Francis Guy (1760–1820) was an English-born American Colonial Era painter. Mostly remembered for his topographic views of Brooklyn, Guy is today highly regarded as one of America's earliest and most important landscape artists.http://dallasmuseumofart.org:8080/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/0?t:state:flow=bc60b99f-65ae-49c9-a7bb-8f85adcc1f6a

Biography

Guy participated in the family business as a London silk dyer before he moved to the United States in September 1795, where he intended to continue his career. He lived briefly in New York and Philadelphia and by 1798 had settled in Baltimore. After a fire destroyed his business in 1799 in

Baltimore Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...

, Guy decided to devote himself to painting. Although he had no formal art education, Guy was able to learn by himself, with the help of patrons like Robert Gilmor. Robert Gilmor was one of Baltimore’s noted early art collectors, who allowed Guy to copy his pictures. In Baltimore, Guy worked with wealthy clientele creating landscapes of country estates and later he became known for depicting the everyday activities of Baltimore's citizenry. Guy then moved to

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

in 1817, where he stayed until his death in 1820. The type of landscape paintings Guy produced was relatively new to American art. Indeed, during the colonial period American artists usually depicted idealized subjects chosen from European artistic models rather than painting from nature. Guy died before the completion of the very ambitious exhibition he had planned at the Shakespeare Club in Brooklyn in 1820.

References

Bibliography

* Brooklyn Museum exhibition: ''Picturing Place: Francis Guy's Brooklyn, 1820'' *

Dallas Museum of Art The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is an art museum located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, along Woodall Rodgers Freeway between St. Paul and Harwood. In the 1970s, the museum moved from its previous location in Fair Park to the Art ...

: http://dallasmuseumofart.org:8080/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/0?t:state:flow=bc60b99f-65ae-49c9-a7bb-8f85adcc1f6a {{DEFAULTSORT:Guy, Francis 18th-century American painters 18th-century American male artists American male painters 19th-century American painters 1760 births 1820 deaths American landscape painters 19th-century American male artists