William James Stillman United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 was an American painter, journalist, and photographer.

Biography

Stillman was born in Schenectady, New York

Schenectady, New York

Schenectady is a city in Schenectady County, New York, United States, of which it is the county seat. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 66,135...

 in 1828. His parents were Seventh Day Baptist

Seventh Day Baptist

Seventh Day Baptists are Christian Baptists who observe Sabbath on the seventh-day of the week in accord with their understanding of the Biblical Sabbath for the Judeo-Christian tradition...

s, and his early religious training influenced him all through his life. He was sent to school in New York by his mother, who made great sacrifices that he might get an education, and he graduated from Union College

Union College

Union College is a private, non-denominational liberal arts college located in Schenectady, New York, United States. Founded in 1795, it was the first institution of higher learning chartered by the New York State Board of Regents. In the 19th century, it became the "Mother of Fraternities", as...

 of Schenectady in 1848. He studied art under Frederic E Church

Frederic Edwin Church

Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters...

 and early in 1850 went to England, where he made the acquaintance of Ruskin

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...

, whose Modern Painters he had devoured, was introduced to Turner, for whose works he had unbounded admiration, and fell so much under the influence of Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

 and Millais

John Everett Millais

Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA was an English painter and illustrator and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.-Early life:...

 that on his return home in the same year he speedily became known as the "American Pre-Raphaelite."

In 1852 Lajos Kossuth

Lajos Kossuth

Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva was a Hungarian lawyer, journalist, politician and Regent-President of Hungary in 1849. He was widely honored during his lifetime, including in the United Kingdom and the United States, as a freedom fighter and bellwether of democracy in Europe.-Family:Lajos...

 sent him on a fool's errand to Hungary

Hungary

Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...

 to dig up crown jewels, which had been buried secretly during the insurrection of 1848-1849. While he was awaiting a projected rising in Milan, Stillman studied art under Yvon

Adolphe Yvon

Adolphe Yvon was a French painter known for his paintings from the Napoleonic Wars. Yvon studied under Paul Delaroche, rose to fame during the Second Empire, then finished his career as a teacher....

 in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, and then, as the rising did not take place, he returned to the United States and devoted himself to landscape painting on Upper Saranac Lake

Upper Saranac Lake

Upper Saranac Lake is one of three connected lakes, part of the Saranac River, in the towns of Santa Clara and Harrietstown, near the village of Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks in northern New York. Upper Saranac Lake is the sixth largest lake in the Adirondacks. With Middle Saranac Lake and...

 in the Adirondacks and in New York City, where he started the Crayon. It numbered Lowell

James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell was an American Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat. He is associated with the Fireside Poets, a group of New England writers who were among the first American poets who rivaled the popularity of British poets...

, Aldrich

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was an American poet, novelist, travel writer and editor.-Early life and education:...

 and Charles Eliot Norton

Charles Eliot Norton

Charles Eliot Norton, was a leading American author, social critic, and professor of art. He was a militant idealist, a progressive social reformer, and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States.-Biography:Norton was born at...

 among its contributors, and when it failed for want of funds, Stillman removed to Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

.

There he passed several years, but a fit of restlessness started him off once more to England. He renewed his friendship with Ruskin, and went with him to Switzerland to paint and draw in the Alps

Alps

The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....

, where he worked so assiduously that his eyesight was affected. He then lived in Faris and was in Normandy

Normandy

Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...

 in 1861 when the American Civil War

American Civil War

The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...

 broke out. He made more than one attempt to serve in the Northern ranks, but his health was too weak; in the same year he was appointed United States consul in Rome.

In 1865 a dispute with his government led to his resignation, but immediately afterwards he was appointed to Crete, where, as an avowed champion of the Christians in the island and of Cretan independence, he was regarded with hostility both by the Muslim population and by the Turkish authorities during the subsequent Cretan uprising

Cretan Revolt (1866–1869)

The Cretan Revolt of 1866–1869 or Great Cretan Revolution was a three year uprising against Ottoman rule, the third and largest in a series of Cretan revolts between the end of the Greek War of Independence in 1830 and the establishment of the independent Cretan State in 1898.-Background:The...

. In September 1868 he resigned and went to Athens

Athens

Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...

, where his first wife (a daughter of David Mack of
Cambridge), worn out by the excitement of life in Crete, committed suicide.

He was an editor of Scribner's Magazine for a short time and then went to London, where he lived with Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

. In 1871 he married artist Marie Spartali

Marie Spartali Stillman

Marie Euphrosyne Spartali, later Stillman , was a British Pre-Raphaelite painter of Greek descent, arguably the greatest female artist of that movement...

, a daughter of the Greek consul-general Michael Spartali, although without his permission. When the insurrection of 1875 broke out in Herzegovina

Herzegovina

Herzegovina is the southern region of Bosnia and Herzegovina. While there is no official border distinguishing it from the Bosnian region, it is generally accepted that the borders of the region are Croatia to the west, Montenegro to the south, the canton boundaries of the Herzegovina-Neretva...

 he went there as a correspondent of The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

, and his letters from the Balkans aroused so much interest that the British government was induced to lend its countenance to Montenegrin aspirations.

In 1877-1883 he served as the correspondent of The Times at Athens; in 1886-1898 at Rome. During this time he was assisted in his photograhic work by the nascent archaeologist and photographer, John Henry Haynes

John Henry Haynes

John Henry Haynes was an American traveller, archaeologist, and photographer, best known for his archaeological work at the first two American archaeological excavations in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia at Nippur and Assos...

. He was a severe critic of Italian statesmen, and embroiled himself at various times with various politicians, from Crispi

Francesco Crispi

Francesco Crispi was a 19th-century Italian politician of Arbëreshë ancestry. He was instrumental in the unification of Italy and was its 17th and 20th Prime Minister from 1887 until 1891 and again from 1893 until 1896.-Sicily:Crispi’s paternal family came originally from the small agricultural...

 downwards. After his retirement he lived in Surrey, where he died on July 6, 1901.

He wrote The Cretan Insurrection of 1866-1868 (1874), On the Track of Ulysses (1888), Billy and Hans (1897) and Francesco Crispi (1899).

Criticism and legacy

Recent critics such as Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (in Antiquity and Photography, Getty Museum, 2005) have argued that Stillman's photography

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

, especially an album of views of the Athenian Acropolis, displayed an artistic sensibility and a genius of a higher order than the rest of his work. The first series was photographed in 1869 and privately published in 1870; Stillman rephotographed the Acropolis in 1882 and subsequently reordered the combined series in a second album. Stillman's photographs, in their daring perspectives, in their creative synthesis (inspired by Ruskinian

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...

 ideas) of aesthetic feeling and a scientific/scholarly perspective on architectural form, and in their incorporation of the Greek landscape and the modern Greek context of ancient ruins, show a startlingly modern sensibility for their time, a way of seeing utterly different from the commercial photography of contemporary Greeks and foreigners, whose representations tended to cater to the set expectations of the foreign philhellenic

Philhellenism

Philhellenism was an intellectual fashion prominent at the turn of the 19th century, that led Europeans like Lord Byron or Charles Nicolas Fabvier to advocate for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire...

and touristic market.

Further reading

• Stillman, William James. Autobiography of a Journalist (2 vols, Boston, 1901).

External links

• Biography Stillman, William James: The Autobiography of a Journalist. v1. 19 Sep 07 - MobileRead Forums at www.mobileread.com FREE Sony Reader e-book version of Autobiography of a Journalist