Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819-1905)

Professions: Landscape painter; Naval painter; Animal painter; Lithographer

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  The Check--Keep Your Distance

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  In the Woods: Taking it Easy

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  The Hunter's Dilemma: I

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  Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819-1905)

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Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait Biography

(b Livesey Hall, nr Liverpool, 5 Aug 1819; d Yonkers, NY, 28 April 1905). American painter and lithographer of English birth. He spent the first three decades of his life in England and arrived in New York in 1850. Steeped in admiration for the subjects of Edwin Landseer and the style of the Pre-Raphaelites, he established himself as a realistic painter of animals and sporting scenes. For his images of Western hunters and trappers, he used as sources the works of George Catlin and William Ranney, artists who, unlike himself, had travelled extensively. He established a summer studio at a camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where he painted sporting scenes. These wilderness scenes, often composed around an anecdote, appealed to a wide popular audience, and from 1852 Currier & Ives as well as Louis Prang published a number of lithographs and chromolithographs of his work. Tait also composed still-lifes of game birds and, in his later career, barnyard scenes of sheep and chickens. His painting A Tight Fix: Bear Hunting in Early Winter (1856; Detroit, MI, Manoogian priv. col., see 1983–4 exh. cat., p. 124) shows a characteristic drama: a wounded hunter has lost his gun in a deadly-looking encounter with a bear, from which a companion, attempting to shoot the bear from behind a tree, may or may not be able to rescue him.

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