1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Fuller, George

FULLER, GEORGE (1822–1884), American figure and portrait painter, was born at Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1822. At the age of twenty he entered the studio of the sculptor H. K. Brown, at Albany, New York, where he drew from the cast and modelled heads. Having attained some proficiency he went about the country painting portraits, settling at length in Boston, where he studied the works of the earlier Americans, Stuart, Copley and Allston. After three years in that city, and twelve in New York, where in 1857 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design, he went to Europe for a brief visit and for study. During all this time his work had received little recognition and practically no financial encouragement, and on his return he settled on the family farm at Deerfield, where he continued to work in his own way with no thought of the outside world. In 1876, however, he was forced by pressing needs to dispose of his work, and he sent some pictures to a dealer in Boston, where he met with immediate success, financial and artistic, and for the remaining eight years of his life he never lacked patrons. He died in Boston on the 21st of March 1884. He was a poetic painter, and a dreamer of delicate fancies and quaint, intangible phases of nature, his canvases being usually enveloped in a brown mist that renders the outlines vague. Among his noteworthy canvases are: “The Turkey Pasture,” “Romany Girl,” “And she was a Witch,” “Nydia,” “Winifred Dysart” and “The Quadroon.”