; Landscape painter; Animal painter

  • William Sidney Mount 1807-1868 , The Ramblers oil on canvas

  • *William T. Ranney (1813-1857), *Arthur F. Tait (1819-1905) and *William Sidney Mount (1807-1868)

  • * WILLIAM SIDNEY MOUNT 1807-1868

  • WILLIAM SIDNEY MOUNT (American, 1807-1868) Portrait of a Man Reading Oil on artists' board 7-7/8 x 5-1/2 inches (20.0 x 14.0 cm) Signed lower left: W.S. Mount PROVENANCE: Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, New York, New York; Alfred Victor Frankenstein, New

Biography: Mount

(b Setauket, NY, 26 Nov 1807; d Setauket, 18 Nov 1868). American painter. America’s first major genre painter and one of the most accomplished of his era (rivalled only by George Caleb Bingham), he spent most of his life on rural Long Island. He was apprenticed as a sign painter in 1825 to his brother, Henry Mount (1802–41), in New York. In 1826, frustrated by the limitations of sign painting, he enrolled for drawing classes at the newly established National Academy of Design, where he aspired to be a painter of historical subjects. His first efforts in painting were portraits; the historical scenes that followed, such as Saul and the Witch of Endor (1828; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.), were similarly linear, flat and brightly coloured. In 1827 he returned to live on Long Island, and from then onwards he alternated between the city and the country. He began to make the yeomen of Long Island his subject-matter, perhaps inspired by the popularity of engravings after David Wilkie and 17th-century genre painters.

Grove Art excerpts - Electronic ©2003, Oxford Art Online

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