biography of Albion Harris BICKNELL (1837-1915)

Birth place: Turner, ME

Death place: Malden, MA

Addresses: Boston, from c. 1857

Profession: Portrait, historical, landscape, and still life painter, engraver and etcher

Studied: in Turner, Maine, and Boston, before 1850; Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Thomas Couture, 1850

Exhibited: Boston Athenaeum (five times between 1857 and 1860); NAD, 1868; Boston AC, 1880; Doll and Richards, Boston, 1866, 1886

Work: Lincoln at Gettysburg," Malden Public Library, Malden, Mass."

Comments: After returning from study in Europe c. 1857, Bicknell settled in Boston. Although he was best-known as a portraitist--he painted portraits of Lincoln and Horace Mann--and for his historical pictures, he was also a respected still-life painter. In 1865, after John La Farge became ill, he took over the the decoration of the dining room panels for Charles Freeland's Beacon Street home in Boston, completing five still-life subjects and one figural piece. Bicknell was a friend of La Farge and Elihu Vedder.

Sources: G&W; Art Annual, XII, obit.; Boston BD 1857-60; 8 Census (1860), Mass., XXVI, 723, shows that Bicknell's father was a prosperous grocer; Swan, BA; Panorama (Oct. 1945), 9, repro.; More recently, see Naylor, NAD; Gerdts and Burke, American Still-Life Painting, 187, 192; Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth, 29, 146, 147.