James Wells Champney (1843-1903)
Born in 1843, James Wells Champney studied art at the Lowell Institute in Boston until 1863, when he enlisted as a soldier in the Civil War. At the end of the war, he traveled to Europe to further his art education at Academie d’Anvers and Antwerp Royal Academy. Champney became known for his landscape, genre and portrait paintings, demonstrating his versitilty. In 1873, he was hired by Scribner’s Monthly to accompany writer Edward Smith King to New Orleans (where he was active 1873 to 1874) and throughout the South, for a series of illustrated articles entitled “The Great South”. After 1880, James Wells Champney devoted himself to working in pastels and gave up his work with oils and watercolors. He died in 1903.