Background
Lovell Birge Harrison was born on October 28, 1858, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Apollos W. and Margaret (Belden) Harrison, and a brother of Thomas Alexander Harrison and Butler Harrison.
Lovell Birge Harrison was born on October 28, 1858, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Apollos W. and Margaret (Belden) Harrison, and a brother of Thomas Alexander Harrison and Butler Harrison.
Lovell obtained his elementary training as an artist in the school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1875, acting upon the advice of John S. Sargent, he went to Paris, where he continued his studies at the École des Beaux- Arts under Carolus-Duran and Alexandre Cabanel.
Harrison's early works were figure pieces, and his first success in this line was a picture painted in 1880 called “November, ” which was bought by the French government in 1882 for the Marseilles Museum. Soon after this period his health became impaired and he left France, making extensive journeys in far countries - India, Australia, Ceylon, South Africa, Egypt, and most of the rest of the lands bordering on the Mediterranean; a little later he spent several seasons in California and the Southwest, and some months in Quebec. After the early nineties, so soon as his improved health permitted him to resume work, he made his home successively in Plymouth, Massachusetts, New Hope, Pennsylvania, Bearsville, New York, and Woodstock, New York. At the latter place he directed with much success the summer school in landscape painting established by the Art Students’ League of New York. His landscape work was met with an uncommon degree of favor.
Most of his pictures are in the minor key, and are marked by a rare simplicity of design and a rather melancholy vein of sentiment. The best of them combine sturdy realism with the beauty of well-related values. His palette was restricted, and he was at his best when dealing with gray subjects without abrupt oppositions of light and dark. His nocturnal motives, winter twilights, rainy-day pictures, and snow effects, are the most characteristic and harmonious of his works. A good idea of Harrison's personal style is to be derived from the reproductions of his landscapes published in Scribner’s, Art and Progress, and Academy Notes. His pictures have been widely exhibited, and excellent examples may be seen in almost all the important American art museums, including those of Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Toledo, Indianapolis, St Paul, and a dozen other cities.
In 1909 Harrison published a book on Landscape Painting, which was in part the outgrowth of his counsels to his students at Woodstock. Naturally, there is much technical matter in it, but there is also much that should interest the general reader. It is never obscure, and contains a deal of sound esthetic doctrine. Harrison was the writer of a number of magazine articles.
Quotations:
“As painters our business is to transmit to picture-lovers the emotions and the impressions of strength and power or of poetic beauty which have come to us direct from nature. ”
“This is the test of the highest form of art - that it should stimulate the imagination and suggest more than it expresses. ”
Harrison was a member of the National Academy of Design, National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York Water Color Club, Society of American Artists.
Harrison married, in 1882, Eleanor Ritchie, who died on May 1, 1895. His second wife, whom he married November 28, 1896, was Jennie Seaton Harrison.