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Inductees in Artists & Painters
Frank H. Alston, Jr. (1914-1978)
Inducted in 1979
Frank H. Alston, of Providence, 1914-1978, was a designer for the Institute of Heraldry, Department of the Army. He designed many distinctive insignia, flags, badges, and medals for all branches of the U.S. Read more >
George S. Araujo
The late George S. Araujo, formerly of Providence, a Cape Verdean from the Fox Point neighborhood of the City who is regarded as one of the greatest Rhode Island boxers of all time and was the world's number-one ranked lightweight fighter when there was only one world ranking. George served as a longtime coach and recreation director with abandoned or delinquent children. He was also an accomplished folk artist with several local exhibitions to his credit. Read more >
Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901)
Edward M. Bannister was a nationally famous painter during the 19th century. He was a self-taught pioneer among African-American artists, and won a national award during the U.S. Read more >
Donald H. Bousquet (1948-)
Don Bousquet, who turned 67 this St. Patrick's Day, was born in Pawtucket, but his parents moved the family to South County where they both worked at the University of Rhode Island. One of seven children, Don attended Chariho High School where he met his wife, Laura. He went on to the University of Rhode Island to study anthropology. Read more >
John Nicholas Brown (1900-1979)
John Nicholas Brown, 1900-1979, was a former assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air, senior fellow at Brown University and a director of the Smithsonian Institution. He directed the search and recovery of the works of art stolen by the Nazis for which he was decorated by the French and Belgian governments. Read more >
Charles DeWolf Brownell (1822-1909)
Charles DeWolf Brownell was born in Providence in 1822 to parents from old-line Rhode Island families. When Brownell was two-years-old, the family moved to East Hartford where Charles was raised and grew to manhood. In 1843, he became an attorney and lived in a house directly opposite Connecticut's famed Charter Oak. He later rendered a well-known painting of that historical
After a decade of practice, Brownell abandoned his career as a lawyer, having become enamored of landscape painting as a result of his sketching trips through the Connecticut River Valley with artist Henry Bryant. Read more >
Sydney Richmond Burleigh (1853-1931)
Burleigh, Sydney Richmond, 1853-1931
Sydney Richmond Burleigh, a man with roots in Little Compton, Rhode Island, studied art with Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris for two years from 1878 to 1880. Upon his return, he became one of the founders and one of the first exhibitors at the newly-formed Providence Art Club. He taught at the Rhode island School of Design and was one of the founders of the Providence Watercolor Club. He became a champion of the emerging Arts and Crafts Movement. Read more >
Harry M. Callahan (1912-1999)
The late Harry M. Callahan, 1912-1999, formerly of Atlanta, Georgia and Providence, was generally regarded as one of America's greatest photographers and photo essayists of the 20th-century, who was one of the most celebrated educators of his time, teaching for fifteen years at the Rhode Island School of Design, and whose influence on his profession was felt worldwide. Read more >
Arlan R. Coolidge (1902-1993)
Mr. Arlan Coolidge, a Providence resident, was an internationally renowned violinist and a graduate of Brown University. He and served as Chairman of Brown's Department of Music for thirty-one years, served as Executive Director of the Arts Rhode Island, and as Chairman of several Governor's Commissions on fine arts. He was also involved with the National Council of Arts in Education. Read more >
W. Spencer Crooks
Spencer Crooks was an accomplished watercolor artists from Pawtucket whose works have been exhibited throughout the world. He was a popular teacher and lecture-demonstration expert on watercolor painting across New England. He was a major contributor to internationally recognized workshop seminars conducted not only in the United States, but in several foreign countries, including his native Ireland. He is listed in 'Who's Who in American Art', and is the recipient of several prestigious awards in his field. Read more >
Chon Day
Chauncey Addison Day, better known as Chon Day lived in Westerly and became a nationally known cartoonist who created Brother Sebastian. He was voted "Best Magazine Cartoonist of the Year" on three occasions by the National Cartoonist Society. Read more >
Felix De Weldon (1907-2003)
Felix De Weldon, 1907-2003, formerly of Newport and Dana Point, California, was a famed sculptor and painter whose bronze statue of the Marine Corps raising the flag of the United States on Iwo Jima during World War II was dedicated as the Marine Corps War Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia. He created more than 2,000 different public sculptures including presidents and kings. Read more >
Wilfred I. Duphiney (1884-1960)
Wilfred I. Duphiney, 1884-1960, Rhode Island's most prolific and most viewed portraitist of the Twentieth Century, was born in the mill village Central Falls in 1884.
