John Quidor (1801-1881)

The son of a school teacher, John Quidor was born in Tappan, New York, and moved to New York City with his family in 1811. He studied painting with the well-known portrait artist John Wesley Jarvis sometime between 1814 and 1822 but instead of settling for a career as a portraitist, Quidor painted literary subjects. He was not alone in painting scenes from literature. Many contemporaries, including Thomas Doughty,  Asher B. Durand, Henry Inman. Robert W. Weir and, in Boston, Alvan Fisher — not to mention a host of lesser-known illustrators — all made pictures to illustrate books, particularly books written by American authors Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. However, the emotionality and romantic fervor which characterize Quidor’s pictures, and the fact that he pursued these subjects throughout his career while other artists moved on to landscape and portrait painting, distinguish Quidor from the rest. And although he received faint praise for having “merit of no ordinary kind” by Dunlap, he remained largely misunderstood and ignored as an eccentric during his own lifetime. 

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