George Peter Alexander Healy

• 1. Introduction

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  George Peter Alexander Healy spent his days in his painting room. That is how he put it himself, in his autobiography published the year he died: "All my days are spent in my painting room." For a man who sat across from presidents, popes, and kings, that sentence carries real weight. Healy was born in Boston on the 15th of July, 1813, the eldest of five children of an Irish captain in the merchant marine. He died in Chicago on the 24th of June, 1894. In between, he painted nearly every eminent person of the nineteenth century who sat still long enough to let him. The question worth asking is how a fatherless teenager from Boston managed to place himself at the center of so much history. The answers begin on a borrowed canvas and lead through Paris, Rome, Washington, and back again.

• 2. An Unlikely Start

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  Healy's father died when the boy was young, leaving him to help support his mother. He did not pick up a brush until he was sixteen, a late start by the standards of the era. What set him moving was the guidance of Jane Stuart, daughter of the painter Gilbert Stuart. She loaned him a copy of Guido's "Ecce Homo," which Healy copied in color and sold to a country priest. That sale was his first. Stuart then introduced him to Thomas Sully, one of the foremost portraitists in America, and Healy absorbed Sully's advice carefully. He would later repay that debt in practical terms, supporting Sully during a period of financial hardship. By the time Healy was eighteen, he had begun painting portraits professionally. His early success was swift enough that by 1834, at twenty years old, he felt confident leaving his mother well provided for and sailing to Europe to study.

• 3. Paris, Rome, and Recognition

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  In Paris, Healy studied under Antoine-Jean Gros, and he also came under the influence of Thomas Couture. He worked steadily, spending sixteen years abroad across multiple stretches. The Paris Salon of 1840 awarded him a third-class medal. In 1843, the National Academy of Design elected him as an Honorary Academician. A second medal came from Paris in 1855, when he exhibited a large historical canvas titled Franklin Urging the Claims of the American Colonies Before Louis XVI. That work demonstrated an ambition beyond portraiture proper. His principal works from the European years include a portrait of Guizot painted in 1841, now held by the Smithsonian Institution, and a portrait of Audubon dated 1838, housed at the Boston Society of Natural History. Across those decades he also painted King Louis Philippe I and Marshal Soult, placing him in direct contact with the French political world.

• 4. Chicago and a New Anchor

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  Healy returned to the United States in 1855 and established himself in Chicago, Illinois, where he kept his studio for the next fourteen years, until 1869. Two years after arriving, in 1857, he purchased a cottage in Cottage Hill, Illinois, the town now known as Elmhurst, buying it from Thomas Barbour Bryan. The property sat adjacent to Bryan's own Byrd's Nest estate. Healy would live in that cottage for six years, and Bryan became a significant patron of his art. Healy's Chicago connections went further still. He joined Bryan, along with William Butler Ogden, Sidney Sawyer, and Edwin H. Sheldon, in founding Graceland Cemetery. While his base was Chicago, he continued traveling throughout the United States to fulfill commissions. In 1887, he donated forty-one paintings to the Newberry Library in Chicago. Most of those works remain on display throughout the building today, alongside letters by Healy and documentation of the paintings.

• 5. The Presidents and the Peacemakers

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  The Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. commissioned Healy to paint portraits of all the presidents of the United States from John Quincy Adams through Ulysses S. Grant. That series alone represents a sustained record of American executive power across decades. Healy also painted The Peacemakers in 1868 and a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in 1869. One of his earlier Lincoln portraits, painted in 1877, became the model for a Lincoln postage stamp. The stamp was issued on the 12th of February, 1959, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, following a suggestion by Katherine McCook Knox. His large historical painting Webster's Reply to Hayne, completed in 1851 and now hanging in Faneuil Hall in Boston, contains one hundred and thirty individual portraits within a single canvas. A portrait of Isaac Thomas Hecker, founder of the Paulist Fathers, is held at the North American Paulist Center in Washington, D.C., and a portrait of the Comte de Paris resides at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

• 6. A Long Career's Final Chapter

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  Healy returned to Europe in 1869, working primarily in Rome and Paris for twenty-one years. His sitters during this later period included Pope Pius IX, Franz Liszt, and the woman who would become the queen of Romania, painted when she was still a princess. He also painted Gambetta, Thiers, and Lord Lyons. In 1892, he came back to Chicago to live near family. He died there on the 24th of June, 1894, and was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Evanston. That same year, his autobiography, Reminiscences of a Portrait Painter, appeared in print. The book preserves his own voice alongside his painted record, including the quiet declaration that all his days were spent in his painting room. The portrait of Bishop, later Cardinal, McClosky, held at the bishop's residence in Albany, is among the works that carry his legacy beyond the major museum collections.