His public school education led to his enrollment in the Rhode Island School of Design where he eventually graduated to the faculty and taught at this prestigious art school for nearly forty years. His world was centered on College Hill--RISD, the Providence Art Club, the Providence Watercolor Club, and his studio near the Art Club in the Fleur-de-Lys House at 7 Thomas Street. Read more >
Hezekiah Anthony Dyer (1872-1943)
Hezekiah Anthony Dyer was a prolific and accomplished artist who ventured into the equally demanding realms of military affairs, public service, and politics.
Dyer was born in Providence into a storied political family. His grandfather, Elisha Dyer, Sr., was governor of the state from 1857 to 1859 and served as an officer and the adjutant general in the "Dorr War" and the Civil War. Read more >
Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990)
Fritz Eichenberg was an internationally recognized graphic artist, illustrator, and author whose achievements are documented in the Library of Congress. He held several honorary degrees, including one from URI, where he served as professor and Chair of the Art Department. He became a well-known author, with texts that became standard for the field. He was also a member of several prestigious design and art academies and societies, among them the National Academy of Design, which honored him with the F. Read more >
Maud Howe Elliott (1854-1948)
Elliott, Maud Howe, 1854-1948
Maud Howe Elliott lived a very long life and certainly made the most of it. She was born at the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston on November 9, 1854. Her father, Samuel Gridley Howe, a noted physician and social reformer, directed the institution, but most people became familiar with her mother, Julia Ward Howe, who wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic and later battled for the cause of women's rights.
Maud was the driving force behind the founding of the Newport Art Association and served as its secretary until she was eighty-seven years old. Read more >
Barnaby M. Evans
Barnaby Evans is the creator, founder, and executive artistic director of WaterFire Providence. He is an artist who works in a multitude of mediums including site-specific sculpture installations, photograph, film, garden design, architectural projects, writing and conceptual works. His original training was in the sciences, but he has been working exclusively as an artist for more than twenty-five years.
Evans, a resident of Providence, is best known for WaterFire, a sculpture which he installed on the three rivers of Downtown Providence that draws over one million visitors to the city each year. Read more >
John J. Fawcett (1909-1992)
John J. Fawcett of North Kingstown earned international acclaim during an outstanding thirty-seven year career with the Providence Journal Company. He was an accomplished sports and editorial cartoonist, and a champion for the rights of others. He gained four National Brotherhood Awards from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and his prolific works have been sought by heads of State. Read more >
Charlie Hall
Charlie, as he prefers to be called, is a versatile comedian, writer, showman, artist, and political activist. In 2012, Charlie was the first person inducted into the newly-established Rhode Island Comedy Hall of Fame. His induction was the culmination of over thirty years of laugh-making through a variety of avenues including stand-up, writing, theater, and art. He is a true Renaissance man, and some say, a Rhode Island icon. Read more >
Milton R. Halladay (1874-1961)
Milton R. Halladay, 1874-1961, a native of Vermont, was a noted political cartoonist for the Providence Journal for nearly fifty years, and his cartoons were published in countless other newspapers and magazines. He has been called "one of the deans of American political cartooning". His cartoon commemorating the death of Thomas A. Read more >
Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904)
Heade, Martin Johnson, 1819-1904
Martin Johnson Heade was an accomplished landscape, portrait, and still life painter, a poet, and a naturalist. Heade is one of the most important American Romantic painters of the 19th Century and one of the major figures in the development of Luminism. Born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1819, he received his first art training around 1838 from local folk artists Edward and Thomas Hicks.
In 1858 Heade took a studio in the Tenth Street Studio building in New York City. Read more >
John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872)
Kensett, John Frederick, 1816-1872
John Frederick Kensett was one of the most influential members of the second generation of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. By age twelve, he was working in his family's engraving and printing business in New Haven. When he was thirteen, Kensett went to New York to work for Peter Maverick, then America's leading engraver. In Maverick's shop he met John W. Read more >
Charles Bird King (1785-1862)
King, Charles Bird, 1785-1862
Charles Bird King (September 26, 1785 - March 18, 1862) was born in Newport, the only child of Deborah Bird and Revolutionary War veteran Captain Zebulon King, who moved the family to Ohio in 1789 and was killed there by Indians.
