Self-portrait, date unknown

Self-Portrait.
Author/Artist
Champney, James Wells, 1843-1903.
Creation Date
c. 1882
Frick Digital Collections

JAMES WELLS CHAMPNEY ~ AMERICAN IMPRESSIONIST PAINTER. Scarce Cabinet Photograph, ca. 1874, depicting the artist seated on the floor holding his young daughter Maria [identified as such in pencil in an unknown hand on verso]. Photographer not identified. Mount shaved on verso and slightly trimmed at bottom edge.



Prolific American artist, illustrator, watercolorist, and photographer James Wells "Champ" Champney [1843-1903] was very successful as an oil painter of genre scenes, and later was perhaps the foremost pastelist of his day. He was one of the first Americans to grasp and utilize the spirit of impressionism.



In his youth, he studied drawing at the Lowell Institute and took courses in anatomy under Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was apprenticed to a Boston wood-engraver at 16, but left in 1862 to serve in the Civil War, becoming a member of Company G, Forty-Fifth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Militia and was stationed at Fort Macon and Fort Spinola [near New Bern]. He was eventually discharged because of malaria.



After studying and traveling in Europe, he exhibited his first genre painting in 1869 at the Paris Salon. Returning in 1870 to Boston, he opened a studio and continued to produce genre paintings, popular with the American public. In 1873, he was commissioned by Scribner's Monthly to illustrate "The Great South," a series of articles by Edward King that aimed at re-acquainting Americans to the former Confederate South. The two traveled more than 25,000 miles, and Champney contributed at least 500 illustrations.



Afterwards, he visited Europe, where again he exhibited at the Salon, and was commissioned by L'Illustration, the French magazine, to do figure drawings of American life. In 1876, Champney settled in Deerfield, Massachusetts and showed his paintings at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. While teaching art at Smith College between 1877 and 1884, Champney began experimenting with pastels. His portraits of New York society and theater personalities boosted his artistic growth and popularity.

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