Henry Inman

Henry Inman (October 20, 1801 – January 17, 1846) was an American portrait, genre, and landscape painter.

Career He was the first vice president of the National Academy of Design, He excelled in portrait painting, but was less careful in genre pictures. Among his landscapes are Rydal Falls, England, October Afternoon, and Ruins of Brambletye. His genre subjects include Rip Van Winkle, The News Boy, and Boyhood of Washington. His portraits include those of Henry Rutgers and Fitz-Greene Halleck in the New York Historical Society. He also painted portraits of Angelica Singleton Van Buren, Bishop White, Chief Justices Marshall and Nelson, Jacob Barker, William Wirt, Audubon, DeWitt Clinton, Richard Varick, Martin Van Buren, Francis L. Hawks, and William H. Seward.

Thomas L. McKenney assigned Inman, who was an accomplished lithographer, the task of copying more than a hundred oil paintings of Native American leaders by Charles Bird King to translate into a printed book, the History of the Indian Tribes of North America. The oil paintings are now in the collections of White House, the Joslyn Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, among others. the last of which considered his most famous. Critic John Neal in The Yankee called it "a remarkably fine picture, notwithstanding its faults... a bold, impassioned, well-painted picture".

At the time of his death, he was engaged on a series of historical pictures for the Capitol at Washington. He was also president of National Academy of Design.

Mary Lawrence Inman (1826–1860), who married Smith Cutter Coddington (1812–1868) in 1844. John O'Brien Inman (1828–1896), who was also a painter. Mary Lucy Inman (1828–1907), who married William Vail (1815–1880) Henry Inman, Jr. (1837–1899), a writer who married Eunice Churchill Dyer (1842–1922) in 1862.

Inman died on January 17, 1846, after returning from England to America due to failing health.

Selected works