Thomas Prichard Rossiter
American, 1818 - 1871
Between 1840 and 1846, Rossiter lived, traveled, and worked throughout Europe with a number of his artistic friends, including Asher B. Durand, John F. Kensett and John W. Casilear. In 1841 be attended classes at the École Preparation des Beaux-Arts in Paris before traveling with Thomas Cole through France and Switzerland on route to Italy. Over the next three years, Rossiter wintered in Rome (where he became a prominent member of Rome’s American colony) and summered in Florence, Venice, Naples, and Germany. He used this sojourn to study drawing and the colorists of Venice, make copies of the old masters, and to roam the countryside sketching local architecture and landscapes.
Upon his return to the United States in 1846, Rossiter was eager to put his European training to use on large-scale, ambitious compositions. Although he continued to support himself painting portraits and teaching, he increasingly engaged with biblical and allegorical subjects, as well as domestic genre scenes and episodes from American history; and he exhibited these works on promotional tours throughout the North and South. In 1849, Rossiter was elected an academician of the National Academy of Design; and in 1851 he opened a studio with Kensett and Louis Lang. Also in that year, he married Anna Ehrick Parmly (1835-1856), whom he had met through her father, Dr. Eleazer Parmly, when he commissioned the artist to paint a group portrait of his three daughters.
In the spring of 1853, Rossiter and his wife embarked on a second tour of Europe before settling in Paris so the artist could continue his study of the masters and refine his painting style. During this stage of his career, Rossiter was particularly interested in French academic art and admired paintings imbued with moral and sentimental messages. According to the artist, the pictorial arts, whether epic and ideal, entertaining, or genre and landscape, were all capable of instruction. Rossiter increasingly believed his goal should be “to awaken public feeling and by constant effort and untiring industry…make the artistic profession one which shall convey instruction with pleasure to all classes” [“A Sketch of A Life of the Artist,” in A Description of Rossiter’s Paintings: The Return of the Dove of the Ark; Or, The Triumph of Faith; and Miriam the Prophetess Exulting over the Destruction of Pharoah’s Host (New York: Printed for the Exhibition, n.d.): 12; cited in Weber, Every Kind of a Painter (Garrison, NY, 2015): 10].
While in Europe, the Rossiters had an active social and artistic life together until Anna’s untimely death in May 1856, after the birth of a daughter. Rossiter immediately returned to New York with their three young children, and the next two years were a period of both recovery and discovery for Rossiter. Once again, he relied on portrait painting and teaching to support himself; yet he also made several trips to different regions of the United States to exhibit his biblical paintings. These excursions—which took him to the Great Lakes, along the Erie Canal to Buffalo and Niagara Falls, Michigan and Minnesota, and Wheeling, West Virginia by train—greatly influenced his sense of purpose. In particular, Rossiter made a trip to Mount Vernon in June of 1858 with his friend, landscape painter Louis Rémy Mignot, to collaborate on a history painting featuring George Washington. Like so many of his fellow American artists in the 1850s, Rossiter increasingly sought ways to illustrate and glorify America’s past, and the dual subjects of Washington and Mount Vernon proved fertile terrain. This project with Mignot would lead to a series of paintings highlighting the domestic and political life of the first president and serve as a stylistic and thematic turning point in Rossiter’s career.
Shortly after his second marriage to Mary (Mollie) Sterling in the spring of 1860, Rossiter closed his New York City studio and relocated to Cold Spring, New York, on the Hudson River. Here, he spent the next decade devoted to his cycle of works on the life of Washington and also completed a number of group portraits, allegorical scenes touching on the theme of liberty at the close of the Civil War, landscapes of the Hudson River Valley, and additional series featuring biblical scripture, the life of Christ, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
A few years following Rossiter’s death in 1871, the art critic H.W. French observed of his career: “Mr. Rossiter was not a complete success, nor yet by any means a failure. He had much ability in color, and ready skill in catching a likeness. But in drawing he was more deficient. Many of his larger pictures he sent about the country on exhibition: in fact, his success was partially due to the energy with which he kept himself before the public.” [Art and Artists in Connecticut (1879): 103; cited in Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1980): 86].
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