William Stanley Haseltine

William Stanley Haseltine was born on June 11, 1835, in Philadelphia to John Haseltine, a successful businessman, and Elizabeth Shinn Haseltine, an amateur landscape painter. After studying at the University of Pennsylvania and graduating from Harvard in 1854, he trained under German artist Paul Weber in Philadelphia before following him to the Düsseldorf Academy, where he studied with Andreas Achenbach. In 1856 he traveled through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy with fellow Americans Albert Bierstadt, Emanuel Leutze, and Worthington Whittredge, settling briefly in Rome before returning to the United States in 1858. By late 1859 he had established a studio in New York's Tenth Street Studio Building alongside leading Hudson River School painters. His meticulously detailed paintings of the rockbound coasts of Narragansett, Nahant, and Mount Desert Island earned him election as Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1860 and full Academician in 1861. After the death of his first wife in childbirth in 1864, he married Helen Marshall in 1866 and relocated to Europe, settling permanently in Rome by 1869. From his studio in the Palazzo Altieri, he produced brilliantly colored Italian coastal views, including scenes of Capri, Sicily, and Mount Etna, that proved popular with American tourists. He also exhibited at the Paris Salon, helped found the American Academy in Rome, and served on the Art Committee of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In 1899 he traveled to the American West and Alaska with his son Herbert, who later became a noted sculptor. Haseltine died of pneumonia in Rome on February 3, 1900. Today his work is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.