Edward Chalmers Leavitt

Edward Chalmers Leavitt (1842–1904), a indigenous of Providence, Rhode Island, was an yet to be New England painter said to be the most renowned still excitement painter of his day in Providence, although today he is largely forgotten.

Leavitt was born March 9, 1842, the son of Providence pastor Rev. Jonathan Leavitt and his wife Charlotte Esther (Stearns) Leavitt. Leavitt's father Rev. Jonathan Leavitt, was born at Cornish, New Hampshire, and superior settled in the ministry at Bedford, Massachusetts, where he married the daughter of the primary minister Rev. Stearns, and subsequent to was ordained minister of Richmond Street Congregational Church in Providence, where he remained for a quarter of a century. Rev. Leavitt's son Edward Chalmers Leavitt, born in Providence, attended private schools in Providence, and Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, New Hampshire. (His forlorn sister Charlotte married Edward Slocum of Providence.)

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Leavitt enlisted at Boston in the United States Navy afterward his friend William Warren Flint of Walpole, New Hampshire. During his Navy service, Leavitt frequently clever his drawing technique.

Little is known of Leavitt's career. Most of his paintings featured tabletop arrangements of flowers, fruit, antiques and vintage bric-a-brac, and were sought after by the Victorian center class. The oil upon canvas paintings often were marked by their prudence of texture. During the 1870s and 1880s Leavitt frequently exhibited at the National Academy of Design. But as the extra century approached, Leavitt's output and mood declined, and his reputation faded.

There are indications that during his career, Leavitt worked afterward the clever Martin Heade. Leavitt was known to have studied earlier bearing in mind local player James Morgan Lewin, a painter of doting canvases. During his career, Leavitt painted thousands of canvases, turning out his trademark paintings of flowers, fruit and dead fish and game for a hungry center class worried for artworks to decorate their newly acquired homes. At one time, Leavitt's still lifes decorated Boston's esteemed Parker House hotel as with ease as the Narragansett Hotel in Providence. Leavitt worked at his studio at the Hoppin Homestead Building in Providence.

Among the artists of the day, Leavitt was seen as a solid—if uninspired—craftsman. Painter Charles Walter Stetson, for instance, didn't disguise his contempt for Leavitt's steady output for the upper middle classes, which Stetson proverb as influenced by the Fall River school. "Artists! they are not artists," wrote Stetson in a fit of pique. "Leavitt himself said to me 'After all, Mr. Stetson, say what we may, we are only dry goods merchants in choice line."

Leavitt's pretense is in the stock of the Brandywine River Museum, which has called him "Providence, Rhode Island's most successful nevertheless life painter of the nineteenth century." Leavitt's con is plus in the gathering of the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Cotuit, Massachusetts, and in the addition of the Cummer Museum of Art In Jacksonville, Florida.

Leavitt died at his house in Providence in 1904.