biography of John ANTROBUS (c.1837-1907)

Birth place: Warwickshire, England

Death place: Detroit, MI

Addresses: Itinerant: Phila.; Georgia; AL; west; New Orleans; Chicago; Wash., DC; Detroit, MI (from 1875)

Profession: Portrait, landscape, and genre painter, poet, and journalist

Studied: Paris, France

Exhibited: St. Charles Hotel, New Orleans (1859); Hoffman's, New Orleans (1860); Michigan State Fair, 1878 (silver med.); Detroit Art Loan Exh. (1883)

Work: Smithsonian Inst.; Historic New Orleans Collection (Plantation Burial"); Chicago Hist. Soc.; Minnesota State Capitol; Detroit Hist. Mus."

Comments: Came to Philadelphia in 1850 and was in Savannah, GA, three years later. In 1855-56 he advertised as a portrait painter at Montgomery, AL, and then traveled through the American West and Mexico. He opened a studio in New Orleans in 1859, and planned a series of 12 large paintings representing plantation life. He completed two while living in Carroll Parish, La, (a plantation slave funeral and a Bayou Macon plantation scene). At the outbreak of the Civil War, Antrobus was a commissioned lieutenant in the Delhi Southrons and departed for Virginia in July 1861. He soon left the Confederate Army, however, and was living in Chicago by 1862. Antobus spent some years in Chicago and Washington, DC, before finally settling in Detroit (c.1875), where he became the city's leading portrait and landscape painter and a frequent contributor to the local newspapers. He was the first artist to paint a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant and he designed the Grant medal authorized by Congress in 1863.

Sources: G&W; Detroit Free Press, Oct. 19, 1907, obit.; Art Annual, VI (1907/08), 106, obit; WPA (Ala.) cites Weekly Montgomery Mail, June 14, 1855; Delgado-WPA cites True Delta, April 29, 1860, and Picayune, July 9, 1861. Loubat, Medallic History of the U.S., 370-71. More recently, see Encyclopaedia of New Orleans Artists, 10-11; Gerdts, Art Across America, vol. 2: 99, 100 (repro.), 239, 240, 286; McMahan, Artists of Washington, DC.