Albert Fitch Bellows was an American landscape painter of the Hudson River School, born in Milford, Massachusetts. From 1850 to 1856 Bellows taught at the New England School of Design in Boston. Bellows resigned his post to travel and study abroad, and spent time in Paris and at the Royal Academy at Antwerp as well as in England. Bellows exhibited his first paintings at the National Academy of Design in 1857, becoming a full member in 1861.

Bellows spent most of his remaining career in New York, where he kept a studio in the same building as many of the notable Hudson River School artists of the time. His landscape oil paintings of the 1860s are fully in the late Hudson River School tradition, though Bellows depicted people more prominently in his landscape paintings than most other artists. Bellows excelled at figurative scene paintings. Bellows also differed from most Hudson River School artists in that he became skilled at watercolor, and was a founding member of the American Watercolor Society, and an honorary member of the Royal Belgian Society of Water-Colorists.

Bellows also mastered etching, along with Samuel Colman he was possibly the only other Hudson River School artist to do so and became a member of the New York Etching Club, the Philadelphia Society of Etchers and the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in London. Bellows died in Auburndale, Massachusetts, on the 24th of November 1883.

See images of his work at: The Athenaeum.

 

 Blue Hill Bay Gallery   11 Tenney Hill, Blue Hill, Maine 04614