Edmund Darch Lewis

American, 1835 - 1910

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(1835-1910) Edmund Darch Lewis was one of the most popular landscape painters of Philadelphia in the late 19th century. He studied with Paul Weber from 1850 to 1855 and exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Boston Athenaeum, the National Academy of Design, the Brooklyn Art Association, and the Boston Art Club. He painted in New York, New England and briefly in Cuba, but his scenes of the Lehigh, Susquehanna, and Wissihickon Rivers of Pennsylvania were among his most popular. The region around Philadelphia, New York, and the Delaware River Gap of western New Jersey provided some of his favorite landscape subjects. By the 1870s Lewis became increasingly interested in shoreline and yachting scenes. He traveled from Cape May, New Jersey to Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, producing many fine watercolors. He was briefly employed by a Narragansett photographer to retouch photographs. Lewis was a prolific painter, sometimes producing up to three paintings a day, and at times the sale of his paintings reputedly outstripped those of all other American painters. As one of the most financially successful artists of his time, Lewis was equally acclaimed for lavish entertainments at his opulent Philadelphia home and for his extensive collections of antique furniture and decorative arts.

Biography courtesy of Roger King Gallery of Fine Art, www.antiquesandfineart.com/rking