Robert Crannell Minor (1839–1904), American artist, was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

on April 30, 1839. His father, Israel Minor, was a merchant who made a large fortune in the pharmaceutical business. As a young man, Robert Minor worked as a bookkeeper in New York City but decided to study art in his early thirties. After studying in New York with painter Alfred Cornelius Howland, Minor went abroad in 1871 to continue his artistic education. He visited various galleries in England before traveling to

Barbizon Barbizon () is a commune (town) in the Seine-et-Marne department in north-central France. It is located near the Fontainebleau Forest. Demographics The inhabitants are called ''Barbizonais''. Art history The Barbizon school of painters is nam ...

, France, where he studied under Diaz. He later studied in Antwerp under Joseph Van Luppen and

Hippolyte Boulenger Hippolyte Emmanuel Boulenger (3 December 1837 – 4 July 1874) was a Belgian landscape painter influenced by the French Barbizon school, considered to be "the Belgian Corot". Biography Hippolyte Boulenger was born to French parents in Tournai ...

. In 1874, he was vice president of the Société artistique et littéraire of Antwerp. On his return to the United States in 1874, he opened a studio in New York. He painted for many years out of his studio in the Old University Building of

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

. Painting in the

Adirondack Mountains The Adirondack Mountains (; a-də-RÄN-dak) form a massif in northeastern New York with boundaries that correspond roughly to those of Adirondack Park. They cover about 5,000 square miles (13,000 km2). The mountains form a roughly circular ...

and later in

Waterford, Connecticut Waterford is a town in New London County, Connecticut, United States. It is named after Waterford, Ireland. The population was 19,571 at the 2020 census. The town center is listed as a census-designated place (CDP) and had a population of 3,07 ...

, Minor soon became known for his landscapes resembling the

Barbizon School The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement towards Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name ...

. Under the influence of

George Inness George Inness (May 1, 1825 – August 3, 1894) was a prominent American landscape painter. Now recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Inness was influenced by the Hudson River School at the s ...

and

Alexander Helwig Wyant Alexander Helwig Wyant (January 11, 1836November 29, 1892) was an American landscape painter. His early works belonged to the Hudson River School, with its direct pastoral narrative, but evolved into the more moody and shadowy Tonalism. After a s ...

, he also began to paint in a Tonalist style. His paintin
''Great Silas at Night''
(1897) displays his adoption of the Tonalist style while his lingering Barbizon style can be seen i
''A Hillside Pasture''
From the 1890s until his death, Minor exhibited frequently with the Tonalists in New York. In 1897, he was elected a member of the

National Academy of Design The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the f ...

, New York. In 1900, Minor achieved the height of his success at the historic William T. Evans sale in 1900, where his painting ''The Close of Day'' (private collection) fetched $3,050, the highest price for a landscape by a living American painter at that auction. Over the course of his lifetime, Minor was a member of the

Society of American Artists The Society of American Artists was an American artists group. It was formed in 1877 by artists who felt the National Academy of Design did not adequately meet their needs, and was too conservative. The group began meeting in 1874 at the home of ...

and the

Salmagundi Club The Salmagundi Club, sometimes referred to as the Salmagundi Art Club, is a fine arts center founded in 1871 in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan, New York City. Since 1917, it has been located at 47 Fifth Avenue. , its membership roster ...

. He exhibited in New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, and elsewhere in the United States, as well as in the Royal Academy of London and the salons of Paris and Antwerp. Minor was plagued with bad health during the last decade of his life. Despite later speculation, it did not materially impact the quantity of his output, and the suggestion that it impacted the quality of his work is a misreading of the increasing abstraction in certain of his later Tonalist paintings. He died at his home in

, on August 4, 1904. His paintings are owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the

Yale University Art Gallery The Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) is the oldest university art museum in the Western Hemisphere. It houses a major encyclopedic collection of art in several interconnected buildings on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. ...

, the

Mead Art Museum Mead Art Museum houses the fine art collection of Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Opened in 1949, the building is named after architect William Rutherford Mead (class of 1867), of the prestigious architectural firm McKim, Mead & White ...

, the Lyman Allyn Museum, the

Florence Griswold Museum The Florence Griswold Museum is an Art Museum at 96 Lyme Street in Old Lyme, Connecticut centered on the home of Florence Griswold (1850–1937), which was the center of the Old Lyme Art Colony, a main nexus of American Impressionism. The Museum i ...

, the Brooklyn Museum, the

Newark Museum The Newark Museum of Art (formerly known as the Newark Museum), in Newark, Essex County, New Jersey, United States, is the state's largest museum. It holds major collections of American art, decorative arts, contemporary art, and arts of Asia, A ...

, the

Robert Hull Fleming Museum The Fleming Museum of Art is a museum of art and anthropology at the University of Vermont in Burlington. The museum's collection includes some 25,000 objects from a wide variety of eras and places. Until 2014, the museum was known as the Robert ...

, the

Haggin Museum The Haggin Museum is an art museum and local history museum in Stockton, San Joaquin County, California, located in the city's Victory Park. The museum opened in 1931. Its art collection includes works by European painters Jean Béraud, Rosa Bo ...

, the

, the Memorial Art Gallery, and the

University of Arizona Museum of Art The University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA) is an art museum in Tucson, Arizona, operated by the University of Arizona. The museum's permanent collection includes more than 6,000 works of art, including paintings, sculptures, prints and draw ...

Work

His paintings are characteristic of the

Barbizon school The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement towards Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name ...

and

Tonalism Tonalism was an artistic style that emerged in the 1880s when American artists began to paint landscape forms with an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist. Between 1880 and 1915, dark, neutral hues such as gray, brown or blue, often domina ...

, and he was particularly happy in his sunset and twilight effects; but it was only within a few years of his death that he began to have a vogue among collectors. Among his works are: * ''Silent Lake'' (1872 - Paris Salon - an oil painting) see https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/robert-crannell-minor-american-1839-1904-122-c-78b41edbfb * ''Autumn'' (1874) * ''Evening'' (1875) * ''Daybreak" aka "Dawn'' (1876) * ''Under the Oaks'' (1878) * ''Studio of Corot'' (1878) * ''Sundown'' (1879) * ''The Stream'' (1879) * ''Autumn on Lake Champlain'' (1879) * ''October Days'' (1880) * ''Eventide'' (1881) * ''The Vale of Kennett'' (1882) * ''Edge of the Wood'' (1882) * ''Interior of the Forest'' (1883) * ''Morning in June'' (1883) * ''The Wold of Kent, England'' (1884) * ''The Cradle of the Hudson'' (1885) * ''The Close of Day'' (1886) see: http://www.weissauctions.com/AMSEvents/ViewEvent.aspx?id=09c3a91d-b729-4fa3-95c3-0595001e23ab * ''Indian Summer on the Ausable'' (1888) * ''Moonlight on the Sound'' (1891) * ''The Evening Star'' (1893) * ''A Woodland Path aka A Pathway through the Woods'' (1895) * ''A Summer Day'' (1896) * ''Midnight aka Moonlight'' (1897) * ''Great Silas at Night'' (1897) * ''Cloudy October aka Cloudy Autumn'' (1897) * ''September by the Sea'' (1898) * ''Near New London'' (1900) * ''Nocturne'' (1904)

Notes

References

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Minor, Robert Crannell Artists from New York City National Academy of Design members 1839 births 1904 deaths