L. Birge Harrison

Lovell Birge Harrison (October 28, 1854, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – 1929) was an American genre and landscape painter, teacher, and writer. He was a prominent practitioner and advocate of Tonalism.

Life Born in Philadelphia, Birge Harrison was the brother of artist T. Alexander Harrison. He studied first at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1874, and later credited Thomas Eakins as a positive influence on his own teaching style. He then went to Paris on the advice of John Singer Sargent to study with Carolus-Duran and at the École des Beaux-Arts under Cabanel. In 1881 Harrison exhibited at the Paris Salon, and in 1882 his Salon entry, Novembre, became one of the first paintings by an American artist to be purchased by the French government. Discussing the painting years later Harrison attributed its handling to "A Scandinavian painter (who) had shown me the secret of atmospheric painting....and....the importance of vibration and refraction in landscape painting." The paintings of this period included peasant subjects that showed the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage. According to art historian William H. Gerdts, Harrison was then "the leading writer in America on contemporary landscape painting." Harrison's writing reveals an interest in the retinal perception of color, and in tonal harmony; he believed that the term Impressionism was descriptive not merely of the recent movement in French painting, but referred to any work done "honestly and sincerely" before nature.

Harrison's pupils included Florence Ballin Cramer, Mary Gine Riley and Florence Thaw.

Paintings Winter twilight (1910, 30 x 40 cm) Meadow in the Connecticut November (1881, musée des beaux-arts de Rennes, France) Le moulin rouge (1909) Fifth Avenue in Winter A Puff of Steam The Old Inn at Cos Cob (1914)