biographie de George Peter Alexander HEALY (1813-1894)

Birth place: Boston

Death place: Chicago

Addresses: Paris; Rome; Chicago

Profession: Portrait and historical painter

Studied: Couture, Antoine Jean Gros, France,1834

Exhibited: Paris Salon, 1836-37, 1839-42, 1844-45, 1850, 1855, 1869, 1872, 1874-81, 1883, 1885-87, 1889-90; PAFA, 1847-68, 1882; Paris Int. Exhib., 1855 (gold med.); NAD, 1862-87; Brooklyn AA, 1864-74, 1912; Boston Athenaeum; Grand State Fair, 1868 (hon. men. for portraits); Boston AC, 1874-75; World's Indust. & Cotton Centennial Expo, 1884-85.

Member: Chicago Acad. Design (founder); NAD, c.1857; AIC (founder)

Work: MMA; CGA; NPG; BMFA; NAD; NMAA; Essex Inst., Salem, MA; Minnesota Hist. Soc.; Chicago Hist. Soc.; Univ. Kentucky Art Mus.; Newberry Lib., Chicago; Virginia MFA; Louisiana State Museum; J.B. Speed Museum; priv. collections in New Orleans.

Comments: Along with William Morris Hunt, he was one of the most successful of mid 19th-century portrait painters. He began his artistic career in Boston in 1830 (at age 17) and in 1834 went to France for study. Fifteen of the Presidential portraits he painted for King Louis Philippe I of France in 1842 and never delivered (as the King was overthrown six years later) are now in the Corcoran Gallery. When he returned to the U.S. in 1842, he was already internationally known for having been patronized by the royal families of England and France. From 1844-67 he was occupied with numerous commissions in Wash., DC, in other cities along the Eastern seaboard, and in the Southern states, as well as in Chicago where he made his home from 1855-67. His sitters included many of the leading statesmen of the time (A. Lincoln, J.Q. Adams, A. Jackson, D. Webster), as well as leaders of religion, society, and business (Pope Pius IX, Liszt, Longfellow, Louisa May Alcott). After the Civil War Healy went back to Europe, settling first in Rome, then in Paris, but all the while continuing to travel and fulfill important commissions in the U.S. and many European capitols. Returning finally to the U.S. in 1892, he spent his last years in Chicago (a city he had often returned to while living abroad). He was more commonly known as G.P.A. Healy.

Sources: G&W; The career of G.P.A. Healy has been the subject of several books: his own Reminiscences of a Portrait Painter (Chicago: 1894); Life of George P.A. Healy, by His Daughter, Mary [Mme. Charles Bigot] (Chicago: 1913); and a study by his grand-daughter, Marie de Mare, entitled G.P.A. Healy, American Artist (New York: 1954). See also: DAB; Swan, BA; Cowdrey, NAD; Cowdrey, AA & AAU; Rutledge, PA; Richmond Portraits; Karolik Cat.; Rutledge, Artists in the Life of Charleston; Washington Art Assoc. Cat., 1857; Baigell, Dictionary; Encyclopaedia of New Orleans Artists, 179; McMahan, Artists of Washington, D.C.; Jones and Weber, The Kentucky Painter from the Frontier Era to the Great War, 53-54 (w/repros.); Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons, 353-55; 300 Years of American Art, vol. 1, 159; Falk, Exh. Record Series.

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