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George Cochran Lambdin

American, 1830 - 1896

BiographyGeorge Cochran Lambdin is now best known for floral paintings, especially roses from his own garden. However, during his lifetime, he was recognized for his skill with sentimental genre subjects of which one of his most famous was "The Dead Wife," completed in 1860. Its popularity, with the bereaved husband holding the hand of his dead wife, was so great that it was in the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition.

He also painted many portraits of Philadelphia women, usually accompanied by roses whose hues matched the complexion of the subject.

Lambdin was born in 1830 in Pittsburgh, the son of James Reid Lambdin, a successful portraitist from whom he received his early artistic training. In 1838, when he was eight, his family moved to Philadelphia, where he resided until his death. He studied in Munich and Paris in 1855 and Rome in 1870.

Lambdin began exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1848. At this time his success came from genre paintings with much sentimentality, many of them including childhood and later Civil War scenes. Within these earlier works he included flowers, usually roses, which pointed towards the next stage of his career.

In 1857, Lambdin turned to still life, concentrating on floral themes during the 1860's. He settled in Germantown, near Philadelphia, and cultivated a garden famous for roses. From 1870, his paintings of flowers, especially roses, were extremely popular and were widely reproduced as chromolithographs.

He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1868 and died in 1896.

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