When Charles King was fifteen, he went to New York to study portrait painting, and he then journeyed to London, where he was taught by Benjamin West at the Royal Academy.
After returning to America in 1812, he eventually settled in Washington, D.C. Read more >
Christopher Grant La Farge (1897-1956)
It is not unusual in Rhode Island that talent and accomplishment run in many of the state's long-established families. A case in point is the La Farge family. Christopher Grant La Farge was the son of a noted architect of the same name, grandson of John La Farge, a nationally prominent artist and stained glass maestro, and brother of Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and champion of Native American culture.
Although he was New York City born in 1897, Christopher's heart was at the family's River Farm estate in the North Kingstown village of Saunderstown, a place often visited by Theodore Roosevelt. Read more >
John La Farge (1835-1910)
La Farge, John, 1835-1910
John La Farge was born in New York City in March 1835 to parents of French ancestry. His interest in art began during his training at Mount St. Mary's College and St. John's College (now Fordham University). Read more >
Armand M. LaMontagne (1939-)
Armand M. LaMontagne is considered one of America's preeminent sculptors of celebrated personalities. Best known for his life-size wood and bronze sculptures of well-known public figures he has sculpted significant likenesses of well known athletes such as Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Bobby Orr, Larry Bird, Carl Yastrzemski and Harry Agganis, as well as prominent individuals including George Patton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, Elvis Presley and Lord Horatio Nelson. Read more >
Frank B. Lanning (1905-1987)
MFrank Lanning, 1905-1987, was a Providence Journal sports cartoonist and President of the Hall of Fame. He was well known throughout the state for his sports cartoons and his contributions to Rhode Island life in general and its' youth, in particular. Read more >
Edmund Darch Lewis (1835-1910)
Lewis, Edmund Darch, 1835-1910
Edmund Darch Lewis was one of the most popular of the Philadelphia landscape painters and one of the best artists of Narragansett Bay, particularly in capturing the Victorian heyday of the Towers and grand casino of Narragansett Pier. A student of Paul Weber from 1850 to 1855, Lewis exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Boston Athenaeum, the National Academy of Design, and the Boston Art Club. In the second half of the Nineteenth century he was one of America's premier watercolorists.
Employed briefly in Narragansett, Rhode Island by a photographer to touch up photos, he also painted original watercolor works prolifically, sometimes three a day. Read more >
James Sullivan Lincoln (1811-1888)
Lincoln, James Sullivan, 1811-1888
James Sullivan Lincoln was Rhode Island's premier artist of the mid-nineteenth century and has been acclaimed by his peers as "Father of Rhode Island Art."
The Massachusetts-born Lincoln was orphaned in his teens and left his Bay State farm to become an apprentice to a firm of Providence engravers and then to Providence portraitist C. T. Hinckley. Read more >
Charles I. D. Looff (1852-1918)
Charles I.D. Looff (1852-1918) is considered the first of the great American carousel builders having created 17 of them during his long career--some of which was spent living and working in Riverside, Rhode Island.
Charles I. Read more >
Maxwell Mays (1918-2009)
Maxwell Mays,1918-2009,was a lay preacher in his hometown of Greenville, Rhode Island, and one of the top painters of folk art in the United States. He exhibited in many of the major cities across the nation, and was past President of the Providence Art Club. His work, featuring traditional New England scenes, was published in Collier's, Yankee, American, and Cosmopolitan magazines. Read more >
Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf (1830-1895)
Metcalf, Helen Adelia Rowe, -- -1895.
