Schreyer was born in Frankfurt and lived much of his life there. He trained at the Städel Institute. He joined the household of Maximillian Karl, sixth Prince of Thurn and Taxis, a minor royal family that was based in Frankfurt, and traveled with that household through Hungary and into Russia and Turkey. In the 1850s he served as a painter in the ranks of the Austrian army, traveling with it through Wallachia.
The unsettled nature of Wallachia would later provide Schreyer topics for his canvases. In about 1856, Schreyer left the service of the Austrians and traveled around the Mediterranean to Syria, Egypt, and Algiers. He settled in Paris in 1862 and, in 1864, showed his first painting at the Salon. Schreyer remained in Paris until 1870. In 1870, Schreyer returned to Germany. He exhibited in the Vienna Exposition in 1873.
Schreyer was known as a painter of horses and battlefields, and of Orientalist topics. His work sold well in the United States.
René de Saint-Marceaux was born in Reims, northeast of Paris, the son of a champagne maker and the grandson of the city’s mayor. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the early 1860s and studied under the sculptor François Jouffroy. The 1868 Salon committee accepted Saint-Marceaux’s sculpture of The Youth of Dante; he would continue to show at the Salon throughout his career.
Saint-Marceaux exhibited a terracotta bust of a child at the Salon of 1874 that the portraitist—and teacher of John Singer Sargent— Carolus-Duran later purchased for his own collection. By 1876, Saint-Marceaux had rented a studio at 68, rue d’Assas, in Paris, close to the Luxembourg Gardens.
In 1892, Saint-Marceaux married Marguerite Jourdain, the affluent widow of the artist Eugène Baugnies. Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux kept a busy social calendar. Her parties brought wealthy Parisian society members together with artists and musicians. Saint-Marceaux and the Haggins were a part of the same community of artists, their friends and critics, and their collectors.
Rix’s father, Alfred, brought their entire family overland to California from Vermont in the early 1850s. After his wife died, Alfred sent young Julian back to be brought up by New England relatives. Julian Rix returned to San Francisco when he was 15 in 1866. His father apprenticed him to a firm of house painters.
His sketches drew the attention of local artists and soon young Rix became one of the first students at the San Francisco Art Association. During the summers of 1873-1880, Rix traveled through California, painting all the way. Rix exhibited his works annually in the 1870s and 1880s with the San Francisco Art Association and the San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute.
In 1883, Rix moved to New Jersey and, later, New York. He exhibited his work regularly in New York galleries. Rix traveled to Europe in 1889 and was influenced by the Barbizon School. He lived on the East Coast for the rest of his life, dying at the age of 52.
Richet was born in 1847 in Solesmes, a village in Normandy dominated in his childhood years by a growing Benedictine monastery. By the late 1860s he was a pupil of Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña (1807-1876). The Salon committee accepted Richet’s painting of the forest of Fontainebleau in 1869. By 1870, he had taken a studio in Paris at the southern edge of Montmartre.
Under the influence of Diaz, Richet depicted scenes around the village of Barbizon and in the Fontainebleau forest over the course of his career. Diaz died in 1876. After that, Richet worked under Jules Lefebvre, another painter of the Barbizon School. Lefebvre taught at the Académie Julian, which had been founded in 1868; it is likely that Richet enrolled there, and continued his study of landscapes. Richet enjoyed a long and settled career, painting both in the Barbizon area and in his native Normandy. He died in Paris in March of 1907 at age 60.
Renoir was a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and in the studio of Charles Gleyre. Renoir met Claude Monet and they experimented with painting outdoors. Renoir’s painting of Esmeralda was accepted into the 1864 Salon. In 1868 and 1870 he showed in the Salon again.
By this time, Monet was painting almost exclusively out of doors, and Renoir often set up his easel nearby. The innovative methods they developed—painting with lighter colors, painting less sharply defined figures and features, and painting scenes of ordinary Parisians at play—were a radical departure from the standard Salon fare.
Renoir became popular for his portraits of fashionable Paris society and garnered financial freedom for the first time. As the 1880s went on, Renoir turned to soft, loosely conveyed images of intimate family scenes
In the early 1900s he purchased property outside of Nice with a view of the Mediterranean and retired there, with hope that the drier, warmer climate would ease his rheumatism. Renoir died in 1919.
Moran was born in England but moved to the United States in the mid-1840s. At 16, Thomas was apprenticed to a wood-engraver. The young Moran sketched and painted and taught himself to paint. Moran’s older brother Edward, also a painter, shared a studio with him. In 1861, the two went to England. After a short period back in America, the Morans went back to Europe in 1866 for another period of study. Moran exhibited two paintings in the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris.
On the family’s return home, Moran tagged along on a U.S. government expedition to the Yellowstone. He filled his sketchbook and, on his return, used the sketches to illustrate an 1871 article for Scribner’s Monthly. Moran expanded his sketches to create a 7-by-12-foot painting, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Magazines continued to send Moran west on assignments.
In the late 1870s enormous landscapes fell out of favor. In the 1880s, Moran’s taste shifted as he embraced the new fashion for small, quiet landscapes.
Jean-Baptiste-Ferdinand Monchablon was born in the village of Châtillon-sur-Saône. In about 1875, Monchablon went to Paris to study painting under Alexandre Cabanel. He debuted at the Salon in 1881. Monchablon began to specialize in realistic, light-filled landscapes by 1885. He moved home and focused his skills on depicting the valleys and fields around his hometown.
Monchablon continued to exhibit his paintings in Paris and abroad in the 1880s and 1890s, but lived most of the time in Châtillon. He traveled to the Netherlands to study 17th-century Dutch artists in the mid-1880s; his landscapes, like those in the Dutch landscape tradition, are dominated by large skies, panoramic views of the countryside, and meticulous detail. Monchablon was so enamored of that tradition that he began signing his paintings with the Dutch version of his name: Jan Monchablon.
Knoedler’s Gallery of New York began selling Monchablon’s landscapes in 1887. American collectors from New York and the Midwest favored his works.
Robert Cranell Minor’s father was a coal dealer, and that was to have been his career—but he was drawn instead to art. His first teacher was Alfred C. Howland, an artist himself who had studied in Düsseldorf and in Paris with the Barbizon painters. Minor followed his teacher’s path to Europe in the mid-1860s, and remained there for almost 10 years. He joined the community of artists at Barbizon and studied there under Narcisse Diaz de la Peña (1807-1876). Minor traveled throughout Europe, spending two years painting landscapes in England. He showed his work at the 1872 Paris Salon as well as in London’s Royal Academy before returning to the United States in the mid-1870s. Minor opened a studio on New York’s Washington Square and spent summers painting in the Adirondacks.
Minor frequently painted interior forest scenes, similar to the work of Theodore Rousseau and Diaz de la Peña. Minor was a member of the National Academy of Design and the Salmagundi Club.
Homer Dodge Martin was born in Albany, New York, and studied briefly with Hudson River School artist William Hart. He worked in the Tenth Street Studio Building from 1865-1882, sketching in New England during the summers. The National Academy of Design admitted him as a member in 1868. Artist John La Farge, befriended him and exposed him to contemporary trends in paintings. Martin began to move away from his Hudson River background and toward a more impressionistic style.
Martin lived in France between 1882 and 1886. There, he absorbed the vision of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and the Barbizon School. His paintings became more abstract and atmospheric; he began to paint from memory instead of his earlier meticulous sketches. By 1888, he had moved back to New York and was working in a studio.
