George R. Barse

By nature, by youthful training, and by the associations of friendship, George Randolph Barse, Jr., belonged among the academicians of his day. Stemming from the Middle West—from Detroit, Kansas City, and Chicago (where he studied art)—he found his artistic home in Paris. His roommate at that time, Mr. Harry W. Watrous, writes: “We lived together for some months at 7 rue Alfred Stevens. Our life was that of the average young American painter. We exhibited at the Salon and when we had money we spent it and when we had none tried to find someone who had—and they were mighty few.” He won the Academy prize in Paris in 1882, the New England prize at Boston in 1885 and the first prize of the National Academy of Design in 1885. He studied at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, the Académie Julien and in the ateliers of Boulanger and Cabanel. Eight panels from his hand decorate the Library of Congress and examples of his painting, chiefly allegorical in subject and decorative in spirit, are to be found in the principal galleries. Visiting Capri in his youth, he married there, and ever afterward returned to the island annually for a month’s painting and to renew an old friendship with Elihu Vedder.

Geoffrey Parsons
1938 Century Memorials