Benjamin "Ben" Foster was an American landscape painter, and art critic, whose paintings won widespread acclaim during his lifetime.
Background
Benjamin Foster was born on July 31, 1852, in North Anson, Maine, the son of a Maine lawyer and politician, Paulinus Mayhew Foster, who traced his lineage to old Salem and Martha’s Vineyard families, and Lydia Hutchins.
His father practised for twenty-five years in North Anson, holding various public posts and serving for two sessions as president of the state Senate.
In 1860 the family moved to Richmond, Maine, where the following year Paulinus died. He seems to have left his family in straitened circumstances, for Benjamin, the seventh of ten children, was early thrown on his own resources.
Education
At eighteen Benjamin Foster went to New York to seek work. A dreamy, and delicate observer of nature, he was destined to spend twelve years in mercantile drudgery in the city.
Foster was thirty before he rebelled and determined to devote himself to painting. He studied first in New York with Abbott Thayer and at the Art Student’s League, then went to Paris.
Career
After a year under Olivier Merson and Aimé Morot, Foster came back to develop his own individual landscape style in oil and water-colors, unhampered by theories or by any consuming desire for popularity. Six months of every year he spent in the romantic hill-country about his farm at Cornwall Hollow, Connecticut.
The quiet, meditative moods of nature appealed to him: mysterious atmospheric effects, dawn, twilight, moonlight, the aspect of night in the hills; and these he rendered with intimate knowledge, a mastery of tone, and "a large feeling for unity, " which caused French critics to compare him to Cazin. His landscapes, begun in the open, were worked out from memory in the studio, in order to allow time for the "sublimation of the ideal from the real. "
In 1900 Foster exhibited at the Paris Exposition, and the following year he was brought into national prominence when the French government purchased for the Luxembourg his picture "Lulled by the Murmuring Stream, " a scene in a little New England village at night. He was the first American painter after Winslow Homer to be so honored. In addition to painting, Foster wrote art reviews for the New York Evening Post and the Nation.
Foster was for many years art critic of the New York Evening Post and a contributor to the Nation. Benjamin Foster died on January 28, 1926, in Maine.
Membership
Benjamin Foster was elected to membership in the Society of American Artists in 1897, to the National Academy in 1904, to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and to various water-color societies, local and national.