Franklin Dullin Briscoe (1844-1903)

History and marine painter Franklin Dullin Briscoe was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1844 and studied in Philadelphia with Edward Moran in 1860. Like many of his contemporaries, he then went abroad to further his artistic education, visiting London and Paris before returning home and establishing his studio in Philadelphia. Briscoe made several more ocean voyages during his career, experiences that inspired the dramatic seascapes and shipping scenes for which he is today best known. The weather was an especially important factor in his work, whether capturing fishermen returning after a long day’s work under calm, luminist skies to his paintings of storm-tossed ships and sailors at the mercy of the wind and waves. 

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Briscoe’s work was shown at the Pennsylvania Academy and the Brooklyn Art Association, and he took part in the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. He was also a noted painter of historic events and created an enormous, ten-panel panorama of the Battle of Gettysburg twenty years after the close of the Civil War. While the current location of these paintings is unknown, they traveled throughout the country on exhibition soon after completion. Today the artist’s work can be found in several museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.

References: Falk, Who Was Who in American Art, 1999. American Art Analog.