JAMES GALE TYLER

James Gale Tyler, marine painter and illustrator, was born in Oswego, New York in 1855. Mainly self-taught, Tyler studied briefly with marine artist Archibald C. Smith in New York City in 1870. He maintained studios in New York City from 1882 through 1899, but also had studios in Providence, Rhode Island in the mid-1880s and in Greenwich, Connecticut from the mid-1870s until his death in 1931.

Beginning with 1900, Tyler painted every America’s Cup race. His illustrations of ships sailing off Newport were reproduced in Literary Digest, Harper’s and Century magazines. In 1930, at age seventy-five, Tyler covered his last America’s Cup, producing paintings of the “Shamrock” and “Enterprise” racing off Newport that were exhibited at the Union League Club of New York. His marine paintings were so popular that forgeries were made during his lifetime.

He was a member of the Brooklyn Art Club, the Salmagundi Club, the Artists Fund Society and the Greenwich Society of Artists. He exhibited at the National Academy, the Providence Art Club, the Boston Art Club, the Brooklyn Art Association, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Society of Independent Artists. His work is represented in such collections as the Chicago Galleries Association, the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., the Tokyo Museum, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT, the Omaha Museum of Art, Nebraska, the Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia and the New York Historical Society, New York City.