Artists in Ohio, 1787-1900: A Biographical Dictionary

This comprehensive new three-volume guide to the early art and artists of Ohio is a compendium of hard-to-find information. The result of more than twelve years of research in community archives, newspapers, business directories, census returns, genealogical records, and manuscripts, Artists in Ohio, 1787-1900 is the most ambitious and complete attempt ever made to document the state's artistic origins and growth. The authors have uncovered and remedied innumerable gaps and erros in standard reference works. They have also brought to light new information about thousands of forgotten men and women, once well-known in their communities, who achieved success in either the fine arts or the decorative and "practical" arts of photography, ornamental penmanship, tombstone carving, china painting, illustrating, cartooning, and the execution of panoramas and theatrical scenery. More than 13,000 entries are filled with factual details that will be indispensable to art scholars, genealogists, museum professionals, and historians, as well as to private and institutional collectors of American paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs, and anyone with an interest in the local and regional history of the nineteenth-century Midwest. Each entry is documented, cross-referenced, and back up by two bibliographies and an appendix devoted to art organizations, schools, major expositions, and collaborative works.