Benjamin Champney

Benjamin Champney was one of the most revered White Mountain painters and hundreds of painters traveled to the Saco River – North Conway, NH area to paint with “the master.” Champney was born in New Ipswich, New Hampshire in 1817 and he was a proficient landscape, panorama, flower and portrait painter. Although he spent his summer months painting in NH, he also maintained studios in Boston and Woburn, MA. He studied with Robert Cooke (drawing) and was a lithographic apprentice to Thomas Moore (who succeeded Pendleton) from 1836-1839 in Boston. In 1840, Washington Allston convinced Champney and Thomas Moore to sail for Paris, where Champney studied on and off for 7 years (1841-1846). After returning briefly to Boston in 1846, Champney went back to Europe within months to paint panoramic views of the Rhine.  During the Revolution of 1848, he continued to paint along the Rhine and then moved back to the Boston area to exhibit his paintings of the Rhine and the Revolution, and he gained a reputation and acclaim for being a great panorama painter. By the end of 1849, he turned to landscape painting, moved to the Saco River-North Conway area and opened a studio in Woburn, MA. His paintings of the White Mountains and North Conway were copied in many prints and his landscapes were so beautiful that they stimulated many painters to paint outdoors with Champney and he is recognized as the dean of White Mountain painters.  His son, James Wells Champney (1843-1903) was a fine portrait and genre painter, who became an art instructor at Smith College, but died before his father did when he fell down an elevator shaft in NYC.

Champney was a great supporter of artists and in an attempt to have New England painters recognized and deemed viable by a public who revered European masters, the artists was a founding member of the Boston Art Club. Discouraged with the American exhibition scene, Champney only exhibited with the Boston Art Club, the Boston Athenaeum, National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the American Art Union and at the Paris Salon (1844, 1845). In 1997, the New Hampshire Historical Society gave him a posthumous retrospective exhibition, which was highly acclaimed.  In 1900, he memoirs were published in the book Sixty Years’ Memories of Art and Artists.