George Alexander Healy

George Peter Alexander Healy was an American picture painter. He was one of the most productive and well-known painters of his day, and his sitters included a large number of the famous personages of his time. He was conceived in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the oldest of five offspring of an Irish skipper in the shipper marine. Having been left bastard at a youthful age, Healy assisted with supporting his mom. At the point when sixteen years old he started drawing and without a moment's delay terminated with the desire to be an artist. Jane Stuart, the little girl of Gilbert Stuart, helped him inside and out, lent him a Guido's "Ecce Homo", which he duplicated in color and offered to a national minister. Afterward, she acquainted him with Thomas Sully, by whose guidance Healy benefitted a lot, and appreciatively reimbursed Sully in the times of the last's affliction.

At eighteen, Healy started painting portraits and was soon fruitful. In 1834, he went to Europe, leaving his mom very much accommodated, and stayed abroad sixteen years during which he contemplated with Antoine-Jean Gros in Paris and in Rome, went under the swarming impact of Thomas Couture, and painted perseveringly. He got a second rate class award in the Paris Salon of 1840. In 1843 he was chosen into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician. He won a second-class award in Paris in 1855, when he showed his Franklin asking the cases of the American Colonies before Louis XVI.

Healy was one of the most productive and well-known painters of his day. He was astoundingly simple, venturesome, brave, and innovative. "Every one of my days are spent in my painting room" (Reminiscences). His style, basically French, was sound, his color fine, his drawing right and his administration of light and shade amazing. His similarities, firm in a diagram, unequivocally painted, and with later glazings, are determined, tough, and compelling.

Among his portraits of prominent people are those of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Pope Pius IX, Arnold Henry Guyot, William H. Seward, Louis Philippe, Marshal Soult, Hawthorne, Prescott, Longfellow, Liszt, Gambetta, Thiers, Lord Lyons, Sallie Ward and the Princess (later the sovereign) of Romania. He painted portraits of the considerable number of leaders of the United States from John Quincy Adams to Ulysses Grant—this arrangement being painted for the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C. Healy additionally painted The Peacemakers in 1868 and Abraham Lincoln in 1869. In one huge authentic work, Webster's Reply to Hayne (1851; in Faneuil Hall, Boston), there are one hundred and thirty portraits.

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