Samuel Burtis Baker

Samuel Burtis Baker (September 29, 1882 - March 10, 1967), commonly known as Burt Baker, was an American artist and teacher, best known for his portrait paintings.

Early life and education Baker was born in South Boston, Massachusetts, to Samuel Burtis and Jennie Morgan Brine Baker.

Career

Painting Baker opened his own studio in Boston in 1910. Following a 1910 exhibition of 10 of his portraits at Copley Gallery in Boston, he was commissioned to do portraits for the Harvard University Law School, the Massachusetts and New Hampshire state legislatures, and others. Best known as a portrait artist, he would expand his range around this time to include figure painting, landscape, cityscape and still life.

After moving to Washington, D.C., in 1921, Baker regularly exhibited with the Arts Club of Washington and the Society of Washington Artists. He was elected to the Guild of Boston Artists in 1925.

Interior with Figure (1920) is considered to be Baker's most famous work. In it, a woman in profile holds up a small hand mirror, silhouetted against a curtained window. It won the Corcoran Gallery of Art's William A. Clark Prize in 1921, and was awarded a silver medal at the Corcoran's Biennial Exhibition of 1921. It made its New York debut in the National Academy Museum and School's winter exhibition in 1923.

Baker's portrait of opera singer Lillian Nordica in costume as Brunhilde from Ring of the Nibelung was his longest-running portrait work, begun in 1910 and finally completed in 1948. It was hung at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and later donated to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Several of Baker's paintings were loaned to The White House for display in Harry S. Truman's private living quarters from May 1945 to October 1946. In 1921, he moved to Washington, D.C., to teach at the School of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where he taught life drawing, composition and drawing from antiquity. He was vice principal there from 1926 until he retired in 1935. From 1925 to 1936, he was also an adjunct professor at the College of Fine Arts at George Washington University, teaching drawing and painting. He was successful during his lifetime, but had fallen into obscurity by the time of his death, in part because he was two decades younger than many of the other Boston painters with whom he was linked,

Baker had a daughter, Alden Baker, born in 1928, who went on to become an impressionist artist.

In 1993, a quarter-century after his death, the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, held a solo show of 30 Baker paintings, in tandem with the exhibition A Century of Talent: Unknown Artists of the Boston Art Club, which also included a Baker painting. Art Association of Newport, Newport, RI, 1920 City Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, 1920 Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, 1920 Guild of Boston Artists, various shows, 1922, 1925, 1927, 1948, 1959 National Academy Museum and School, New York, NY, 1923 Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA, 1923 International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Venice, Italy, 1924 Charcoal Club at the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, MD, 1924 Sesquicentennial International Exposition, Philadelphia, PA, 1926 Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO, 1930 George Washington University Library, Washington, D.C., 1951 Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA, 1993