Smithsonian American Art Museum
When Abbott Handerson Thayer turned eighteen, his family moved from Keene, New Hampshire, to Brooklyn, where the thriving art and literary scene fed his imagination. For a time Thayer studied in Paris, and soon after his return to New York his career prospered.
Childe Hassam learned the value of hard work after his father’s hardware store burned to the ground and Hassam left school to work as a wood engraver.
In 1888, having grown up in Philadelphia, Sloan had to leave high school in his senior year when his father's business failed. He took a job as a cashier with a book and print dealer and found he was able to sell the greeting cards and copies of etchings by Rembrandt and Dürer that he had made.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens moved with his family from Ireland to the United States when he was six months old. He had an intense creative energy that drove him to produce many drawings as a child and to attend night classes at Cooper Union while in his teens.
Edmund Tarbell's remarkable New Hampshire summer home is emblematic of the painter and his art.
John von Wicht was highly trained in fine and applied arts in his native Germany before he immigrated to the United States in 1923. When he was seventeen he apprenticed in a painting and decorating shop, and spent his spare time drawing from nature.
Mark Lindquist was introduced to the lathe as a young boy by his father, Melvin. He later apprenticed in ceramics and became interested in the simple and graceful designs of Oriental and pre-Christian pottery.
William Morris Hunt traveled to Europe with his family when he was nineteen and stayed there for more than a decade, working and studying in Italy and France
Flora Mace and Joey Kirkpatrick are among the few glass artists who co-sign their work. Kirkpatrick was introduced to glass as a graduate student and became interested in Dale Chihuly's technique of picking up glass threads with molten glass.
Sample's attempt to impose a Thomas Hart Benton/Grant Wood brand of Midwestern regionalism on New England seems to have been at once affirmative and upbeat, and singularly touched with irony.