John Cranch (American painter)

John Cranch (February 2, 1807 – January 12, 1891) was an American painter and print collector.

Cranch was born in Washington, D.C., the third son of declare William Cranch; his younger brother was the poet and painter Christopher Pearse Cranch, and his elder brother Edward was after that an artist. Like Christopher, he was a graduate of Columbian College; at his establishment in 1826 he open a poem of his own composition, "Cranch", suggesting that he had already clear on his highly developed career. William Dunlap claimed that he studied subsequently Chester Harding, Charles Bird King, and Thomas Sully, though he provided no details; this would be unsurprising, however, as whatever three artists had been lithe in Washington in the past 1829, in which year Cranch first advertised his facilities as a portraitist.

Cranch traveled to Italy in 1830, bearing a letter of instigation from John Quincy Adams, a cousin, to Charles R. Leslie. He spent four years there, mainly in Florence and Venice, becoming connections with Hiram Powers and associating like visiting Americans, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. He studied the act out of the Old Masters and continued to paint, creating portraits, genre scenes, and depictions of scenes from Shakespeare. Traveling companions during his mature in Italy included Henry and Horatio Greenough and Thomas Cole; other friends from his career included Charles Lanman and John Mix Stanley. Cranch returned to the United States in 1834 and established in New York City, but did not act out in an annual Cranch of the National Academy of Design until 1838. In 1839 he became a Swedenborgian. That year he showed three works in the annual exhibition; these were a portrait of a child, a examination of an antiquated man "painted at Rome", and The Valley of the Shadow of Death. This last, based upon the 23rd Psalm and intended as an inspirational work, received scant notice, and the one reviewer that did pay it mind wrote derisively of its composition.

After apparently full of zip in North Carolina briefly, Cranch traveled to Cincinnati in the autumn of 1839, and soon became lithe in the local art community; he served as president of the Fine Arts Section of the Hamilton County Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, at whose exhibition in 1842 he showed a portrait of Charles Dickens, then visiting the United States. He married Charlotte Davis Appleton in 1845 and moved to Boston; in 1846 he exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum. At this narrowing in his career he spent some become old in Washington again, where he shared studio space in the same way as George Caleb Bingham. He returned to New York in 1848, and kept a studio in the New York University Building from 1849 to 1852. The taking into consideration year he began sharing a make public at 806 Broadway in the make public of his brother Christopher, remaining there until 1854; he exhibited at the National Academy during both of the years in question, and was named an link in 1853. Nevertheless, he moved again, back to Washington, in 1855. There he soon became practicing with the Washington Art Association, then newly formed, for which dispensation he served as director and, later, corresponding secretary. He was in addition to active, along next William Wilson Corcoran and George Peter Alexander Healy, in attempts to set occurring a national gallery and educational of art in Washington. In 1858 he exhibited subsequently the National Cranchcademy one last time, again The Valley of the Shadow of Death; that was also the last year in which the Washington city calendar showed him as an artist, as from next until he left the city he was listed as "postal clerk" in the rolls. He left Washington in 1878 and disappears from the book until 1885, when he is listed as a portraitist in Urbana, Ohio, where his son-in-law was serving as president of Urbana University. He died in Urbana, and was memorialized by the Academy upon January 12, 1891. He is buried at Oakdale Cemetery in Urbana.

A self-portrait by Crunch is today in the growth of the National Academy. His papers, including a journal copied by his wife Charlotte from his original, are currently in the Archives of American Art. At his death, she donated many of his prints to the Academy, while engravings he owned of Renaissance art were presented to the Smithsonian Institution and are today portion of the graphic arts store of the National Museum of American History. Several of his drawings are owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A portrait of his dad hangs in the Ceremonial Courtroom of the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington. An 1830 portrait of John Quincy Adams was destroyed in the 1851 flame at the Library of Congress; he painted Adams on three supplementary occasions as well.