Thomas Waterman Wood (1823 to 1903)
Born in 1823, Thomas Waterman Wood grew up in Montpelier, Vermont. He began his career as a portrait painter, and like many other artists of his day he took extended trips to Europe to see and study the great works of art there. He studied portrait painting with Chester Harding in Boston during 1846-47, and later worked in Quebec, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore until 1858. He then decided to move south and settled in Nashville, Tennessee, and then in Louisville, Kentucky, until 1866.
After painting a series of three pictures dealing with the role of blacks during the Civil War, Wood won election into the prestigious National Academy of Design and served as its president. He later moved to New York City and spent summers in Montpelier, where he founded the T.W. Wood Gallery and Arts Center, one of Vermont’s oldest art galleries. He died in 1903.
Examples of his work hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Information courtesy of Skinner Inc. November 2006