James Carroll BECKWITH
1852–1917, USA

Born in Hannibal, Missouri, James Carroll Beckwith spent his youth in Chicago where his family relocated shortly after his birth. In 1868, Beckwith began to study art, receiving instruction from Walter Shirlaw at the Chicago Academy of Design. When the great Chicago fire destroyed the Academy in 1871, Beckwith moved to New York. There he enrolled at the National Academy of Design, attending classes with Lemuel Wilmarth and developing friendships that would last throughout his life with J. Alden Weir, Abbott Thayer and George de Forest Brush, among others.

Beckwith traveled abroad in 1873. He spent five significant years in Paris where he became extremely close to the important American expatriate artist John Singer Sargent who was a classmate in the atelier of Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran. Beckwith and Sargent shared a studio, at 73 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and for three years their lives were closely intertwined. Beckwith introduced Sargent to the American students in Paris and Sargent invited Beckwith to join him at cosmopolitan social gatherings. Like Sargent, Beckwith adopted the direct painting method advocated by Carolus-Duran and began to work in a bold alla prima style. As a part of his training, Beckwith visited museums and galleries, studying the work of Raphael, Tintoretto, Veronese, Tiepolo and Velasquez. After being admitted to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1874, Beckwith received further instruction from Léon Bonnat. In 1877, Beckwith, along with Sargent, assisted Carolus-Duran in painting a large ceiling decoration in the Louvre.

On his return to America in 1878, Beckwith settled in New York and participated in the first exhibition of the Society of American Artists. He taught at the Art Students League from 1878-1882 and from 1886 to 1897. In New York, Beckwith became close to William Merritt Chase, assisting Chase in the organization of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition in 1883, a show that included works by radical French painters Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. In 1884, Beckwith displayed pastels at the first exhibition of the Society of Painters in Pastel which had been largely organized by Chase. Beckwith became an associate at the National Academy of Design in 1884, and in 1894, he became a full member.

For many years, Beckwith worked in the Sherwood Studios in New York and spent his summers upstate. During his mature career, he concentrated on rendering portraits, continuing to work in the animated style of his French years; gradually he lightened his palette and developed an Impressionist manner. He traveled to Europe often and lived in Italy from 1910 to 1914, there painting plein-air studies of monuments, buildings and landscapes. Despite illness in his last years, Beckwith continued to paint until almost the end of his life.

Beckwith's works are included in many important private and public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Source: http://www.spanierman.com