Background
Robert Crannell Minor born on April 30, 1839, in New York. He was the son of Israel and Charlotte (Crannell) Minor, was a descendant of Thomas Minor (or Miner) who came to New England in 1629.
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Robert Crannell Minor
Edit ProfileEducation
Upon leaving school, Robert worked for his father, who was a coal dealer, but after a brief experience he found that he had no taste for business, and decided to take up painting. He studied for two years under Alfred C. Howland in New York, then went to Antwerp, where he continued his training under H. Boulanger and Joseph Van Luppen. From Antwerp, he turned to Paris, and after three years of experimentation there, joined the artists' colony at Barbizon, where he was fortunate enough to become the disciple of that brilliant colorist, Narcisse Diaz. This relationship proved to be the turning-point in his career; it determined the direction in which his work was to develop, and he became an avowed Barbizon man.
Career
Before returning to the United States, Minor spent two years painting landscapes in the south of England. He exhibited "The Silent Lake" at the Paris Salon of 1872 and several landscapes at the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery in London. Most of his English subjects were found in the Wold of Kent. His New York clubs were the Lotos and the National Arts. The Lotos Club purchased one of his paintings from the National Academy Exhibition of 1896. He was made a National Academician in 1897 and served as president of the Salmagundi Club in 1898. While a student in Antwerp he had been vice-president of the Société Artistique et Littéraire; and he was a member of several other artistic associations. Soon after his death, a collection of 109 of his pictures were exhibited and sold at the American Art Galleries, New York (1905), bringing a total of $35, 190. Emerson McMillin bought nine works, including "The End of Summer, " for which he paid $1, 200. This noble composition, with its fine old trees and luminous sky, reminds the observer in a vague way of both Ruysdael and Rousseau. McMillin was also the owner of "Sunrise, " while "Eventide" belongs to the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D. C. One of his favorite sketching grounds for several seasons was Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, and other places in northern New York attracted him for a time, but his final choice was Waterford, Connecticut, not far from New London, where he did much of his best and ripest work, and where he died.
Achievements
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Many of Minor's works had appeared in the current exhibitions in America during his long absence that he found himself already well known when he returned and set up his easel in the old University Building, Washington Square, New York. In the exhibition of the Society of American Artists, 1878, he had several pictures, among them "The Studio of Corot, " which was a delicate early-morning effect not wholly unlike the work of Corot himself. No American landscapist, with the possible exception of George Inness, has drawn so much inspiration from the Fontainebleau group of French masters as Minor. His body of work forms a handsome memorial to the great tradition of French nineteenth-century landscape painting. He had thoroughly assimilated the ways and means of his master, Diaz, had much of the same instinctive sense of color, and composed with the same pictorial dignity and distinction.
Works
Membership
an associate of the National Academy of Design, a member of New York Etching Club
Connections
Minor married Isabel Smith in 1860, and a son and a daughter survived him.
- Father:
- Israel Minor
- Mother:
- Charlotte L. Crannell Minor
- Brother:
- Albert Judson Minor
- Brother:
- Israel Minor, Jr
- Wife:
- Isabel Augusta Smith Minor
- Son:
- Robert Crannell Minor, II
17 March 1807 - 5 February 1895
26 August 1810 - 15 September 1899
12 March 1849 - 14 December 1880
11 November 1840 - 13 June 1893
2 September 1838 - 13 January 1901
19 January 1889 - 14 January 1894
