RALPH EARL

Portrait and landscape artist Ralph Earl was born in 1751, the eldest son of a landowner in Paxton, Worcester County, Massachusetts. Earl left home in 1774 to avoid enlistment in his father’s local militia regiment, moving to New Haven, Connecticut where he began to work as a painter. As an artist Earl was self-taught, but had begun by imitating the work of John Singleton Copley. As a result of his loyalist sympathies, Earl fled to England in 1777, disguised as a servant to Captain John Money, an English officer returning home in a prisoner of war exchange. He left behind in America his wife and their two young children. Earl established himself as a painter in Norwich, remaining there until 1782. By 1783 Earl was in London, where he studied with Benjamin West and achieved significant success, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and gaining commissions for portraits of prominent Englishmen. In London he was exposed to the English landscape tradition, exemplified in the work of Thomas Gainsborough, and began to enhance his backgrounds with elaborate landscape compositions. Earl returned to America in 1785, at the conclusion of the War of Independence, bringing with him a new wife. He painted in Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, before settling in New York City. The artist spent from 1786 until 1788 in debtor’s prison in New York, where his confinement attracted the sympathy of debtor-prison reformers who came with their wives and children to sit for portraits in the prison. Thus, Earl remained a popular portraitist even while incarcerated. He was released in the custody of Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell, a prominent New York City physician, and when Cogswell relocated his practice to Hartford, the artist went to Connecticut with him. For the next thirteen years Earl became the visual chronicler of the Connecticut gentry, traveling throughout the state, and producing a body of work that documented the society he found. In 1800 the artist journeyed to Niagara Falls to sketch that natural wonder, becoming the first American artist to paint the falls. Assisted by Jacob Wicker, an ornamental painter who had traveled with him, Earl completed a twenty-seven-foot long, fourteen-foot high scenic panorama, which was shown in Northampton, Massachusetts, the Peale Museum in Philadelphia, New Haven, Connecticut, and in London, its last known location. Earl died in 1801 at the early age of fifty, the result, a local minister claimed, of a life of “intemperance.”