AUGUSTUS GEORGE HEATON
HEATON, AUGUSTUS GEORGE, painter and writer, is descended from the Eatons and Heatons in the New Haven colony, their earliest ancestor having come to America in the second voyage of the Mayflower. He was born April 28, 1844. His father, Augustus Heaton, a hardware commission merchant, was "a man of integrity and geniality." He was a director of Girard college, of the Philadelphia Bank and of the Philadelphia Trust Company. The death of his mother, while young Heaton was but six years old, deprived him of a love and care which he has sadly missed throughout his life. He was carefully nurtured as an only son under the care of a cautious father and grandmother. His life as a boy of active brain and special tastes for art, poetry, natural science and philosophy he feels was somewhat too sedentary. He passed his winters in Philadelphia and his summers in New Haven. Carpentering and construction were enjoyable pastimes while a boy.
He had every opportunity for prolonged study and began to prepare for college, but the classics and mathematics were not to his taste, and art had preoccupied him from childhood. His disposition was reserved but independent, his thoughtful mind was charmed by ideals and his self culture was more notable than his school progress. Selecting art as a profession at nineteen he went from the Academy of William A. Reynolds in Philadelphia, to Paris, and studied at the School of Fine Arts from 1863-65 under Cabanel, taking a further course later under Bonnat, from 1878-82, and exhibiting several times at the Paris Salon, during these years. Between these two periods of study, he was professor of the Fine Arts, in the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, taking the position in 1866, and lecturing also till 1868. His renewed artistic energy during his years of study in Paris gave him a much higher standing in his profession. On returning to America he opened a studio in New York, in 1874. He painted "Washington at Fort Duquesne," in 1881, for the Union League club, Philadelphia, and his famous picture "The Recall of Columbus," was finished in 1883. It was bought by congress for the Capitol at Washington, and was engraved on the fifty-cent World's
