Born in New York City in 1842, Arthur Parton was a landscape painter who studied in Philadelphia under William T. Richards and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Parton gained from Richards a sound grounding in the technical aspects of his art.

Parton settled in New York City in 1865 and became a regular exhibitor at the National Academy of Design. In 1886, he received the gold medal of the American Art Association and the Temple Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He also won the competitive prize in the Paris Exposition in 1900. His works are represented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1869, Parton spent a year in Europe, where he was influenced by the Barbizon painters. His first pictures were shown in Philadelphia in 1862, but the works that brought him public prominence were On the Road to Mt. Marcy (1873, location unknown), A Mountain Brook (1874, location unknown) and Evening, Harlem River (1887, location unknown).

His November, Loch Lomond, and Solitude (dates and locations unknown) attracted a great deal of attention at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 and gave him a national reputation. "In any foreign collection of paintings," the New York Evening Post said, "Mr. Parton's work would be distinctly American." He died in 1914 at age 71.

Memberships:
American National Academy
American Water Color Society
Artist's Fund Society
National Academy of Design

Public Collections:
Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York City

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton

Along with his younger brother Ernest, Arthur Parton was a central member of the Hudson River School. Born in Hudson, New York, Arthur trained under William Trost Richards at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and began exhibiting in Philadelphia at the age of twenty-two. Richards' influence can be seen throughout his early work, which followed the naturalistic mode of the Hudson River School. After spending a year in Europe in 1869, he began to experiment with the style of the Barbizon School, creating pastoral landscapes with softer brushwork and a pronounced attention to tone. As he incorporated aspects of Luminism, Tonalism, and Impressionism into his landscapes, his work came to exemplify the diversity of American art in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Parton spent the majority of his career in New York, establishing a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building and painting throughout the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains. He enjoyed widespread recognition; his painting of the Shenandoah River was published in William Cullen Bryant's Picturesque America and he won medals and prizes from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, the American Art Association, and the St. Louis Exposition of 1904. His work is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, the Hudson River Museum, the High Museum of Art, and the Washington Country Museum of Fine Arts.

Biography courtesy of Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, www.antiquesandfineart.com/questroyal