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John Mackie Falconer

John Mackie Falconer was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and emigrated to America in 1836. He settled in New York City and began work for a hardware company, which he came to control by 1874. Outside of this occupation, Falconer was a passionate amateur artist, widely recognized for etching and painting in watercolor and oil. Active in a number of arts organizations, he was acquainted with many of the noted artists of the day including Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Jasper Cropsey, and William Sidney Mount, whose work, among others, he collected.

An early advocate of working in watercolor, Falconer participated in the New York Society for the Promotion of Painting in Water Colors (1850-55) and was a founding member of the American Watercolor Society. He was involved in several sketch clubs in New York. In 1848, he exhibited his first work, a watercolor, at the National Academy of Design and was elected an amateur honorary member in 1851.

In 1857, he moved to Brooklyn, where he was engaged in art circles, including the Brooklyn Sketch Club and the Brooklyn Art Association, and lent considerable support to the association's first exhibition. Falconer retired from business in 1880, sold his art and book collections, and moved to a smaller residence that had a studio where he continued to pursue his art. On painting trips, he traveled to Canada, the Midwest, and the South, and also recorded scenes around the New York area, favoring architectural subjects.

Portrait of a Seated Man and Portrait of a Man are likely the result of Falconer's involvement with the New York Society for the Promotion of Painting in Water Colors, which held informal sketching sessions with live models for "the study of local life character."1 Falconer produced numerous studies of posed figures, most often male, executed in this fluid naturalistic manner with skilled use of the medium's transparent nature over pencil marks. These studies are characterized by a lone figure, often seated on a modest wooden chair, with little suggestion of the background environment; they are routinely signed and dated in the manner of these two works.2 Falconer's natural facility with the watercolor medium is evident in his convincing characterizations and assured handling of forms, light, shadow, proportion, and spatial relations. VAL

Biography courtesy of The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/charleston

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