Henry Inman (painter)

Henry Inman (October 20, 1801 – January 17, 1846) was an American portrait, genre, and landscape painter.^[1]

Henry Inman
Painting of Inman by Jacob Hart Lazarus, circa 1837–1840, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Born	(1801-10-20)October 20, 1801 Utica, New York
Died	January 17, 1846(1846-01-17) (aged 44) Manhattan, New York
Spouse	Jane Riker O'Brien ​ ​ (m. 1822)​
Children	John O'Brien Inman Henry Inman, Jr.
Signature

Early life

He was born at Utica, New York, to English immigrant parents who were among the first settlers of Utica.^[2] His family moved to New York City in 1812.^[1]

Beginning in 1814 and continuing for the next seven years, he was an apprentice pupil of John Wesley Jarvis in New York City, along with John Quidor.^[3][4]

Career

He was the first vice president of the National Academy of Design,^[2] where he a great number of his paintings were exhibited.^[5] He excelled in portrait painting, but was less careful in genre pictures. Among his landscapes are Rydal Falls, England, October Afternoon, and Ruins of Brambletye. His genre subjects include Rip Van Winkle, The News Boy, and Boyhood of Washington. His portraits include those of Henry Rutgers and Fitz-Greene Halleck in the New York Historical Society. He also painted portraits of Angelica Singleton Van Buren, Bishop White, Chief Justices Marshall and Nelson, Jacob Barker, William Wirt, Audubon, DeWitt Clinton, Richard Varick, Martin Van Buren, Francis L. Hawks, and William H. Seward.^[2]

• 
  William Henry Seward around 1844
• 
  Seward's wife Frances Adeline Seward

Thomas L. McKenney assigned Inman, who was an accomplished lithographer, the task of copying more than a hundred oil paintings of Native American leaders by Charles Bird King to translate into a printed book, the History of the Indian Tribes of North America.^[6] The oil paintings are now in the collections of White House, the Joslyn Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, among others.^[7] Inman also painted illustrations for The Sketch Book by Washington Irving and The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. Many more appeared as engravings in The Atlantic Souvenir and The Token annual gift books in the late 1820s and early 1830s.^[5] In the Metropolitan Museum, New York, are his Martin Van Buren, The Young Fisherman, and William C. Maccready as William Tell,^[7] the last of which considered his most famous. Critic John Neal in The Yankee called it "a remarkably fine picture, notwithstanding its faults ... a bold, impassioned, well-painted picture".^[5]

During a year spent in England in 1844–1845, he painted Wordsworth, Macaulay, John Chambers, Sir William Stewart, Baronet of Blair and other celebrities.^[8]

At the time of his death, he was engaged on a series of historical pictures for the Capitol at Washington. He was also president of National Academy of Design.^[9]

Among his pupils was the portraitist and still-life painter Thomas Wightman.

Personal life

In 1822, Inman was married to Jane Riker O'Brien (1796–1873). Together, they were the parents of:^[1]

• Mary Lawrence Inman (1826–1860), who married Smith Cutter Coddington (1812–1868) in 1844.
• John O'Brien Inman (1828–1896), who was also a painter.^[1][10][11]
• Mary Lucy Inman (1828–1907), who married William Vail (1815–1880)
• Henry Inman, Jr. (1837–1899),^[12][13] a writer who married Eunice Churchill Dyer (1842–1922) in 1862.^[14]

Inman died on January 17, 1846, after returning from England to America due to failing health.^[9]

Selected works

• Paintings by Henry Inman
• 
  Portrait of David Vanon (c. 1832–33)
• 
  Portrait of Angelica Singleton Van Buren (c. 1842), White House Collection
• 
  Portrait of Sequoyah (c. 1830), National Portrait Gallery (United States)
• 
  Portrait of Clara Fisher (c. 1828), Indianapolis Museum of Art
• 
  Portrait of a Woman (c. 1825), Brooklyn Museum
• 
  Portrait of No-Tin (Wind) (c. 1832–33), Los Angeles County Museum of Art
• 
  Portrait of Cornelia Rutgers Livingston (c. 1833), New Britain Museum of American Art
• 
  Portrait of Mrs. William Samuel Johnson (c. 1823), Yale University Art Gallery
• 
  Dismissal of School on an October Afternoon (1845), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

References

1. Caldwell, John; Roque, Oswaldo Rodriguez; Johnson, Dale T. (1994). American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 1: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born by 1815. Metropolitan Museum of Art. p. 450. Retrieved July 26, 2017.
2. Dunlap, William; Bayley, Frank William; Goodspeed, Charles Eliot (1918). A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. Boston : C.E. Goodspeed & Co. Retrieved July 26, 2017.
3. Roger Panetta, ed. (2009). Dutch New York: the roots of Hudson Valley culture. Hudson River Museum. pp. 223–235. ISBN 978-0-8232-3039-6.
4. Caldwell, John; Rodriguez Roque, Oswaldo (1994). Kathleen Luhrs (ed.). American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. I: a Catalogue of Works by Artists Born By 1815. Dale T. Johnson, Carrie Rebora, Patricia R. Windels. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press. pp. 479–482.
5. Lovejoy, David S. (Winter 1955). "American Painting in Early Nineteenth-Century Gift Books". American Quarterly. 7 (4): 354–355. doi:10.2307/2710429.
6. Gerdts, William. The Art of Henry Inman.
7. "Henry Inman | LACMA Collections". collections.lacma.org. Retrieved July 26, 2017.
8. Harris, Neil (1966). The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226317540. Retrieved July 26, 2017.
9. "Henry Inman". The Plattsburgh Republican. January 31, 1846. Retrieved July 26, 2017.
10. Tuckerman, Henry Theodore (1867). Book of the Artists. American artist life, comprising biographical and critical sketches of American artists: preceded by an historical account of the rise and progress of art in America. New York: G. P. Putnam & sons. Retrieved July 26, 2017.
11. "Antiques & Fine Art – John O'Brien Inman – Biography". www.antiquesandfineart.com. Retrieved July 26, 2017.
12. Thrapp, Dan L. (1991). Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography: G-O. University of Nebraska Press. p. 704. ISBN 0803294190. Retrieved July 26, 2017.
13. Lossing, Benson John; Wilson, Woodrow (1915). Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History from 458 A.D. to 1915. Harper Bros. p. 42. Retrieved July 26, 2017.
14. Underhill, Lora Altine Woodbury (1910). Descendants of Edward Small of New England, and the Allied Families, with Tracings of English Ancestry. Priv. Print. at the Riverside Press. p. 1710. Retrieved July 26, 2017.

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

External links

• Art and the empire city: New York, 1825–1861, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Inman (see index)
• Gallery of Henry Inman's works, Art Authority
• Henry Inman collection at the New-York Historical Society