Artist

Daniel Garber

born North Manchester, IN 1880-died Lumberville, PA 1958
Media - J0014061_1b.jpg - 89406
Daniel Garber, © Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum J0014061
Born
North Manchester, Indiana, United States
Died
Lumberville, Pennsylvania, United States
Nationalities
  • American
Biography

Garber was long associated with the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, first as a student, then as an instructor. In his landscape paintings, a single tree often dominates the foreground.

Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)

Artist Biography

Daniel Garber, one of the most interesting and original of the late American impressionists, was born in North Manchester, Indiana, the youngest son of a Mennonite family. As a youth he studied with Frank Duveneck at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and later at the Pennsylvania Academy with Thomas Anschutz and J. Alden Weir. In 1905 he received a fellowship to study abroad from the Pennsylvania Academy, and while in England he painted works that are the most strictly impressionist of his career.

On his return to America in 1907 he established a studio in Lumbersville in Bucks County, just north of New Hope, Pennsylvania, and in the ensuing years became a central figure in the New Hope art community.

During these years he developed two different modes of painting. His more conventionally impressionistic works were lightly painted with attention to the shape and detail of the subject matter. His other, more popular style was more decorative and poetic, as exemplified in Tohickon [SAAM, 1922.6.3]. Framed by sinuous tree trunks silhouetted in the foreground, a planar regression into the distance is bathed in a soft luminous light. It was a quietly lyrical style distinctly opposed to the bravura technique adopted by his colleagues in the New Hope colony.

In 1919 he began teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy and at his retirement thirty years later was one of its most loved and respected instructors.

Emery Battis Artist Biographies for the exhibition American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000)

Exhibitions

Media - 1912.5.1 - SAAM-1912.5.1_1 - 45177
Grand Salon Installation-Paintings from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
June 5, 2009November 11, 2013
This installation in the Renwick Gallery's Grand Salon displays seventy paintings from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection, including landscapes, portraits, and allegorical works by fifty-one American artists from the 1840s to the 1930s.