Birge Harrison: Poet Painter

"Winter Landscape" by Birge Harrison

"When I [Charles Louis Borgmeyer] was in Paris last year, Alexander Harrison asked me why I did not write about some of our Americans, who were just as good artists, often better, than those of whom I wrote. So I approached Mr. Birge Harrison with a dictagraph concealed in my pocket and this is the substance of our many talks:

It was fascinating to hear him speak of his father, who was a Philadelphia merchant, a man of broad and liberal cultures, an accomplished linguist, a musician and a passionate lover of flowers and of all things beautiful in nature. He was also an enthusiastic gentleman-farmer, dividing his time between his city counting-house and his farm in the environs, where he carried out some of the very earliest experiments in genuine scientific farming.

It was upon this farm in Germantown that the three brothers, Alexander, Birge and Butler passed their boyhood days. A close friend of the Harrison family was the distinguished engraver, John Sartain. He was a most sympathetic and kindly critic of the boys' early efforts; and it was doubtless his confidence in their genuine artistic vocation which prompted the elder Harrison to urge his sons, one after another, to adopt painting as the serious profession of their lives. This was certainly a very unusual attitude for any parent to assume at that time.

As a boy, Birge Harrison, with his inseparable companion, a sketchbook, in hand or pocket, haunted the studios of the few artists of note who at that time lived in Philadelphia. There was the famous Thomas Sully, for instance, who was still painting valiantly at 90; William Trost Richards, who Birge Harrison thinks has never been surpassed as a draughtsman of the sea; Hamilton, another marine painter, and Peter Rothermel, whose vast pictures of the Battle of Gettysburg made a sensation in its day."  

(Excerpts from "Birge Harrison: Poet Painter" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer in the "Fine Arts Journal," Vol. 29, 1913.)