Sears Gallagher

Gallagher took his art seriously, adapted new techniques, and was open to the influence of European Impressionism. During the height of his career his watercolors were favorably compared to those of Winslow Homer and F. Benson, and his etchings and drypoints to those of James McNeill Whistler. • Illustration — "Broadway, Monhegan; Early Morning" by Sears Gallagher. Photograph courtesy of the Boston Public Library by permission of the artist's heirs.

• Name — Sears Gallagher • Birthplace — South Boston, Massachusetts • Born — April 30, 1869 • Died — 9 June 1955 • Place of death — West Roxbury, Massachusetts • Burial Place — Walnut Hills Cemetery • Education — * The English High School • Académie Julian • Occupation — Artist

Gallagher was born April 30, 1869 in South Boston to parents who were members of the city's mercantile class; his father was a cabinetmaker and stove merchant and his mother was a descendant of Massachusetts Bay Colony pilgrims. He seems to have had a natural talent for drawing, remarked on by family and friends in his early years. During the time he was a student at the English High School of Boston he also studied with artist George H. Bartlett in a private night school. He had a drawing selected for exhibition at the Boston Art Club in 1887, when he was only 18. While launching his career as an illustrator for magazines and books, he also pursued a career as an artist of etchings and watercolors, enhancing that career through additional training, first in Boston and then in Paris. For about two years, from 1887 to 1889, he studied figure drawing and worked in the Boston studio of Italian-born art teacher and muralist, Tommaso Juglaris. Gallagher also received instruction, especially in the techniques of etching, from Charles H. Woodbury, an accomplished and successful artist who founded the Ogunquit School of Art in Maine. Gallagher and Woodbury remained lifelong friends. After Juglaris returned to Italy, Gallagher began studying with Samuel Peter Rolt Triscott, an English-born painter with a growing reputation in Boston. • Illustration — "In the Rapids" Etching by Sears Gallagher. Photograph courtesy of the Boston Public Library by permission of the artist's heirs. In 1892, Triscott and Gallagher made a summer trip to Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine. Monhegan, which Gallagher visited regularly for the next 40 years and where he bought a house in 1904, was a frequent subject of his painting. Its rocky shore and bold cliffs appear in such works as Crashing Surf, Monhegan, Maine. His summer visits to Monhegan were often followed by fishing and sketching trips in the fall to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In April 1895, Gallagher married Charlotte Dodge and shortly thereafter left on a honeymoon to Europe, beginning in England but with the apparent goal of settling in Paris for further instruction. Like such other Americans as Woodbury, F. W. Benson, Edmund Tarbell, and Childe Hassam, Gallagher joined the ateliers of Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant at the Académie Julian and settled in to study and paint. Two of his watercolors from his work there were selected for inclusion in the 1896 Paris Salon. By the time he and his wife returned to Boston in 1896, his reputation as a watercolorist and his success in Europe established him as an important young artist. Gallagher purchased a house in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, close to Boston, in 1897 and settled into a life of middle-class ease, remaining in the same house until his death. A son, Bradford, was born in 1904, and a daughter, Katherine, in 1906.

• Illustration — Photograph by Warner Taylor of Sears Gallagher (left) painting Frank Pierce on Fish Beach, Monhegan Island, Maine. Photograph courtesy of Anne Burr Czepiel. Before 1900, Gallagher had eight exhibits in Boston, Providence, and Lowell: one of oil paintings and the rest watercolors and pen and ink drawings. The pace of exhibitions picked up considerably after the turn of the century, with a total of 46 between 1900 and 1929 and then tapered off to 11 between 1930 and 1939 and three in the 1940s. His exhibitions were routinely and positively reviewed in the two major art journals of the period, The Art News and American Art News, as well as in the popular press, and his work was collected by individuals and major museums. Gallagher undertook numerous commissions to illustrate books and magazines. He did a series of 40 etchings of iconic Boston buildings and landscapes that were widely distributed and followed these with series on New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. Sales of his paintings and prints and his work as an illustrator earned Gallagher a steady income. He complemented this with teaching at Boston University's evening school.