biography of Joseph Henry BUSH (c.1794-1865)

Birth place: Frankfort, KY

Death place: Lexington, KY

Addresses: Itinerant, working throughout South; Louisville, KY 1819; Lexington, KY, 1861-

Profession: Portrait painter

Studied: Thomas Sully, Phila., c.1814-16

Exhibited: PAFA, 1815; Matthew Harris Jouett Gallery, Lexington, KY, 1818

Work: Transylvania Univ., Lexington, KY; Locust Grove, Louisville, KY; Speed Art Mus., Louisville, KY; Univ. Kentucky Art Mus.

Comments: Born sometime between 1794 and 1800, son of Philip Bush (see entry); he went to Philadelphia at the age of 17. He quickly established himself as a leading itinerant painter in the South, arriving in Mississippi about 1818 and moving from one plantation to another, then returning to his native Kentucky, where he worked in Frankfort and Lexington before settling in Louisville about 1819. Bush continued this travel pattern throughout his long career. By 1831 he had established a winter studio in New Orleans, maintaining it until about 1845. Bush painted many of the leading planters of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, as well as in Mississippi (Vicksburg and Natchez, c.1845). He was recorded in the 1850 Census as living in a hotel at Louisville (KY), with real property valued at $1,600.

Sources: G&W; Price, Old Masters of the Blue Grass (birth date given as 1794); 7 Census (1850), Ky., XI, 301 (age given as 50, indicating birth date c. 1800); Louisville Kentucky Herald, June 9, 1819, cited by Dr. Clarence H. Brigham; New Orleans Bee, Dec. 9, 1831, and Picayune, Jan. 28, 1845, cited by Delgado-WPA; Rutledge, PA. More recently, see Gerdts, Art Across America, vol. 2, 87, 92, 157, 160 (repro.), 161; Encyclopaedia of New Orleans Artists. 60; Jones and Weber, The Kentucky Painter from the Frontier Era to the Great War, 44-45 (w/repros.)