Levi Wells Prentice

Levi Wells Prentice (December 18, 1851 – November 28, 1935) was an American nevertheless life and landscape painter. Prentice was associated with the Hudson River School.

Prentice grew up on a farm in Lewis County, New York By 1872, Prentice had traveled through the Adirondack Mountains, painting the views as well as the surrounding region. He opened his first studio as a landscape painter in Syracuse, New York in 1875.

Self-taught artist Levi Wells Prentice is best known for his realistic yet life compositions of fruit approved within a landscape, or abundantly spilling from bushel baskets. Early in his career, he painted portraits and landscapes of the Adirondack Mountain region of Lewis County, New York, his birthplace.

He followed a self-prescribed learned path, begun by the Hudson River School and reinforced by John Ruskin's (1819–1900) truth-to-nature principles laid out in his book Modern Painters. Although he can be joined to both schools of thought, Prentice can not be considered a believer of either. This LP has a photo of the artist in his to come Brooklyn studio in the company of his paintings and a pure essay upon his excitement and work.

Prentice later turned to painting nevertheless life subjects behind he moved briefly to Brooklyn, New York in 1883, focusing on fruit, in order of frequency apples, strawberries, peaches, plums, raspberries, cherries, muskmelons, pears, currants, pineapples, gooseberries, grapes and bananas usually piled tall in pots or in natural settings.

Prentice married an English woman, Emma Roseloe Sparks, in Buffalo, New York in 1882 and had two children, Leigh (born March 22, 1887) and Imogene (born September 17, 1889). He moved on the order of from 1903 to 1907 in the past settling in the Germantown district of Philadelphia. However, his pretense did not get much confession with historians until the 1970s. He was a aficionado of the Brooklyn Art Association and frequently exhibited his paintings there.

In auxiliary to his artistic talents, he was a craftsman who enjoyed making his own brushes, palettes and frames.

In his painting, Prentice placed an emphasis on dark outlining like a business for textual precision, creating dramatic contrasts. The shift between dark background areas and the full of life hues of the fruit are ended to come going on with the child maintenance for the compositions an exciting, visual energy. The fruit is presented as soon as clarity and precision. An emphasis appears to be placed upon the idea of man anti nature. The wooden baskets gone hand-wrought nails represent a structured, man-made object, while the overly ripe fruit represents the fleeting qualities of nature. These paintings also work up Prentice's remarkable skills at rendering color, form, and texture.

Art historian William H. Gerdts observed that there are several works by Prentice in which he achieves a vibes of illusionism which is unsurpassed. In 1993, the skillful "illusionism" of Levi Wells Prentice was celebrated in a retrospective exhibition at the Adirondack Museum in New York. His works continue to be appreciated by enlightened collectors. He is represented in many museums including the New York State Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Montclair Art Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.

Prentice died November 28, 1935, in Germantown, Pennsylvania.