Artist
Centurion, 1901–1929
Born 28 October 1854 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died 11 March 1929 in Woodstock, New York
Proposed by Will H. Low and Frank Fowler
Elected 2 March 1901 at age forty-six
Century Memorial
It is so long a time since Birge Harrison painted that his work in American art seems to belong to a period as far back as the Hudson River School. Yet Harrison’s landscapes of the Eighties and Nineties were better known to the art-loving public of that day than pictures by many other artists whose work and personality would be now recalled by everybody. His paintings charmed because of the simplicity with which, as in his “Plymouth Harbor,” his “Winter,” his “Hillside Farm” and his “Twilight on the Seine,” he pictured nature in her quiet moments. He loved gray skies and snowbound landscape: Quebec in the winter was a delight to his artistic imagination. In the colony at Woodstock, which he founded, it is recalled that during many years he knew all his neighbors intimately, never spoke an unkind word, and found good in every one.
Alexander Dana Noyes
1930 Century Association Yearbook
