Henry McCarter

Henry McCarter studied at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The recorded working language is English. Work by Henry McCarter is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and The Phillips Collection.

• Name — Henry Bainbridge McCarter • Born — 5 July 1864 • Birthplace — Norristown, Pennsylvania • Died — 20 November 1942 • Place of death — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Field — Painter, Illustrator • Movement — Post-Impressionism, Modernism

McCarter was born 5 July 1864 in Norristown, Pennsylvania. In 1879, he began attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine arts where one of his instructors was Thomas Eakins. However, he described the five years of his studies there as "lost years." In 1887, he went to Paris where he studied with Puvis de Chavannes, Léon Bonnat and Thomas Alexander Harrison of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

While in Paris, McCarter became an apprentice in lithography to Toulouse Lautrec. He then returned to the USA and moved to New York to work as a graphic illustrator. McCarter drew illustrations for Scribners, Harpers, McClure's and Collier's magazines, among others. He also taught at the Art Students League of New York. In 1902 he accepted a position as a watercolor teacher and the first instructor of illustration at his former school, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He was an instructor there for the next forty years. Although he began as an illustrator, by the 1920s McCarter concentrated on watercolor and oil painting of still lifes and landscapes. According to the art curator W. Douglass Paschal, McCarter "sought a path merging the compositional structures, brushwork and strong coloration of the Post-Impressionists and Fauves he admired." McCarter became a strong advocate for modernism among his students at PAFA. Students who McCarter influenced included Franklin C. Watkins, Charles Demuth, Norman Carton, and Arthur B. Carles.

McCarter neither married nor had children. He died of a heart attack on 20 November 1942 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, aged 76. McCarter was buried at the Church of Messiah Cemetery in Gwynedd, Pennsylvania

• Illustration — On the City's Edge, 1901, pen and ink drawing • Illustration — Illustration for the poem "The Sea is His" by Edward Sandford Martin in 1898 Scribner's Magazine. • Illustration — From Poems of Paul Verlaine, trans. by Gertrude Hall, 1895 • Illustration — Three Women in a Garden, 1922, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Henry McCarter is recorded as painter and designer.