biography of William Edgar MARSHALL (1837-1906)

Birth place: NYC

Death place: NYC

Profession: Portrait painter and engraver

Studied: Cyrus Durand, in NYC, 1856; Couture in Paris, 1863-65.

Exhibited: Paris Salon, 1865.

Work: NYHS; Yale Univ. Art Gal., New Haven, CT (original oil of the Lincoln portrait).

Comments: Worked as engraver in a watch-case factory when he was seventeen. About 1856 he began engraving portraits, with the encouragement of Cyrus Durand, and in 1858 was hired as a vignette engraver by the American Bank Note Company. He also became interested in painting and traveled to France for study, returning to the U.S. in 1865 at which time he painted and engraved a portrait of the late President Lincoln which received a wide circulation. He opened a studio in NYC in 1866, gaining success as a portrait painter of distinguished Americans. He also painted some romantic and religious subjects. In the 1870s, he produced a heroic ideal engraving of Christ. Marshall was Albert P. Ryder's first teacher and a close friend.

Sources: G&W; DAB; Art Annual, VI (1907/08), 112; Swan, BA; Lloyd Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder (New York, 1959), 14; Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons, 369.