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Birge Harrison
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1884, Birge Harrison has been described as one of America's leading tonalist painters. He first enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and advised by John Singer Sargent, went to Paris in 1875. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with Alexander Cabanel, and in the atelier of Carolus Duran. Then he traveled world wide for Scribner's in the 1880’s including to India, Australia, and the South Seas. In England he was influenced by the atmospheric effects of the works of John Crome and John Constable, and he concluded that the highest achievement in modern art was landscape painting.

His specialties became moonlit landscapes, pueblos, and Indian genre, but unlike many of his Impressionist contemporaries, who liked to paint "en plein air," he painted from memory and preferred a muted palette. He returned to New York, where he taught landscape painting and was Director at the Art Students League. Stressing the importance of the big vision and atmospheric effects and mood in landscape painting, he founded the Woodstock Art Colony and made his home in that picturesque Dutch region of the Catskills. He was one of the first generation of painters and teachers in the Woodstock, New York art colony, which under his influence became a center of Tonalist-style painting. He also became a part of the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, affiliated with the Arts and Crafts Movement.

A contemporary of Charleston painter Alfred Hutty, Harrison maintained a studio in Charleston in 1919 – 1921 and became a mentor to legendary Charleston painter alice Ravenel Huger Smith.

He died in 1929.

Exhibitions include: Expo Universale, Paris, 1889 (medal); Columbian Exposition (Chicago), 1893; Buffalo Exposition, 1901; Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St Louis), 1904; Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915.

Sources include: Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art http://www.museum.cornell.edu/byrdcliffe/ Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940

Sold works:

Charleston Harbor in Moonlight