biografía de Chester HARDING (1792-1866)

Lugar de nacimiento: Conway, NH

Lugar de defunción: Boston, MA

Direcciones: Boston, MA, from c.1822

Profesión: Portrait painter

Estudios: PAFA, for two months in 1820; England, c.1823

Exposiciones: Royal Acad., London, 1824; Royal Soc. British Artists, London, 1824; American Academy, 1828; NAD, 1827 (Artist of the Acad.), 1828-29, 1848, 1859; PAFA, 1876? (deceased)

Asociaciones: ANA, 1828; NA, 1829-60 (hon. mem., prof.)

Obra: BMFA; MMA; National Portrait Gallery, Wash., DC; CGA; Cleveland (OH) Mus.; Massachusetts Hist. Soc.; Missouri Hist. Soc.; Washington and Lee Univ. (portraits); Hampden-Sydney College; Univ. Kentucky Art Mus.; Old Dartmouth Hist. Soc.

Comentarios: Harding ran a furniture business in upstate New York with his brother Horace (see entry) in 1815, but by 1817 he had taken up sign painting at Pittsburgh (PA) and also made his first attempts at portrait painting. The following year he joined his brother Horace in Paris (KY) and took up portrait painting as a profession, stating in his autobiography (1866) that during a six-month period there he painted over 100 portraits. He went to Philadelphia in 1820 but returned to Kentucky after only a very brief period of study. Harding's talent for portraiture was gaining notice and over the next year he achieved enormous success. He was in Cincinnati (OH) in February, 1820, and then moved to St. Louis where he painted Gov. William Clark (Missouri Hist. Soc.) and made a portrait of an Osage Indian Chief (location unknown). He then traveled to the countryside where, in June 1820, he painted the only known life portrait of Daniel Boone (Mass. Hist. Soc.), just before Boone died. Harding continued to travel after this, painting once again in Kentucky, and also in Cincinnati and Chillicothe (OH). He returned to the Eastern seaboard in 1821 or 1822, where he worked in Wash. (DC, Boston, and Northampton (MA), and achieved such rapid prosperity that by 1823 he was able to travel abroad to England. During the next three years he was successful in London, painting for the Royal family and receiving numerous requests for other commissions. Eventually, hard times forced him to return to America, where he was again in great demand. He settled in Boston for a few years and founded Harding's Hall, in which he and an association of artists promoted contemporary art through group exhibitions. He kept his Boston studio but moved to Springfield (MA) in 1830, and still traveled frequently, painting portraits in Wash. (DC), Richmond, Baltimore, Canada, New Orleans (1841), and Kentucky. Harding made a second visit to England and Scotland in 1846. He died in Boston, shortly after his return from St. Louis, where he had painted a portrait of General Sherman. Harding may also have done seascapes, a signed work, dated 1846, is in a Philadelphia collection. Harding's brothers Horace, Dexter and Spencer were also artists (see entries).

Fuentes: G&W; Early sources on Harding's life are his own My Egotistography (1866) and Margaret E. White's A Sketch of Chester Harding, Artist, Drawn by His Own Hand (Boston, 1890, and Boston, 1929). See also: DAB; New Orleans Bee, Feb. 11,1841, and Geb. 11, 1849; Swan, BA; Cowdrey, AAA & AAU; Richmond Portraits; Karolic Cat.; Dunlap, History; Flexner, The Light of Distant Skies. More recently, see Baigell; 300 Years of American Art, 109; Encyclopaedia of New Orleans Artists; Gerdts, Art Across America, vol. 1: 61, 73-74+; vol. 2: 81, 95, +; and vol. 3: 29-30, 33, 36; Peggy and Harold Samuels, 206-207; Wright, Artists in Virgina Before 1900; Jones and Weber, The Kentucky Painter from the Frontier Era to the Great War, 52-53 (w/repros.); Blasdale, Artists of New Bedford, 103 (w/repros.)