Monograph Number Two in The Mentor Reading Course
Edwin Howland Blashfield has a place in the front rank of American mural painters through his elevation of thought and his masterly execution. His imagination is fertile and his treatment of subjects highly decorative. He has been able to paint both history and legend, and has placed them side by side in the same compositions.
He was born on December 15, 1848, in New York City. He is a son of William Henry Blashfield, and a brother of Albert Dodd Blashfield, the illustrator.
Blashfield studied first at the Boston Latin School. Then, in 1867, he went to Paris to study under Leon Bonnât. He also received valuable advice from Gérôme and Chapù. He exhibited for many years at the Paris Salon, and also at the Royal Academy in London. In 1881 he returned to the United States and married.
For some years he was a painter of genre pictures; that is, pictures of common life and its associations. Then he turned to decorative work, which was marked by rare delicacy and beauty of color. At the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 he painted mural decorations for a dome in the Manufacturers’ Building. Later he did the great central dome of the Congressional Library at Washington, the drawing room for the Huntington residence, the decoration for the courtroom in the courthouse at Baltimore, the decoration of the entire chancel in the Church of the Savior at Philadelphia, and many other masterpieces of mural art.
Blashfield is well known as a lecturer on art, and has written many articles dealing with the subject. With Mrs. Blashfield he wrote, in 1900, “Italian Cities,” and together, with A. A. Hopkins, they edited Vasari’s “Lives of the Painters.”
At one time Blashfield was president of the Society of American Artists. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and many other societies. He makes his home in New York City.
Blashfield has received many honors and medals, including a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition in 1900, a gold medal at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904, a Carnegie prize in 1911, and others.
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 2, No. 15. SERIAL No. 67
COPYRIGHT, 1914. BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION. INC.