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Bass Otis (July 17, 1784 - November 3, 1861), was an early American artist, inventor, and portrait painter. He painted hundreds of portraits including many of the best known Americans of his day, and produced the first American lithograph in 1819.
Bass Otis (July 17, 1784 - November 3, 1861), was an early American artist, inventor, and portrait painter. He painted hundreds of portraits including many of the best known Americans of his day, and produced the first American lithograph in 1819.
Life and work
Otis was born inEast Bridgewater, Massachusetts
East Bridgewater is a town in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 14,440 at the 2020 census. It is also a part of Massachusetts' 8th congressional district, of which it is represented by Stephen Lynch.
History
The ...
, the son of Josiah Otis, a physician, and Susanna Orr. As a youth, he may have been apprenticed to a scythe maker, perhaps to a relative. Later he worked as a coach painter, then studied with Gilbert Stuart
Gilbert Charles Stuart ( Stewart; December 3, 1755 – July 9, 1828) was an American painter from Rhode Island Colony who is widely considered one of America's foremost portraitists. His best-known work is an unfinished portrait of George Washi ...
in Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
about 1805-1808. Otis then moved to New York City, perhaps working as an assistant to painter John Wesley Jarvis
John Wesley Jarvis (1780 or 1781 – January 14, 1839) was an American painter.
Biography
John Wesley Jarvis (great, great nephew of Methodist leader John Wesley), was born at South Shields, England. His father was an English mariner, who mov ...
. When he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...
in 1812, his painting career flourished.
He was elected to the Society of Artists of the United States in 1812, and eight of his portraits were included in the combined exhibition of the Society of Artists and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Joseph Delaplaine he began painting portraits for “Delaplaine's Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished American Characters.” In 1816 Otis painted portraits of
The Philadelphia magazines and their contributors, 1741-1850
Philadelphia: R. M. Lindsay, 1892 Otis's notebooks for 1819-26 record over 300 portraits painted, including portraits of artist
File:Thomas Truxtun.jpg, ''Portrait of Thomas Tuxtun'', 1817.
File:Bass Otis (American, 1784-1861) - Portrait of William Henry Harrison.jpg, ''Portrait of President William Henry Harrison'', 1841
File:Fremont.jpg, ''Portrait of John C. Fremont'', 1856.
"The Notebook of Bass Otis, Philadelphia Portrait Painter,"
''Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society'' 103 (1): 179-253. 1993 *John Carpenter McKee, ''Bass Otis and His Critics'', University of Delaware Masters Thesis, 1995. *Philip J. Weimerskirch, "Lithographic Stone in America," ''Printing History'' 11 (1989): 2-15.
Smithsonian Institution Research Information Service (SIRIS)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Otis, Bass 1784 births 1861 deaths 19th-century American painters American male painters American portrait painters Artists from Philadelphia Artists from Boston Burials at Lawnview Memorial Park 19th century in Boston People from East Bridgewater, Massachusetts 19th-century American male artists
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 18 ...
, James Madison
James Madison Jr. (March 16, 1751June 28, 1836) was an American statesman, diplomat, and Founding Father. He served as the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817. Madison is hailed as the "Father of the Constitution" for hi ...
and Dolley Madison
Dolley Todd Madison (née Payne; May 20, 1768 – July 12, 1849) was the wife of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817. She was noted for holding Washington social functions in which she invited members of bo ...
. In total, Otis painted twenty-four portraits for the “Repository,” though only the Jefferson portrait was published before the end of the project in 1818. Some of the remaining portraits were exhibited in Delaplaine’s Philadelphia gallery, which became part of Rubens Peale
Rubens Peale (May 4, 1784 – July 17, 1865) was an American museum administrator and artist. Born in Philadelphia, he was the son of artist-naturalist Charles Willson Peale. Due to his weak eyesight, he did not practice painting seriously until ...
's New York museum. Otis produced the first American lithograph, which was published in the July 1819 issue of ''Analectic Magazine
The ''Analectic Magazine'' (1813–1820) was published in Philadelphia by Moses Thomas, and later, by James Maxwell. Washington Irving served as editor 1813-1814. The magazine was described as "comprising original reviews, biography, analytica ...
'', together with an article on the lithographic process.Albert H. SmythThe Philadelphia magazines and their contributors, 1741-1850
Philadelphia: R. M. Lindsay, 1892 Otis's notebooks for 1819-26 record over 300 portraits painted, including portraits of artist
John Neagle
John Neagle (November 4, 1796 – September 17, 1865) was a fashionable American painter, primarily of portraits, during the first half of the 19th century in Philadelphia.
Biography
Neagle was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His training in ...
, the Reverend Shepard Kosciusko Kollock, Victor Marie du Pont
Victor Marie du Pont de Nemours (October 1, 1767 – January 30, 1827) was a French American diplomat, politician, and businessman. He was also a member of the Delaware General Assembly, the founder of the Du Pont, Bauduy & Co., wool manufactur ...
, John Greenleaf Whittier, Senator John C. Fremont, and the Reverend James Abercrombie. He painted a famous postmortem portrait of Philadelphia financier Stephen Girard. Other well-known sitters included author James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851) was an American writer of the first half of the 19th century, whose historical romances depicting colonist and Indigenous characters from the 17th to the 19th centuries brought h ...
, Thomas Garrett
Thomas may refer to:
People
* List of people with given name Thomas
* Thomas (name)
* Thomas (surname)
* Saint Thomas (disambiguation)
* Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, and Doctor of the Church
* Thomas the ...
, and U.S. President William Henry Harrison
William Henry Harrison (February 9, 1773April 4, 1841) was an American military officer and politician who served as the ninth president of the United States. Harrison died just 31 days after his inauguration in 1841, and had the shortest pres ...
.
He worked mainly in Philadelphia, but also worked in Boston (1837, 1846–58) and in Wilmington, Delaware (1839, 1840s) and in Providence, Rhode Island
Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts Bay ...
(1858–61). His students included Henry Inman, Peter F. Rothermel and John Neagle.
Gallery
References
Further reading
*Craven, Wayne. “Bass Otis: A Critical Commentary” pp. 24–30 in ''Bass Otis: Painter, Portraitist and Engraver''. Wilmington:Historical Society of Delaware
The Delaware Historical Society began in 1864 as an effort to preserve documents from the Civil War. Since then, it has expanded into a statewide historical institution with several buildings, including Old Town Hall and the Delaware History Muse ...
, 1976.
*William Dunlap, ''A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States'' (1834)
*Gordon Hendricks
Gordon Hendricks (1917–1980) was an American art and film historian.
In 1961 Hendricks published ''The Edison Motion Picture Myth'' in which he showed that it was not Thomas Alva Edison who should be attributed with the invention of the fi ...
, " 'A Wish to Please, and a Willingness to Be Pleased,' " ''American Art Journal'' 2 (1970): 16-29.
*
*Knoles, Thomas"The Notebook of Bass Otis, Philadelphia Portrait Painter,"
''Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society'' 103 (1): 179-253. 1993 *John Carpenter McKee, ''Bass Otis and His Critics'', University of Delaware Masters Thesis, 1995. *Philip J. Weimerskirch, "Lithographic Stone in America," ''Printing History'' 11 (1989): 2-15.
External links
Smithsonian Institution Research Information Service (SIRIS)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Otis, Bass 1784 births 1861 deaths 19th-century American painters American male painters American portrait painters Artists from Philadelphia Artists from Boston Burials at Lawnview Memorial Park 19th century in Boston People from East Bridgewater, Massachusetts 19th-century American male artists