Lovell Birge Harrison (1854–1929), usually known as Birge Harrison, was born on 28 October 1854 in Philadelphia. He was the younger brother of the marine painter Alexander Harrison, and his brother Butler was also a painter. He began his art training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1874 and then went to Paris, where he studied under Carolus-Duran and at the École des Beaux-Arts. According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, it was John Singer Sargent who persuaded him to give up his father’s business and travel there.
Harrison became one of the leading American Tonalists, a painter who used a restricted range of subtle colours and soft outlines to suggest the mood of a place at dusk, in moonlight or in mist. He painted landscapes and city scenes in New York and Quebec, and he spent time at artists’ colonies in France and among the Hopi and Navajo in the American Southwest. After the death of his first wife in 1895 he moved to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he later married Jenny Seaton. He was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1910.
Harrison also became an influential teacher and writer on landscape painting, and a key figure in the Woodstock art colony in New York, where he helped found the Art Students League’s summer school. He died in Woodstock in 1929.