Paintings Exhibited at the Fair page 8

Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña Diaz was born in Bordeaux to Spanish parents. At the age of ten, Diaz became an orphan, and misfortune dogged his early years. His foot was bitten by a reptile in Meudon wood, near Sèvres, where he had been taken to live with some friends of his mother. The bite was poorly dressed, and ultimately he lost his leg. However, as it turned out, the wooden stump that replaced his leg became famous.

At fifteen he entered the studios at Sèvres, first working in the decoration of porcelain occupied him and later turning to painting. Turkish and Oriental scenes attracted him, and he took to painting Eastern figures dressed in richly coloured garments; many of these paintings remain extant. He also spent much time at Barbizon. One of his teachers and friends in Paris was François Souchon.

Around 1831 Díaz encountered Théodore Rousseau, for whom he possessed a great veneration, despite the fact that Rousseau was four years younger. At Fontainebleau Díaz found Rousseau painting his wonderful forest pictures, and was determined to paint in the same way if possible. Rousseau taught Diaz all he knew.

Díaz exhibited many pictures at the Paris Salon, and was decorated in 1851. During the Franco-German War he went to Brussels. After 1871, his works became fashionable and rose gradually in the estimation of collectors, and he worked constantly and successfully. Díaz's finest pictures are his forest scenes and storms, and it is on these that his fame rests. There are several examples of his work in the Louvre, and three small figure pictures in the Wallace Collection, Hertford House. Perhaps the most notable of Diaz's works are "La Fée aux Perles" (1857, housed in the Louvre); "Sunset in the Forest" (1868); "The Storm" and "The Forest of Fontainebleau" (1870, housed at Leeds).

Diaz himself had no well-known pupils, but François Visconti showed emulation his work to some degree and Léon Richet followed markedly his methods of tree-painting. For a period, Jean-François Millet also painted small figures in avowed imitation of Diaz's then popular subjects. Renoir once said "my hero was Díaz"

On November 18 of that year he died. In 1851, he was decorated with the rank of Chevalier (Knight) of the Légion d’honneur.

Medallion of Díaz's son, Eugène-

Jean Charles Cazin Jean-Charles Cazin (May 25, 1840 – March 17, 1901) was a French landscape painter and ceramicist.

The son of a well-known doctor, FJ Cazin (1788–1864), he was born at Samer, Pas-de-Calais. After studying in France, he went to England, where he was strongly influenced by the pre-Raphaelite movement. His chief earlier pictures have a religious interest, shown in such examples as The Flight into Egypt (1877), or Hagar and Ishmael (1880, Luxembourg); and afterwards his combination of luminous landscape with figure-subjects (Souvenir de fête, 1881; Journée faite, 1888) gave him a wide repute, and made him the leader of a new school of idealistic subject-painting in France.

In 1890, Theodore Child discussed a few of his paintings (including a series of five paintings depicting the story of Judith and Holofernes) in Harper's Magazine. He painted a scene from The Odyssey, Ulysses after the Shipwreck.

He was made an officer of the Legion of Honour in 1889. His charming and poetical treatment of landscape is the feature in his tonalism painting which in later years has given them an increasing value among connoisseurs. His wife, Marie Cazin (1844–1924), who was his pupil and exhibited her first picture at the Salon in 1876, the same year in which Cazin himself made his debut there, was also a well-known artist and sculptor.

In 1885—1886 he posed for the figure of Eustache de Saint-Pierre in his friends Auguste Rodins The Burghers of Calais

Cazin was awarded a Grand Prix in at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. He remained at the forefront of French landscape painting until his death in 1901.

Wilhelm Kuhnert (September 18, 1865 – February 11, 1926) was a German painter, author and illustrator, who specialized in animal images.

Kuhnert was born in Oppeln in 1865. In 1894, he married 18-year-old Emilie Caroline Wilhelmine Ottilie Alvine Herdikerhoff. They had a daughter, Emilie. The couple divorced in 1909 while Emilie was a student in Ceylon. Kuhnert married for the second time to Gerda Jankowski in 1913. In 1925, on his 60th birthday, she died.

After the end of his technical-commercial apprenticeship at the age of 17, Kuhnert was a scholarship student at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1883 to 1887. From his home in Berlin, he embarked on travels to Scandinavia, Egypt, East Africa and India to make landscape and animal studies. His favorite motif was the African lion. In 1901 Kuhnert was the illustrator for zoologist Johann Wilhelm Haacke's book Animal Life on Earth. In 1903, he became one of the many artists selected to provide illustrations and design trading cards for the Cologne chocolate company, Stollwerck. He also provided some illustrations for the 1900 edition of Brehms Tierleben.

Contrary to the practice of his peers, Kuhnert distinguished himself by sketching tropical animals in the wild, not in zoos. He made pictures by sketching, etching, watercolor, and oil painting. Kuhnert is considered one of the most important German animal painters of his time. As he was not a professional hunter, it often took a great deal of effort to track down his subjects.

Kuhnert died on February 11, 1926 during a recovery stay in Flims, Switzerland.

Edward Henry Potthast was born on June 10, 1857 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Starting in 1870 he studied art at the McMicken School in Cincinnati and in 1873 he began working at the Strobridge Lithography Company. From June 10, 1879 to March 9, 1881, Potthast studied under Thomas Satterwhite Noble, a retired Confederate Army captain who had studied with Thomas Couture in Paris. Potthast later studied at the Royal Academy in Munich with the American-born instructor Carl Marr. In 1886, he departed for Paris, where he studied with Fernand Cormon. In 1895 he relocated to New York City and remained there until his death in 1927.

