George Cochran Lambdin

1830 - 1896

BiographyAmerican painter. He was a son of the portrait and landscape painter James R. Lambdin (1807–89), who had founded a museum in Pittsburgh in 1828 and directed the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1845 to 1864. George Lambdin studied with his father and began exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1848 and at the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1856. In the mid-1850s he travelled, probably to Munich, Paris, and Rome. His early works were sentimental genre paintings, the best known of which are Our Sweetest Songs (1857; New York, N. Acad. Des.) and the Dead Wife (The Last Sleep) (exh. 1858; Raleigh, NC Mus. A.). The latter was shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 together with one of his depictions of a Civil War subject, Consecration, 1861 (1865; Indianapolis, IN, Mus. A.). In 1868–9 he was at the Tenth Street Studio Building, New York, where he continued to exhibit anecdotal genre, especially childhood subjects, as in The Pruner (1868; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.). He was elected an Academician by the Pennsylvania Academy in 1863 and by the National Academy of Design in 1868. In Germantown, after a short trip abroad in 1870, Lambdin turned to floral studies, especially of roses from his own garden. Some of his floral still-life subjects were conventional table-top arrangements in glass or ceramic vases, but most were paintings of blooming plants and shrubs as they grow in nature or in garden pots, their foliage and blossoms silhouetted against blue sky or a neutral wall, as in Autumn Sunshine (1880; Washington, DC, Smithsonian Amer. A. Mus.). Many of Lambdin’s flower paintings, accentuated on solid-coloured, often black-lacquered, backgrounds, were chromolithographed by Louis Prang & Co., of Boston, MA. His studies of women with roses from the 1880s, such as his Anne S. P. Chew (Alston) (1881; Philadelphia, PA, Cliveden), elucidate his colour theories, which were influenced by John Ruskin.

[Source: Ruth Irwin Weidner. "Lambdin, George Cochran." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed January 8, 2016, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T048876.]

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