George Fuller was an American painter. The main subjects of his canvases were portraits of his family and friends, landscapes, and, occasionally, ideal figures such as were later to be associated with his name.
Background
George Fuller was born on January 17, 1822, in Deerfield, Massachusets, where his father, Aaron Fuller, a farmer of English descent, described as a serene, kindly man, diligent, and sufficiently prosperous, had taken for his second wife Fanny Negus of Petersham, Massachusets, who came of Welsh stock.
George Fuller was the first of several children by this second marriage. Mrs. Fuller’s grandfather was an officer in the Revolutionary army; her father, a lawyer, was an amateur painter; one of her brothers was a painter by profession, and her younger sister was a miniaturist.
She herself, a sanguine, impulsive, emotional type, for a time stoutly opposed her eldest son’s wish to become a painter; while her husband meant him to be a businessman.
Education
At the age of sixteen, Fuller studied in the Deerfield Academy but found time out of school hours to make many essays in painting, mainly in portraiture.
In 1847, at the solicitation of his friend and mentor, Brown, he went to New York and entered the life class in the school of the National Academy of Design.
Career
When the boy was thirteen years old, Fuller was taken to Boston, to work in a grocery. Finding this occupation irksome, he undertook the equally distasteful trade of selling shoes; but after a month or two, he returned to the Deerfield farm, to which he continued to return after many wanderings throughout his life. About a year later, he joined a party of young men who were going to Illinois to make surveys for a new railroad. This time he was away from home for about two years. His letters to his parents told of many adventures, hazards, and picturesque episodes, and abounded in comments upon men and events that showed unusual discernment for a lad in his teens.
In the words of his biographer, William Dean Howells, he was at that time “an ardent and susceptible youth, falling in love right and left, and full of a joyous life, at once buoyant and tranquil. ”
When it became evident that his artistic ambition was to be seriously reckoned with, he was permitted in 1841 to accompany his half-brother Augustus, a deaf-mute who painted miniatures, on a tour through northern New York for the purpose of painting portraits at fifteen to twenty dollars apiece. This expedition proved fairly successful. After it came a return to work on the farm.
The following winter, 1841-42, the paternal opposition to his choice of a profession having been overcome by his persistency, he went to Albany, New York, to begin the serious study of painting in the studio of Henry Kirke Brown, the sculptor, to whose instruction, counsel, and encouragement Fuller owed much.
After nine months in Albany, he went to Boston to continue his studies during the two succeeding winters at the Boston Artists’ Association. The summers he spent at home, helping on the farm.
Fuller shared a studio in Boston with Thomas Ball, the sculptor. A great event in 1846 was the sale of his first imaginative picture, “A Nun at Confession, ” for the sum of six dollars.
For the greater part of the next ten years, he lived in New York, though three of the winters were passed in the South, at Charleston, Mobile, Augusta, and other places, where he painted a few portraits and made studies of negro life, some of which were utilized in his later work.
He also lived for nearly a year in Philadelphia.
In 1859, the death of his father and the duty of supporting the surviving members of the family recalled him to the farm. Before settling down as a farmer at the old home, however, he was given his first opportunity to make a tour of Europe.
In January 1860, with his friends William James Stillman and William H. Ames, he left New York in a sailing vessel bound for Liverpool. The voyage was tedious and stormy.
In the five months that followed, Fuller visited London, Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice, and other art capitals, making many sketches in the museums, and finding special pleasure in the works of the Venetians.
In London, he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt. His letters of this time do not throw any new light on the old masters, but they are interesting as the first impressions of a sensitive observer. He returned to the United States in the summer of 1860. There he took seriously to farm work, and roamed no more for some fifteen years, almost forgotten save by a few old friends.
His subjects were portraits of his family and friends, landscapes, and, occasionally, ideal figures such as were later to be associated with his name. Fie was feeling his way in solitude ; gradually evolving his own method of expression.
For a time his management of the farm promised to be successful. Many improvements were introduced. Tobacco culture was begun with excellent prospects of profit. A disastrous turn of the tide came in 1875, when the fall of prices forced him into insolvency. In this emergency there was nothing left to him but his art, and he resolved to capitalize it.
