George Linen

George Linen was born in Scotland, the youngest of ten siblings. He studied painting at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and after a decade of running a successful studio in England, he arrived in New York in 1834 and established himself as a painter of cabinet portraits. These small images, about ten inches high, were precursors to photographs, and many were created as Linen traveled across the country from Maryland to Indiana in search of commissions. (Luhrs, ed., American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. I, 1994)