Background
Lemuel Wilmarth was born on November 11, 1835, in Attleboro, Massachusetts. His parents, Benoni Wilmarth and Fanny Fuller, were farming people, and each child of the household was expected to take his turn at the daily farm duties.
Lemuel Wilmarth was born on November 11, 1835, in Attleboro, Massachusetts. His parents, Benoni Wilmarth and Fanny Fuller, were farming people, and each child of the household was expected to take his turn at the daily farm duties.
After attending the district school and a school in Boston, he began his art study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, in 1854. Varying his studies in Philadelphia with peddling trips in the South and other more or less lucrative jobs, by about 1859 he had accumulated enough to go abroad. He spent three and a half years at the Munich Academy under Wilhelm von Kaulbach, and two and one half years under Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris.
Returning to America with his funds exhausted, he was fortunate in securing a commission to paint the decorations in the Park Theatre in Brooklyn.
He began in 1866 to exhibit at the National Academy of Design genre paintings, anecdotal and somewhat sentimental in character, but accurate in drawing and pleasing in composition.
He was appointed instructor at the Academy art school in 1870, and was elected an associate member of the Academy in 1871.
In the spring of 1871 he declined a professorship at Yale because the position at the Academy offered "a larger field of usefulness".
His election as Academician came in 1873. He continued as the head of the Academy school until 1887, when he requested and was granted a leave of absence for two or three years. Under the influence of younger men who were returning from Europe and bringing with them new methods of painting and teaching, a spirit of change was beginning to be apparent in the small American art world. Wilmarth never resumed an active position and definitely resigned his place in the school in 1889. In his teaching he stood for sound construction, accurate drawing, and a high degree of finish. He was elected in 1892 a member of the Academy council, but resigned in the following year because of ill health.
During the years of his teaching he continued to paint and exhibit, with a considerable degree of financial success. In addition to a winter home in Brooklyn, he purchased a farm at Marlboro on the Hudson in 1882, remodeled the house, and built a studio. Not long after this his eyesight began to fail, and in his later life he did very little painting, though he produced some pictures of still life and fruits from his own orchard and vineyard which delighted his patrons with their realism. Wilmarth was also prominent in the Church of the New Jerusalem in Brooklyn, and was one of the founders of the New Earth, a Swedenborgian publication, and for several years its editor.
Lemuel Everett Wilmarth died on July 27, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York.
Lemuel Wilmarth had left the stern religious teachings of his childhood behind him and had passed through a period of atheism, but later found great joy and comfort in Swedenborgianism.
Lemuel Wilmarth was a founder of the Art Students League of New York and a member of the National Academy of Design.
Lemuel Wilmarth was a genial, kindly man, of medium height and rather stocky build, with a full round face.
In 1872 Lemuel Wilmarth married Emma R. Higginson, who died in 1905. They had no children.
