George Peter Alexander Healy (1813-1894)
George Peter Alexander Healy was a highly respected and successful portrait painter in both America and Europe. Encouraged by the great portrait artist Thomas Sully, Healy traveled to France and studied with Antoine Jean Gros. By early 1840s, Healy had become internationally renowned for his portraits of the French and English royal families. In America, Healy painted portraits of well-known figures including Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Webster, Louisa May Alcott and Andrew Jackson.
Information courtesy of Neal Auction Company.
Memorably combining diplomatic manners and great personal charm with obvious skill and exceptional speed, G. P. A. Healy of Boston became a truly international celebrity, whose natural talents and affable character appealed equally to royalty, gentry, and patriots. He was encouraged by Thomas Sully and patronized by Mrs. Harrison Grey Otis to make the first of his (eventually thirty) transatlantic crossings, to study in Paris with Baron Gros (and later with Thomas Couture). He became one of the favorite painters of King Louis-Philippe of France, and the King and Queen of Romania; after long residences in Paris, London, and New York he settled in Chicago, where he made a specialty of painting generals, statesmen, and presidents (his 1864 Seated Lincoln, at the Newberry Library there, is one of his most celebrated works). His fame only intensified over the remaining thirty years of his life, and it has aptly been remarked that his cosmopolitanism prefigured and rivaled that of John Singer Sargent in the next generation.
Information courtesy of Neal Auction Company, July, 2013.