Oliver Frazer was born on February 4, 1808, probably in Jessamine County, Kentucky. He was the second son of Alexander Frazer, who had emigrated from Ireland after participating in Emmett’s insurrection.
His mother was Nancy Oliver of Lexington, Kentucky.
When Frazer was a small child his father died, and he was indebted to his uncle, Robert Frazer, for his education.
Education
Frazer attended the schools of Lexington until he was seventeen, when “the early development of his talent for drawing proved an interruption to the pursuit of his studies”, and he left school to go into the studio of Matthew H. Jouett, from whom he had already gleaned what he knew of drawing.
At Jouett’s advice, he was later sent to Philadelphia to study with Thomas Sully.
In May 1834, he sailed for Europe. The first six months he spent in Paris, where he enjoyed the companionship of George P. A. Healy and Edwin Forrest.
Later he pursued his studies in the schools of Berlin and Florence, but in 1835, he went to England, considering it the best place to study portraiture.
Career
After four years of European study, Frazer returned to Lexington. Frazer’s success in Lexington was immediate. He demanded fifty dollars a portrait, the highest price in the city, and had no lack of patronage.
His work is marked by simplicity of line and firmness of texture, and generally preserves the virtues of eighteenth-century American painting.
The uneven quality of his work was due in part to his temperamental inability to force himself to a standard, and in part to his sight, which in his later years was badly impaired.
He died in Lexington.
Achievements
Personality
Personally, Frazer was eccentric and original, given to a proverbial irony and a not unbecoming hauteur.
Connections
In 1838, Frazer married Martha Bell Mitchell, the daughter of Alexander Mitchell of Frankfort.