Background
Thompson was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1840. His parents are said to have been of Maryland and Virginia stock, their ancestors early settlers on the tributaries of Chesapeake Bay.
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Alfred Wordsworth Thompson
Edit ProfileEducation
Thompson was educated in Baltimore, and, though he began the study of law in his father's office, he turned to art before coming of age.
In 1861 he went to Paris, where he was a pupil successively of C. G. Gleyre, Émile Lambinet, A. Pasini, Adolphe Yvon, and finally of Antoine Barye, the sculptor, under whose tutelage he studied the anatomy of the horse.
Career
At the time of John Brown's raid he went to Harpers Ferry, and made drawings of the places of interest and a likeness of Brown, whom he visited in prison. He opened a studio in Mulberry Street, Baltimore, just before the Civil War began. Many of the war pictures which appeared in Harper's Weekly and the Illustrated London News during the first year of the war were his.
In 1864-65 he worked at the École des Beaux-Arts, and in the same year he sent to the Salon his first picture, "Moorlands of Au Fargis. " To make a painting of the great Gauli glacier he climbed in the company of three mountaineers to a desolate place ten thousand feet above sea-level, surrounded by snow and ice. Later he made some extensive tours on foot through the Eifelwald in Germany, along the banks of the Rhine and the Danube, and through the rugged regions of the Tyrol and Bohemia. One of his trips was a six months' walk from Heidelberg to Calabria in the south of Italy. He walked through Sicily and climbed to the summit of Mount Etna. At a later period he made several visits to Corsica and Sardinia on mule-back.
In 1868 he returned to America and opened a studio in New York, where he soon received a gratifying measure of recognition. He was one of the first members of the Society of American Artists. After his election as an Academician in 1875, he regularly sent pictures to the annual exhibitions of the National Academy. To the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876, he sent "On the Sands, East Hampton" and "Virginia in the Olden Time, " and to the Paris Exposition of 1878 his "School-house on the Hill. "
In his later years he made occasional voyages to France, and traveled in Spain, Morocco, and Asia Minor, his zeal for fresh subjects leading him to wander in many lands. In the early part of his career the scenery of Italy engaged his attention; later he turned to the delineation of American landscape and life; and finally he ventured into the realm of history. He painted a few scenes from the Revolutionary period, or the one just preceding it, "with a smoothness and skill of handling recalling that if he worked under Gleyre, he was also a pupil of Pasini".
He died at Summit, N. J. , aged fifty-six.
Achievements
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Among the best known of his works are "Annapolis in 1776, " in the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, N. Y. ; "The Parting Guests, " owned by the New York Historical Society; "Old Bruton Church, Virginia, in the Time of Lord Dunmore, " in the Metropolitan Museum, New York; and "Washington Reviewing the Troops, 1777. "
Works
Connections
The name of his wife is said to have been Pompella or Pumpelly.
