Joseph Lyman
Joseph Lyman was born on July 17, 1843 in Ravenna, Ohio. He was student of Joseph Henry Dolph and Samuel Coleman in New York City, and a member of the National Academy (Associate, 1886) and the Century Association of New York City. He exhibited at the National Academy from 1874 until 1900 and won a medal for excellence at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. He died in Wallingford, Connecticut in 1913 a respected illustrator and painter.
Lyman was named after his father and was born and raised in Ravenna, Ohio where he received his first artistic training from Joseph Henry Dolph, a Detroit portraitist and specialist in realistically rendered cat and dog genre paintings. Lyman later studied with the well-known Hudson River School landscape painter Samuel Coleman, who instilled in Lyman a love for the natural beauty found in the American landscape. According to Mantel Fielding, he also studied in Europe.
Probably following Joseph Henry Dolph to New York City after 1860, Lyman maintained a studio near Dolph, and like so many 19th century painters who hailed from Ohio and the Great Lakes Regions, he exhibited, trained and gained patronage in New York City and maintained close friendships with painters William Sonntag, Worthington Whittredge, Robert S. Duncanson, genre painter DeScott Evans and Hudson River painter Samuel Coleman. He was also a follower of Winslow Homer.
Lyman surrounded himself with some of the finest landscape and genre painters of his era, and he often painted with each of them on location. Samuel Coleman taught Lyman the fundamentals of painting realistic, luminous landscapes that were animated with animals and people, and Lyman’s close association with William Sonntag and Worthington Whittredge tightened his bond to painting in the academic tradition common everyday scenes that depicted true American life along the shorelines and rivers of New York, New Jersey and New England. The artist’s fine drawing techniques enabled him to paint figures convincingly and his sense of depth, volume and weight are handled with finesse.
Lyman led an active artistic life in New York, frequently painted along the Long Island shore and achieved financial success as a painter. By 1874, he exhibited frequently at the annual exhibitions at the prestigious National Academy of Design and he was elected an Associate of that art organization in 1886. During the 1880s and 1890s, Lyman exhibited annually at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at the Art Institute of Chicago, hanging along the line with the best American painters. He was a member of the Century Association, a noted club which included many of the most prominent New York artists of the era and in 1904 he won a medal for excellence at the St. Louis Exposition.
Judging from the titles of his entries to the National Academy exhibitions, Lyman was an inveterate traveler and a somewhat prolific painter. He painted coastal views of Maine, Long Island, Staten Island, Massachusetts and England. His landscapes included numerous sites on the Hudson River, in the Adirondack Mountains, New York, Maine, Massachusetts and views of the towns of St. Augustine (Florida) and towns in Germany’s Black Forest. Yet, despite all of these exhibition entries at clubs and associations the whereabouts of most of his paintings today in unknown. Perhaps when people own them they do not want to sell them or perhaps many were destroyed over time. No one knows for certain, but the art world considers Lyman’s shoreline views some of the best painted in the 19th century because they depict life as it was in a realistic, uncluttered, academically accurate, confident manner.
Lyman’s expertise is showing human beings in a realistic, narrative setting. Unlike his contemporaries who clung to the more restrictive, contrived formulas of the Hudson River School, Lyman’s scenes are more intimate, natural and contemplative. Some of his canvases had simple titles like Summer Night, Moonlight, Sunset on the Maine Coast, Waiting for the Tide and each appealed to the populace at large because they represented the everyday person performing normal chores.
Lyman died in 1913 a well-known, respected academic painter.