John Whetton Ehninger
John Whetton Ehninger
1827 - 1889
American painter and illustrator. After graduating from Columbia College, New York, in 1847, he immediately departed for Europe to pursue artistic training. He visited Italy and France, but staying in Germany, specifically Düsseldorf, was his main objective. There he studied with Karl Friedrich Lessing, Carl Ferdinand Sohn and fellow American Emanuel Leutze, and in Paris he was instructed by Thomas Couture. During the early 1850s he travelled between America and Europe but finally settled in New York in 1853 until his move to Saratoga Springs after marrying in 1877. Ehninger exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design, New York, where he was elected a full member in 1860. His work reveals interests shared by the other Americans in Düsseldorf: these were mainly history and genre painting, with occasional forays in European landscape. But he quickly returned to American subject-matter; Yankee Peddler (1853; Newark, NJ, Mus.), for example, describes the initiative of an itinerant entrepreneur in the young nation.
Ehninger’s work often suffers for being overcrowded with figures, obscuring the effect of the meticulously rendered details. While he was in England, Ehninger designed for the London Illustrated Times, and in the USA he illustrated works by Washington Irving, Longfellow and Tennyson. He also introduced cliché-verre, a new technique for photographic etching, to America in a portfolio published in 1859. Ehninger thrived on diversity; as well as being an artist, he was an accomplished linguist, classical scholar and amateur actor. [H. Nichols B. Clark. "Ehninger, John W.." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T025636.]
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French, 1864 - 1901
