Robert Scott Duncanson

Duncanson was born in Fayette, Seneca County, New York around 1821. He had no formal training as a painter and taught himself to paint by copying from prints. During the 1840s, he traveled in Ohio and Michigan as an itinerant portrait painter. He was commissioned in 1850 to paint landscape murals for the Belmont estate in Cincinnnati. In the 1850s, he concentrated mainly on landscape painting, and traveled to Canada and Europe, where his work was well received. During his time in Scotland and England in the 1860s, however, he exhibited a serious mental decline (which may have been schizophrenia) and was eventually hospitalized at the Michigan State Retreat in Detroit following a breakdown in 1872. He died there on December 21, 1872.