William Edgar Marshall

Background

William Edgar Marshall was born on June 30, 1837 in New York City of Scotch parents. His father, Francis Marshall, coming to the United States a stone-mason, founded the contracting firm of Marshall, Bates & Company, builders.

Education

Marshall got his education at a public school in Varick Street.

Career

At seventeen he began his engraving in a watchcase factory. His free hours, he devoted to ambitious portrait ventures in line. He was encouraged by a friendly engraver, Cyrus Durand, at whose suggestion the youth executed plates of both presidential candidates in the Buchanan-Frémont campaign. Submitted to the American Bank Note Company, these won Marshall, in 1858, a coveted chance to engrave portrait vignettes. He worked for this company several years and became one of its best engravers. Meanwhile, he published large portrait plates, two of which, Washington after Stuart, and Fenimore Cooper after Elliott, had wide circulation. He also tried his hand at painting original portraits. Finding that he had talent, he went to Paris about 1863 for study under Couture. Two of his student canvases won admission to the Salon. News of the assassination of Lincoln brought him home to paint, from photographs and descriptions, a portrait of the martyred President, which is now at Yale University. His engraving from this picture had an enormous sale. During a period spent in Boston, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Holmes sat for him. About 1866 he returned to New York, taking up his permanent abode in Broadway, near Washington Square, where during the days when artists swarmed in that vicinity his studio became a rendezvous. He had an engaging, humorous personality and in conversation could draw from a wealth of entertaining anecdotes concerning his famous sitters, who, as the years went by, included Grant, whom he painted six times, Sherman, Blaine, Beecher, John Gilbert, Mark Hanna, Harrison, McKinley, and Roosevelt. He helped many a struggling painter, notably Albert P. Ryder, whose talent he was among the first to recognize. When Clemenceau was in exile in America, he renewed a friendship with Marshall begun in the Latin Quarter, making the studio his headquarters. About 1871, having engraved a head of Christ after Da Vinci, Marshall was fired with ambition to paint his own conception of the Galilean. To the project he devoted vast research, producing at length a colossal canvas depicting a dark eyed, Greco-Arabian type, which he exhibited widely but refused to sell. During his later years he lived in retirement in his attic studio, 711 Broadway, keeping so aloof from currents of art life that many believed him dead, but happy with his engravings, his autograph letters, and the great head of Christ, which covered one whole wall. Here, cared for by a second wife, he died.

Achievements

• Marshall is represented in the National Gallery of Art in Washington by his portrait of Longfellow, and one of himself painted at the age of twenty-three.

Personality

He was encouraged by a friendly engraver, Cyrus Durand, at whose suggestion the youth executed plates of both presidential candidates in the Buchanan-Frémont campaign.

Connections

Marshall was twice married. There is no exact information about his first wife, but his second wife was Florence Rogers Garrison, a widow whom he married in 1900.

Father:

Francis Marshall

Wife:

Florence Rogers Garrison

References

• The engraved portraits of Washington, with notices of the Originals and Brief Biographical Sketches of the Painters