He finished about a dozen pictures during the winter of 1875-76, sent them to Boston, where, in the spring, the first exhibition of his works was opened. His success was instantaneous and complete. A new chapter in his life was opened, and from this time forth he had no difficulty in finding buyers for whatever he painted. He now established himself in Boston once more, at the outset taking a studio at 12 West St. , and moving a year or two later to 149-A Tremont St. , in the Lawrence Building.
In 1878, he made his reappearance at the National Academy exhibition with the “Turkey Pasture in Kentucky” and “By the Wayside”; in 1879 he sent to the Academy two pictures, “And She Was a Witch” and “The Romany Girl”; in 1880, “The Quadroon” and a portrait of a boy; and in 1881, “Winifred Dysart. ” The tide of popular approval continued to rise; with the advent of “Winifred Dysart” and “The Romany Girl, ” it reached flood stage. The painter was hailed as a master of rare distinction ; his pictures were called painted poetry.
To the exhibitions of the Society of American Artists he sent “Evening-Lorette, ” “Nydia, ” and “Priscilla Fauntleroy. ”
Three of his paintings were seen at the exhibition of the Boston Art Club in 1882. He was now producing his best work, not only with the joy of creation, but with the satisfaction of knowing that he was understood.
Finished in 1881, it was first seen in a Boston dealer’s gallery, and then at the National Academy, where it created a sensation.
In the spring of 1884, another exhibition of his paintings was opened at the old Williams & Everett galleries in Boston. Twenty works were shown, the most important of the new canvases being “Arethusa, ” his last picture and the only nude subject he ever painted. It represented the Nereid celebrated in Shelley’s poem, who changed herself into a fountain to escape the importunities of her lover Alpheus.
Another important painting was “Fidalma, ” a character in George Eliot’s Spanish Gypsy. There were also “Nydia, ” the “Girl and Calf, ” and a number of portraits. While this exhibition was in progress, the artist was stricken suddenly with pneumonia and died, March 21, 1884, at his home in Brookline. He was buried at Deerfield.
Achievements
Views
Fuller had made a special appeal to the latent idealism of the people, and the response was phenomenal.
“A dreamy picture, full of twilight haze, out of which looks a sweet-faced girl, ” was the simple description of it in Mr. Kurtz’s Academy Notes.
If all this was heartening for the artist, a rich recompense for so many years of patient striving, it was also one of the most significant manifestations of the sound acumen of his public, wholly unused as it was to such things in modern pictorial art as the elusive and mystical qualities of Fuller’s work, but, as it proved, ready and eager for them.
The prompt recognition of a personal note so rare and delicate was therefore not only Fuller’s triumph, but a historic demonstration of zeal in the cause of moral and, as it were, spiritual beauty - those outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace which relate Fuller to such remote predecessors as Botticelli and Memling. Such art as this connotes nobility and purity of character in the artist.
Quotations:
“I have concluded to see nature for myself, through the eyes of no one else, and put my trust in God, awaiting the result”.
Membership
In 1857, Fuller was elected an associate of the National Academy.
Personality
Fuller's most intimate artist-friends in New York were Daniel Huntington, Sandford R. Gifford, Henry Peters Gray, J. Q. A. Ward, and the Cheney brothers.
Fuller was no ordinary man. That his was a singularly fine and sweet nature is the testimony of all who knew him. Extremely simple, modest, and unaffected, he was full of kindness and charity.
He never uttered a word in disparagement of a colleague. If he could not praise, he held his peace. His influence was wholesome. When success and renown came to him, he was not in the least puffed up but remained the same unassuming and gracious gentleman he had always been.
Quotes from others about the person
“His heart was sound, his mind was clear, and his taste was sure, ” wrote Samuel Isham.
“No more fascinating, haunting, the individual figure has come from a contemporary hand, ” wrote Mrs. Van Rensselaer; “it had no prototype or inspiration in the work of any other brush. ”
Connections
In 1861, Fuller married Agnes Higginson of Cambridge, Massachusets.