WILLIAM LAMB PICKNELL PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY

WILLIAM LAMB PICKNELL

American, 1853-1897

BIOGRAPHY
“William Lamb Picknell was born in Hinesburg and lived in North Springfield, Vermont, from 1857 until 1867, when his father, a minister, died. He was then sent to live with guardians in Boston. In the early 1870s, he went to Europe, and for his first two years abroad he studied in Rome with the landscape painter George Inness. Later he spent two years in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s class at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Although his family and friends urged him to return to America after completing his studies, Picknell decided to remain abroad. In 1876, he joined the international art colony that had gathered around the Anglo-American painter Robert Wylie (1839-1877) in Pont-Aven, Brittany, and there his companions included Thomas Hovenden, Alexander Harrison, and Hugh Bolton Jones. Picknell learned Wylie's painting techniques, particularly his use of the palette knife.

“In 1880, he became a member of the Society of American Artists and also won an honorable mention for The Road to Concarneau, 1880 (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) at the Paris Salon, where he had begun to exhibit four years earlier. Not long after, the Parisian dealer Goupil offered to purchase all the paintings Picknell could produce. Indeed, for the artist, the 1880s were marked by both critical success and a growing reputation at home and abroad. He spent two winters in England, where he painted pictures of the frozen countryside, such as Wintry March, 1885 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). He also returned to New England and painted at Annisquam and Coffin's Bay. During the winter months, Picknell traveled to temperate areas like California and Florida, where he could work outdoors. He married in 1889, and the following year, he and his wife settled in Moret-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau. In 1891, he was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design, where he had exhibited as early as 1879.

“The Picknells spent the winters at Antibes, largely because of the artist's failing health. There in 1897 their only child died and the artist's health worsened. In July, he and his wife sailed to visit relatives in New England, where he died in August at the age of forty-three. ‘His life should not be measured by years,’ Edward Waldo Emerson wrote in 1901. ‘He was complete in that, without great physical strength or unusual opportunities, he had . . . won knowledge and skill, recognition, sustenance, fame, respect, and love’.”

[Doreen Bolger Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1980, vol. III, p. 145]

Museum Collections
Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, IL
Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool