Howard Gardiner Cushing (American, 1869-1916)

Howard Gardiner Cushing was born in Boston in 1869. He studied at Harvard in 1891 and at the Académie Julian in Paris with Laurens, Constant, and Doucet from 1891 to 1896. Dividing his time between New York and Newport, he specialized in decorative panels, elegant portraits, and figure works featuring women in fashionable dress.

Cushing exhibited his work at the Societe National des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1892 to 1896; The Art Institute of Chicago in 1895, 1905 and 1909, the National Academy of Design from 1898 to 1909, the Boston Art Club in 1898, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, from 1898 to 1915, the Pan-Am Expo in 1901, the Carnegie Institute in 1904, the Corcoran Gallery in 1907 and the Pan-Pacific Expo, San Francisco in 1915. Upon his premature death in 1916, a group of his Newport friends raised funds and built the Cushing Memorial Gallery building on the grounds of the Newport Art Association, which later became the Newport Art Museum.

His works hang in that museum as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and rarely appear on the art market.