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Thomas Chambers (1808–1869): American Marine and Landscape Painter
Thomas Chambers was born in London in 1808 and emigrated to the United States in 1832. A painter of both landscapes and marine scenes, Chambers did not confine his artistic subjects to views that he knew firsthand but made liberal use of both his imagination and popular engraved images. Chambers is known to have looked not only to the Englishman William H. Bartlett's views, executed for Nathaniel Parker Willis' volume American Scenery (London, 1840), but also to Asher B. Durand's and Jacques Gerard Milbert's prints as the basis for several of his compositions. A number of Chambers' depictions of naval battles during the War of 1812 are based upon engravings, at least two from prints after Thomas Birch.
For the years 1834 and 1840 he was listed as a landscape or marine painter in the New York City directory. From 1843 to 1851 he lived in Boston, then moved to Albany, where he remained until 1857. He was subsequently listed in city directories in New York, 1858-1859; Boston, 1860-1861, and New York again, 1862-1866. After this time there appears to be no record of him, and his death date is unknown.
Obscure in his own lifetime, Thomas Chambers found fame in the twentieth century with the discovery of The “Constitution” and the “Guerriere,” a rare signed painting of his that unlocked the identity of the artist behind a singularly flamboyant group of mid-nineteenth-century American marine and landscape paintings. Chambers’s expressive style and bold decorative sensibility appealed to avant-garde taste, and he was hailed as a spunky native original, “America’s first modern.” Although almost nothing was known about his life, his work rapidly earned a place in the growing collections and anthologies of American folk art.
EXHIBITION:
As more of Chambers’s work came to light, a spare life story was constructed from census records, city directories, and a handful of dated paintings that document a career in the United States between 1832 and 1865. Widely recognized but little studied in the last fifty years, the artist receives here the first survey of his work since his modern debut in New York in 1942.
“Thomas Chambers” is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and its Center for American Art, in association with the Indiana University Art Museum. The exhibition is supported by a generous gift from Mr. and Mrs. William C. Buck. The presentation at the American Folk Art Museum is sponsored by The Magazine ANTIQUES, a Brant Art Media publication. Additional support is provided in part by the Leir Charitable Foundations in memory of Henry J. & Erna D. Leir, the Gerard C. Wertkin Exhibition Fund, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
http://hisour.com/artist/thomas-chambers/
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