Until the age of thirty-nine Potthast earned a living as a lithographer. The purchase of one of his paintings by the Cincinnati Museum of Art may have encouraged him to abandon lithography for a career as a fine artist. His paintings retained the subdued colors and strong contrasts of the Munich school until he adopted the Impressionist palette late in his career.

After his arrival in New York Potthast worked as a magazine illustrator, and exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design, the Society of American Artists and the Salmagundi Club, winning numerous prizes. By 1908 he was installed in a studio in the Gainsborough Building. Thereafter he painted sun-saturated images of Central Park, New England landscapes, and the Long Island beach scenes for which he is best remembered. Potthast, a very private man, died alone in his New York studio on March 9, 1927.

Susan Watkins was born in 1875, and was an accomplished painter who’d studied under well-regarded teachers in New York and Paris, Watkins had mastered her talent by the early 20th century when women were finally beginning to find acceptance as artists.

In the decade before the start of the First World War in Europe, she was one of the most successful American painters in Paris, and a friend (and relative by marriage) of William Merritt Chase.

A little younger than Mary Cassatt and a little older than Georgia O’Keeffe, Watkins was every bit their equal at similar stages of artistic development. She had an especially stunning style with portraiture.

Watkins took ill while living in Europe, then quickly married a suitor she’d long spurned and moved with him back to the U.S. in 1910. They settled in his hometown of Norfolk. About three years later, she died, likely of cancer, at age 37.

Her chance at widespread fame died then, too, because so little of her work had been distributed, and what she’d saved herself wound up in the possession of her relatively new husband, Norfolk banker Goldsborough Serpell.

In the 1900 Salon, her painting (pictured to the left), “The 1830 Girl” won a third-class gold medal. ‘1830 Girl’ immediately established Susan Watkins’ reputation both in Paris and at home.

Jef Leempoels was born in Brussels, May 15, 1867 was a Belgian painter who was renowned in his lifetime for his society and official portraits as well as his genre scenes and symbolist compositions. His work ignored modernist developments and his style has variously been described as academic, realist and symbolist.

He started painting at the age of 19 when he commenced his studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

At a young age Leempoels was able to establish an international reputation and he won several international distinctions. In Paris he won an honorable mention at the 1893 salon and a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900.

'Friendship,' (to the right), which is also referred to as The Hands, because of the many hands in the foreground travelled throughout the US and was exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. It attracted a lot of attention and there was intense speculation in the media about how the painting should be interpreted.

Leempoels, died in 1935.

Henry Bayley Snell was born 1853, and was a well-known American impressionist painter from New Hope, Pennsylvania. He was born in England and emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City in 1875 at the age of 17. While studying art at the Art Students League, he supported himself working for an engineering firm and a lithography studio. Snell married the artist, Florence Francis (his first cousin) in 1888 and began painting in New Hope in 1900, and later moved there around 1926.

Snell painted on many trips to Europe and India, and is especially noted for his coastal scenes of Cornwall, England. He also painted harbor scenes of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where he co-founded a second art school/colony in 1921 along with Frank Leonard Allen called Boothbay Studios. He also taught in New York City, Washington, D.C. and at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design). Snell died in 1943.

Charles Rollo Peters was born in California in 1862, A native Californian, Charles Rollo Peters studied privately with Jules Tavernier and at the California School of Design with Virgil Williams and Christian Jorgensen. By the mid-1880s, Peters was exhibiting works in San Francisco, most of which were seascapes and harbor views. In1886, he and his studio mate, John Stanton, journeyed to Monterey, it is his paintings of Monterey—especially his nocturnes—that would secure his reputation and earn him the title “Prince of Darkness.”

Returning to San Francisco in 1889, Peters opened a studio in the bohemian quarter and became an active exhibitor. The following year he went to Monterey and began painting works that would become “his signature Monterey style.”

Peters traveled again to Europe, in 1891, remaining for four years and painting numerous works, most of which were nocturnal landscapes. He died in 1928.

Ernesto Celedonio Emeterio de la Cárcova was born on March 3, 1866 and was a renowned Argentine painter of realistic style, first Director and founder of the School of Fine Arts in Argentina.

He was born in a traditional family of Buenos Aires.

He began his painting studies at an early age. In Buenos Aires, he began his studies at the Stimulus Society of Fine Arts. He continued his activity in Europe, where he studied in Paris, Rome, and Turin. In this last city he attended the Albertine School, under the guidance of Giacomo Grosso.

In 1893 he returned to Buenos Aires, where he completed one of his most recognized works, "Without bread and without work" (shown left). Exposed in 1894 in the Ateneo Hall. This work was acquired in 1906 by Eduardo Schiaffino, for the National Museum of Fine Arts, where it is currently kept.

He died on December 28, 1927 in Buenos Aires.

Homer Ransford Watson born on January 14, 1855– was a Canadian landscape painter. He was a member and president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, as well as a founding member and first president of the Canadian Art Club.

As a youth, he received his first set of paints from an aunt and he decided to become an artist. He sought the advice of Thomas Mower Martin in Toronto, and moved there in 1874. He copied works at the Toronto Normal School and was mainly self-taught, but met other artists in Toronto (e.g., Lucius O'Brien) while working part-time at a photography studio.

In 1876, Watson traveled to New York and met the painter George Inness. He was influenced by the Hudson River School and painted along the Hudson and Susquehanna Rivers in the Adirondack Mountains. In 1880, he sold his first major work, The Pioneer Mill, to the Marquis of Lorne for Queen Victoria's art collection.

Watson moved to England in 1887 for four years, and further established his reputation. Over the next few years, his works became increasingly popular among collectors and received prizes at expositions across North America. In 1902, at the height of his British career, he exhibited The Flood Gate. Homer Watson died in Doon on May 30, 1936.