Edward Chalmers Leavitt

Edward Chalmers Leavitt (1842–1904), a indigenous of Providence, Rhode Island, was an in the future New England painter said to be the most renowned still cartoon painter of his morning 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 sophisticated settled in the ministry at Bedford, Massachusetts, where he married the daughter of the primary minister Rev. Stearns, and once 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 unaided sister Charlotte married Edward Slocum of Providence.)

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Leavitt enlisted at Boston in the United States Navy subsequent to his buddy William Warren Flint of Walpole, New Hampshire. During his Navy service, Leavitt frequently expert 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 middle class. The oil upon canvas paintings often were marked by their suitability of texture. During the 1870s and 1880s Leavitt frequently exhibited at the National Academy of Design. But as the additional century approached, Leavitt's output and character declined, and his reputation faded.

There are indications that during his career, Leavitt worked past the capable Martin Heade. Leavitt was known to have studied earlier taking into consideration local artist James Morgan Lewin, a painter of romantic 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 anxious for artworks to titivate their newly acquired homes. At one time, Leavitt's nevertheless lifes ornamented Boston's esteemed Parker House hotel as without difficulty 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 center classes, which Stetson saying 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 temperate goods merchants in complementary line."

Leavitt's fake is in the increase of the Brandywine River Museum, which has called him "Providence, Rhode Island's most successful still life painter of the nineteenth century." Leavitt's feign is next in the collection 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 home in Providence in 1904.