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Biography of Ralph EarlName: Ralph EarlBirth Date: 1751 Death Date: 1801 Place of Birth: Connecticut, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: artist, painter Ralph Earl Ralph Earl (1751-1801) was an American painter whose work recalls the archaisms of 17th-century colonial limners. He was one of America's earliest landscape artists.Ralph Earl was born in rural Connecticut. Nothing is known of his early training. In 1775, working in New Haven, he and the engraver Amos Doolittle visited the recent battle scenes of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord. Earl's four painted battle pictures, engraved by Doolittle, were among the earliest such scenes done in America. The forms are sharply drawn with little modeling and take on the look of flat paper cutouts.Earl's father was a colonel in the Revolutionary Army, but Earl's own sentiments lay with the loyalists. Refusing to fight the King's troops and fearing for his safety, he fled to England in 1778, where he remained for 7 years. He left behind him Sarah Gates Earl, his wife and cousin. Later Earl married again (never having …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…which was not uncommon for itinerant painters of the time. His paintings were uneven in quality. Among the best are the portrait Daniel Boardman (1789), in which a lovely, grassy landscape with soft mists falling over the hills stretches behind the figure; and the portrait Mrs. William Mosley and Son Charles (1791). His Connecticut hillscapes of the 1790s are precise and factual, yet manage to catch the personality of the place.Earl's clumsy power was representative of the work of itinerant Connecticut painters in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Further Reading Laurence B. Goodrich, Ralph Earl: Recorder for an Era (1967), offers a lively account of his career. William Sawitzky, Ralph Earl, 1751-1801 (1945), is a catalog of an exhibition of Earl's works at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Worcester Art Museum, Mass.Goodrich, Laurence B., Ralph Earl, recorder for an era, Albany State University of New York 1967. |