William Henry Buck (1840 to 1888)
In the late 1870′s and until his untimely death in 1888, William Henry Buck was recognized as Louisiana’s leading landscape painter. Born in Norway, Buck settled in Boston and arrived in New Orleans around 1860. For the next twenty years Buck worked as a clerk in the cotton business, and studied under Richard Clague in his spare time. By 1880 his well-received exhibitions at Seebold’s and Wagener’s galleries encouraged him to undertake a career exclusively as an artist. Buck’s first major painting exhibition was held at W.E. Seebold’s Fine Art Gallery in the winter of 1877-1878 and, he subsequently had exhibitions there from 1883 to 1885.
Buck shared studio space with such artists as Andres Molinary, Achille Perelli and Paul Poincy until opening his studio on Carondelet Street in 1880. After Richard Clague’s death in 1873, a group of artists that included Buck, Marshall J. Smith, Theodore Moise, Andres Molinary, John Genin, and Charles Giroux established the Southern Art Union in New Orleans. All six of these artists painted landscapes in Mississippi during the postwar period. Mississippi landscape paintings of that era were almost exclusively the product of these artists from New Orleans. Some of Buck’s scarce Mississippi titles include Beauvoir, which hangs in the Confederate Memorial Hall in New Orleans, View of Fort Massachusetts at Biloxi in the collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art and On the Gulf Near Bay St. Louis, in the collection of The Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
p4A acknowledges the assistance of the New Orleans Auction and the Neal Auction Company in the preparation of this note.