Edward Wilbur Dean Hamilton (American, 1864-1943)

American artist Edward Wilbur Dean Hamilton was born in Pennsylvania in 1864. Hamilton eventually came to Boston to study painting, enrolling in the Massachusetts Normal Art School in 1879. He was honored for the best set of works in the Constructive Arts program in 1882 and received his diploma in 1883. Shortly after graduation, Hamilton moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he continued his studies under prominent artist Tomasso Juglaris (1844-1925) at the Rhode Island School of Design.

In 1889 Hamilton traveled to Paris and passed the examinations to enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he studied with Jules Eli Delaunay (1845-1906). He exhibited landscapes and portraits in the Paris Salons of 1889 and 1890. He spent the summer of 1889 in Grez-sur-Loing, a small village located just south of the Forest of Fontainbleau. In 1892, after a trip to Venice, Hamilton returned to Boston, took studio on Boylston Street, and began exhibiting his paintings in annual exhibitions at the Boston Art Club and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The J. Eastman Chase Gallery in Boston held an exhibition of Hamilton’s European paintings in April of 1892.

Hamilton taught at the Massachusetts Normal Art School from 1892 until he retired in 1942. He was a member of Boston’s Copley Society and St. Botolph Club and was a medal recipient at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, 1915. In the 1920s he bought an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Kingston, Massachusetts, where he established a summer school. He died in Kingston in 1943.