Background
William was born on June 1, 1828 in Schenectady, New York, United States, the son of Joseph and Eliza Ward (Maxson) Stillman.
William was born on June 1, 1828 in Schenectady, New York, United States, the son of Joseph and Eliza Ward (Maxson) Stillman.
After graduating from Union College in 1848, he studied landscape painting in New York during part of the next winter under Frederick Edwin Church.
In 1851 or 1852, after his return to America, he joined Kossuth and was sent to Hungary on a special mission, which, owing to Kossuth's incompetence in giving directions, failed. After a brief stay in France he opened a studio in New York and became art critic for the Evening Post.
In January 1855 he founded the Crayon: A Journal Devoted to the Graphic Arts, and the Literature Related to Them. Although it was a literary success (numbering among its contributors James Russell Lowell), Stillman at the end of 1856 severed his connection with the paper because of financial difficulties and ill health. Through the Crayon, however, he had formed valuable acquaintances among the literati of Cambridge and Concord, and he now removed to Cambridge, where for a time he continued his landscape painting and was instrumental in forming the Adirondack Club, whose roster included the names of Emerson and Agassiz.
In 1860 he was again in Europe pursuing his art and enjoying the company of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ruskin. Soon after the outbreak of the Civil War he became American consul at Rome (appointment confirmed, February 19, 1862). At that time he received a consular appointment to Crete, and there soon found himself in the midst of the Cretan insurrection of 1866.
He at once sided with the Cretans, but by his kindness to the natives he so incurred the enmity of the pasha that his own life and that of his family were much endangered. By 1868 the strain had become so great that he abandoned the consulate and removed to Athens, where his wife died the following year. He soon settled in London. For the next few years he engaged in literary pursuits.
In 1875 he set out for Herzegovina, then on the point of insurrection, as a volunteer correspondent for the London Times, and he soon extended his activities into Montenegro and Albania. He spent much of his remaining life in the employ of the Times as a special correspondent, with his residence in Rome.
As a landscape painter, he had quite exhausted his enthusiasm by 1860, although during the ten preceding years he exhibited pictures at the National Academy and was elected an associate of that body in 1854.
In 1898 he retired on a pension and removed to Surrey, where three years later he died.
William James Stillman workied primarily as a war correspondent in Crete and the Balkans, where he served as photographer. He also served as United States consul in Rome, and afterward in Crete during the Cretan insurrections. Besides, Stillman wrote such works as The Cretan Insurrection of 1866-1868 (1874), On the Track of Ulysses (1888), Billy and Hans (1897) and others.
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He freed himself from the dogmas of Calvinism as fully to accept the tenets of Spiritualism, although deprecating the professional medium.
The critical influence of Ruskin, whom he regarded with utmost reverence, seems in a measure to have run counter to Stillman's native artistic bent and may have helped to silence his genius. But his ultimate abandonment of painting was probably due to the fact, as he himself hints, that his theoretic knowledge of his art surpassed his executive ability. His literary work reflects both his honesty and versatility.
An innate spirit of inquiry led him ever to seek fresh fields of thought as well as endeavor. Hostile in early life to the teachings of evolution, he ultimately accepted the scientific creed of Darwin.
Of himself he once wrote that he had never published a book except from a desire to contribute to human knowledge.
Quotes from others about the person
"Perhaps his material prosperity and success might have been more signal, " wrote the London Times when he died, "had his tastes and gifts been fewer. Certainly his life would have been less full, and the man less engaging. "
He and his wife, Laura Mack, whom he had married on November 19, 1860, lived until 1865. In 1871 he married Marie Spartali, daughter of the Greek consul-general in London.
