Background
Thomas Benedict Clarke was born on December 11, 1848 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of George Washington Clarke, Ph. D. , an educator, of a family long resident at Milford, Connecticut, and Mary Jane McKie.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
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Thomas Benedict Clarke was born on December 11, 1848 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of George Washington Clarke, Ph. D. , an educator, of a family long resident at Milford, Connecticut, and Mary Jane McKie.
Thomas Clarke was educated at Washington Collegiate Institute, New York, from which he went into business, achieving early success. In the heyday of the Hudson River school of American painting, from 1869 onward, he followed the seasonal art exhibitions and began to buy and sell pictures.
The "e" appended to Dr. Clarke's name was of middle-nineteenth-century addition, to distinguish him from a near neighbor in Washington Square who was George Washington Clark. It has been said of him that although he went into the fine-arts business, dealing in Chinese porcelains and handling the landscapes of George Inness, Sr. , he "always held himself to be an amateur in art". He was a prolific collector and made auction history through his successive disposals which were managed with meticulous care and taste and of which the catalogues, prefaced and edited by well-known writers, were important contributions to the history of art. Notable was the Clarke sale at Chickering Hall, February 14-18, 1899, of paintings and Chinese art for about $235, 000. There was general excitement when Inness's "Grey, Lowery Day, " owned by Clarke since 1877, went for the top price of $10, 150. Another historic dispersal was the Clarke sale in January 1919 of paintings by contemporary American artists. The collection had been in formation since 1884 and included the well-known "Whistler's Father. " Clarke was anticipating, meantime, an active national interest in portraits attributed to early American painters, and of these canvases he made a resplendent display in 1928 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Fiske Kimball, director of the Museum, wrote the catalogue's foreword. The collection was Clarke's great contribution to preserved Americana. In publishing and exhibiting his "finds" in this field he was enthusiastic and possibly, in some cases, too trustful of pedigrees of pictures and artists supplied to him by persons professionally engaged in research. By and large, however, this assemblage of colonial and post-Revolutionary portraits, which became a national possession through the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, represents an important achievement of American connoisseurship. Clarke, greatly beloved and respected, recipient of many honors, officer and member of many New York clubs and associations, died in New York after several months' illness.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
He was married, on November 14, 1871, to Fannie Eugenia Morris, of a distinguished and well-to-do New York family. They had one son and four daughters.