Ms. Rowe Metcalf, formerly of Providence, was leader in the drive to establish the Rhode Island School of Design and devoted most of her time from 1878 to her death in 1895 to directing the School. Her influence and administrative skills enabled RISD to be founded with the goals of training artisans, teaching students the principles of art, and promoting appreciation of art, allowing it to become recognized as one of the most prestigious fine arts schools in the country. Read more >
William Trost Richards (1833-1905)
William Trost Richards was born in Philadelphia, the son of Quaker parents. His formal academic education ended in 1847 following his father's death when he worked as designer and illustrator of ornamental metalwork to help support his family. Richards married writer Anna Matlack in 1856 and settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania, where he lived until 1881. He studied drawing with the German-born artist Paul Weber and traveled and sketched with William Stanley Haseltine. Read more >
Karl R. Rittmann (1919-2001)
Karl R. Rittmann of Warwick, RI, whose outstanding artistic talents produced hundreds of famous portraits, features for newspapers, book illustrations, and colorful landscapes on display throughout the state and across the nation. He taught art in the Warwick School System for twenty-one years and served ten more years as Vice Principal of Veterans's Memorial High School. His major contributions to culture and art in Rhode Island is chronicled by his prolific works. Read more >
Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller (1874-1948)
Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller, 1874-1948, was the daughter of U.S. Sen. Nelson Aldrich, patron of the arts, and advocate for women's rights. Read more >
John Paul Selinger (1850-1909)
Jean Paul Selinger was born in 1850 in Boston. He studied art at the Lowell Institute, Boston and next trained abroad at the Art Academy in Stuttgart, and then under Wilhelm Lieble at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Selinger was a colleague of William Merritt Chase and became a skilled portraitist, genre painter, and landscape artist.
In the 1880s, Selinger opened an art studio in Providence and married Rhode Island-educated floral artist Emily Harris McGary (a distinguished silver medalist in Providence and Boston Art club competitions). Read more >
Charles Walter Stetson (1858-1911)
Charles Walter Stetson was born at Tiverton Four Corners on March 25, 1858, to an ailing mother and an impoverished father, a Baptist preacher who dabbled in herbs. He was raised from age eleven in Providence, in an unhappy household of economic worries; he died in Rome at age fifty-three having gained recognition as a distinguished painter and an incomparable colorist. The year after his death, critics at his large memorial exhibition said, "few paintings convey such majesty and sublimity of feeling."
Self-taught, Stetson was painting by the age of 14 and was quickly admired for his colors and his landscapes, patterned after his favorite--the British art critic, essayist, and watercolorist John Ruskin. Read more >
Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828)
Gilbert Stuart, 1755-1828, of North Kingstown is one of America's most notable portrait painters. After study in Dublin and London, he returned to America in 1793, where he painted renowned portraits of many of our founding fathers including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Read more >
Jane Stuart (1812-1888)
Jane Stuart was Newport's first woman portraitist, following in the illustrious footsteps of her famous father Gilbert Stuart. Jane was the youngest of his twelve children and his tenth daughter. She appears to be the great artist's favorite offspring, and worked with him in his declining years until his death in 1828, often completing the portraits he had begun.
When her father died penniless, Stuart, at the age of sixteen became the sole support of the family. Read more >
Marjorie Joy Vogel (1930-2007)
Born in Dayton, Ohio on October 31, 1930, the daughter of Theodore and Margaret (Burke) Suman, Marjorie received her B.Sc. in Business/Psychology at Kentucky's Bowling Green University. Her early years gave little indication that she would become the most prolific artist ever of Rhode Island's architectural, or built, landscape. Read more >
Mary C. Wheeler (1846-1920)
Mary Colman Wheeler (1846-1920) the founder of Providence's Wheeler School, was born on the family farm in Concord, Massachusetts, May 15, 1846. The Wheeler family, direct descendants of one of the first families of Massachusetts, was friends and neighbors of the Transcendentalists and literary leaders of their times; the Alcotts, Thoreaus, Hawthornes, Peabodys and Emersons. Miss Wheeler is buried along with these Concord notables on Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
An appreciation for the value of the arts and education came naturally to Mary Wheeler. Read more >
George William Whitaker (1840-1916)
George William Whitaker (1840-1916), a Fall River native, was one of the four founders of the Providence Art Club in 1880, along with Edward M. Bannister, Charles Walter Stetson, and Sydney Burleigh. Having studied in Paris with Laszlo De Paal, his work was influenced by the Barbizon School of landscape painters, where natural scenes became the subjects of paintings rather than being mere backdrops. He is best known for his Tonalist landscapes, which he developed in his years at Barbizon and Fontainebleau. Read more >
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