Flavius
J. Fisher (1832-1905)
Flavius
James Fisher was born in Wytheville, Virginia in 1832. His family
moved to eastern Tennessee and by the age of twelve, young Fisher
had shown so great a talent for drawing that he was placed in a
Philadelphia studio where he studied art for five years.
During
his time in Philadelphia, Fisher worked and studied probably with
James Reid Lambdin. Fisher then worked some in the 1850's in
Memphis and Nashville.
He
returned to Virginia about 1855, settled in Richmond, and
established a studio on Broad Street between Eight and Ninth
streets. There he and artist Edward V. Valentine became friends.
Fisher was then doing portraits in oil and crayon; his 1856 crayon
portrait of Valentine is in the Valentine Museum.
In 1858
Fisher exhibited several of his works, including Crayon Portrait
of the Curator and Sleeping Cupid, from a Plaster Cast,
at the thirty-fifth annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts. The exhibition gave Fisher’s address as Petersburg; he
evidently worked there for a short time before 1859 or 1860, when he
left to study in Germany.
Fisher
was the first American to be admitted to the German Art Institute in
Berlin. While studying in Germany, he renewed his relationship with
Edward and William Valentine, who were traveling and studying art in
Europe. Fisher traveled as well, spending some time in Dusseldorf,
Paris and London. Late in 1862 Fisher contracted smallpox in
Berlin, and the Valentines cared for him until he was taken to the
hospital.
By
February 1863 Fisher had recovered sufficiently to resume his work.
At this time he made several crayon portraits of Edgar Allan Poe
based on a daguerreotype of the writer. He presented one of these
portraits to Edward Valentine in gratitude for Valentine’s concern
and care during his illness, and it is now in the collection of the
Valentine Museum.
Fisher
continued to work in Germany during 1863 and 1864. In April 1863
Edward Valentine wrote that Fisher had “tried at one time to sell
his pictures here, but I advised him to keep them and sell them in
Virginia, for I think being some of his first works in Europe they
should be in Virginia. He has heard nothing from his relatives for
about two years I think,” Valentine continued. A day later William
Valentine observed that Fisher “is still studying, but as he
receives no orders and is unable to get to the South - to which he
is devotedly attached – he is quite sad.”
After
the Civil War Fisher returned to Virginia and in 1866 opened a
studio in Lynchburg. The local newspaper wrote that Fisher became "a
leading member of one of the brightest and most intellectual
coteries of young men that Lynchburg perhaps ever had." He had
begun painting history and landscapes, as well as portraits. In his
portraits he insisted on giving special attention to facial details
and expressions. He immediately obtained a commission to paint
wholesale grocer and banker James Franklin. This painting is now
owned by the Lynchburg City Museum. During the post war days Fisher
did portraits of Tennessee Union Reconstruction Governors William G.
Brownlow and Dewitt C. Senter, and is touted as once riding into
Knoxville on horseback to paint portraits of Colonel J.W. Gaut and
Mrs. William Gibbs McAdoo.
For
reasons that are unclear, Fisher apparently considered returning to
Richmond as early as 1868, but he did not make the move until 1873,
when his Lynchburg studio burned with all the paintings and drawings
it housed. He remained in Richmond for nearly a decade.It was during
this period that Fisher instructed his younger cousin, William Henry
Huddle, who would return to Texas to become one of its most famed
artists. In 1882 Fisher moved to Washington, D.C. and for the next
twenty-three years he maintained his studio in the Corcoran Building
there and continued to work as a portraitist. Until his death in
Washington on May 8, 1905, he was an artist and, as a Lynchburg
admirer had pointed out in 1867, a “frank, industrious, self-denying
man.”
Bibliography: L. Moody Sims, Jr.,"John
Blennerhassett Martin, William Garl Brown, and Flavius James Fisher:
Three Nineteenth-Century Virginia Portraitists"
Virginia
Cavalcade Volume 25,
Number 2, Autumn 1975.
Skipper
Steely, "Flavius James Fisher. From Vermillion Splotch to a
Washington D.C. Favorite" unpublished manuscript.