Hamilton Hamilton
American, 1847-1928
“Spring Landscape”
Oil on canvas; 20 x 24 inches
Signed lower left
Of Scottish descent and born in Oxford, England, Hamilton Hamilton became a renowned American landscape and portrait painter and illustrator. He traveled widely, which meant that his landscape subjects included France, England, the American West, and the states of New York and Connecticut, where he was one of the founders of the Silvermine Art Guild in Norwalk. Hamilton Hamilton emigrated with his family to Cowlesville, New York, a rural community near Buffalo, when he was a child, but he spent most of his life in Connecticut except for a few years around 1910 when he lived in Pasadena, California.
Hamilton was largely self-taught and pursued his artistic talents in spite of his parents’ lack of encouragement. However, in 1870 they financially supported his travels to Europe including France, where he studied in Paris. After two years, he was forced to return home to help support his family, which he did by opening a portrait studio in 1872. The next year he made a sketching trip west to Colorado and spent much of the summer and winter there, completing forty-seven paintings. Hamilton Hamilton continued painting in New York State and his Colorado paintings were chosen as entries at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Between 1878 and 1879, Hamilton Hamilton returned to France where he painted in the art community in Pont-Aven in Brittany with painters who identified with the Barbizon School and the revolutionary plein-air method of painting. Hamilton’s works can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona and the Akron Art Museum in Ohio.