George Wright
Once described as "the undisputed top illustrator in the nation," George Hand Wright was born to a Quaker family in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania. The son of a blacksmith, he studied at the Spring Garden Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and in Paris and Munich, before settling in New York City. By the turn of the century, he had established himself there as a genre painter and illustrator.
In 1907, Wright moved permanently to Westport, Connecticut and was a founder of the art colony that developed there. From 1900 until his death in 1951, he worked as a freelance illustrator for various publications, including Harper's, The Century, Scribner's and, in later years, The Saturday Evening Post. Simultaneously, he painted genre subjects—primarily outdoor scenes—in Connecticut, New York City, the South and other places, including Canada and Europe on story assignments. Wright was a member of many important art organizations and exhibited at the National Academy of Design, Salmagundi Club, Grand Central Galleries, and other venues. His work was widely admired, especially by his fellow artists, who considered him one of the finest talents of his generation.
Wright achieved his earliest success in the 1890s, with a series of oils depicting bashful suitors in awkward, sometimes embarrassing situations, but he is chiefly admired for his illustrations. Like John Sloan, Everett Shinn and other artist-reporters, he approached his sketchbooks as diaries, making finished illustrations from on-the-spot drawings. Many of the artist's sketches were reproduced directly in the magazines as reportorial coverage for accompanying articles. Wright is known to have made no distinction between these illustrations and the fine arts prints, watercolors and pastels he created independent of magazine commissions. It is occasionally difficult to separate the two categories, a situation complicated by the fact that he also exhibited his illustrations, possibly after reworking them.
Wright's travels in the South are not documented, and his work is rarely dated. He appears, however, to have visited South Carolina on at least one occasion, in 1915, when he recorded aspects of African-American life in Beaufort, a small coastal town seventy miles south of Charleston. Only one of the known paintings is dated— a small watercolor entitled Laundry Day in South Carolina. The series also included A Black Wedding in Beaufort, South Carolina and similar works.
Watercolors of Zig Zag Alley, Chalmers Street and related subjects suggest that Wright began his trip in Charleston and then traveled to Beaufort by boat, stopping at Edisto to paint a series of pastels, including Looking at Rockville from Edisto Island. Although Wright was clearly engaged with realist concerns throughout his career, his pastels of the 1930s and 40s, which include scenes of African-American life in Edisto and Beaufort, are more decorative in color and composition, and may have been composed from earlier sketches, aided by memory.
(http://www.askart.com/artist_bio/George_Hand_Wright/22112/George_Hand_Wright.aspx)
