Albert Babb Insley

Landscape artist Albert Insley, associated with the American barbizon painters, enjoyed an active career depicting inland and marine subjects around the New England and Middle Atlantic states, from the early 1850's to 1935. He was raised in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of a photographer. He received his first painting commission at age 12, and worked for his father as an apprentice photographer during his teens.

During the early 1860s, Insley continued his artistic development, first as an art instructor with Henry Hillyer at New York University, then, from 1864 to 1865, as a student of Jasper Francis Cropsey. The artist painted some historically interesting views of New York Harbor, Bayonne, New Jersey and Staten Island, and began to exhibit his work regularly at the National Academy of Design beginning in 1862. Insley exhibited annually at the Academy from 1862 to 1898, and at the Brooklyn Art Association from 1869 to 1891. From 1873 to 1918, he maintained a residence and studio at the prestigious Tenth street Studio Building in New York City, making regular painting trips to Rockland County, New Jersey, the Hudson River Valley, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut and Long Island.

After 1881, Insley's paintings became more expressive under the tutelage of George Inness, and more poetic under the influence of the French Barbizon painters. From 1905 to 1915, the artist painted many memorable impressionistic works. Insley used a bright palette of colors from the early 1920s to his death in 1937. Insley died after 83 years of painting, at age 95, in Nyack, New York.

Memberships:
Boston Arts Club
Brooklyn Art Association
Nanuet Painters and Sculptors Guild
National Academy of Design
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Salmagundi Club

Public Collections:
Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
Cragsmoor Free Library, New York
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington
Harding Museum, Chicago
Jersey City Museum, New Jersey
Preservation Society, Newport, RI
Rockland County Historical Society, New York

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

Raised in a family of artisans, Albert Insley began his studies with his uncle, an architect, at age twelve, and trained in his father's photography studio at age fourteen. By the time he was twenty, he exhibited his first painting at the National Academy of Design and continued to exhibit there for the following thirty-two years. A pupil of Jasper Francis Cropsey and George Inness, Insley's paintings reflect the most picturesque features of the artistic currents of the time. He painted among such notable artists as Winslow Homer, J. Alden Weir, Arthur Hoeber, Herman Herzog, Leonard Ochtman, Frederick Dielman, and Seymour Joseph Guy.

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