James Carroll Beckwith (1852-1917)

James Carroll Beckwith is an artist traditionally celebrated for his mural painting and his iconic portrait of fellow Hannibal, Missouri, native, Samuel Clemens. Three years after the close of the Civil War, Beckwith traveled north to Chicago to study with Walter Shirlaw. In 1871, he headed east to New York to attend the National Academy of Design and, despite frequent trips and residencies overseas, he would retain ties to the city for the rest of his life. While in Manhattan, financial necessity drove Beckwith to portrait painting. As Pepi Marchetti Franchi has noted, Beckwith’s portraits of women during this period took on a specific agency, and perhaps it is for these powerful and frequently sensual images that he ought to be best remembered. His subjects included Minnie Clark, the “Original Gibson Girl,” and Evelyn Nesbitt, the scandal-haunted wife of Harry K. Thaw and former lover of Stanford White. Beckwith exhibited his work at the 1889 Paris Exposition and he won the Gold Medal at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition. After suffering two years of poor health during which he continued to paint, he died in New York in 1917.

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