Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic process, widely used during the 1840s and 1850s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process.
Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.
Samuel Bell Waugh was a 19th-century American portrait, landscape, and moving panorama painter. His portrait subjects included Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
Rutgers University–Camden is one of three regional campuses of Rutgers University, a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. It is located in Camden, New Jersey. Founded in 1926 as the South Jersey Law School, Rutgers–Camden began as an amalgam of the South Jersey Law School and the College of South Jersey. It is the southernmost of the three regional campuses of Rutgers—the others being located in New Brunswick and Newark. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". In 2024 the school was ranked 48th among the top public universities and 98th among national universities by US News and World Report
The year 1895 in art involved some significant events.
John Kane was an American painter celebrated for his skill in Naïve art.
Theodore Jasper was a portrait painter and photographic colorist active in Columbus, Ohio from circa 1866 to 1883. From the 1840s to the 1860s he worked in New York and Connecticut. His paintings formed the basis for Studer's Popular Ornithology, a late 19th-century work that had several editions with chromolithographic copies of Jasper's art.
Paul Kane was an Irish-born Canadian painter whose paintings and especially field sketches were known as one of the first visual documents of Western indigenous life.
John Mix Stanley was an artist-explorer, an American painter of landscapes, and Native American portraits and tribal life. Born in the Finger Lakes region of New York, he started painting signs and portraits as a young man. In 1842 he traveled to the American West to paint Native American life. In 1846 he exhibited a gallery of 85 of his paintings in Cincinnati and Louisville. During the Mexican–American War, he joined Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney's expedition to California and painted accounts of the campaign, as well as aspects of the Oregon Territory.
David Gilmour Blythe was a self-taught American artist best known for paintings which satirically portrayed political and social situations. Blythe was also an accomplished portraitist and poet. He is widely regarded as the Pittsburgh region's pre-eminent nineteenth-century painter.
The Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site is a state historic site in West Hills, New York, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The site preserves the birthplace of American poet Walt Whitman.
The Walt Whitman House is a historic building in Camden, New Jersey, United States, which was the last residence of American poet Walt Whitman, in his declining years before his death. It is located at 330 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, known as Mickle St. during Whitman's time there.
John Plumbe Jr. was a Welsh-born American entrepreneurial photographer, gallerist, publisher, and an early advocate of an American transcontinental railroad in the mid-19th century. He established a franchise of photography studios in the 1840s in the U.S., with additional branches in Paris and Liverpool. He created a lithographic process for reproducing photographic images, called the "plumbeotype."
Samuel Aloysius Murray was an American sculptor, educator, and protégé of the painter Thomas Eakins.
The Eagle Street College was an informal literary society established in 1885 at the home of James William Wallace in Eagle Street, Bolton, to read and discuss literary works, particularly the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819–1891). The group subsequently became known as the Bolton Whitman Fellowship or the "Whitmanites". Its founder members were Dr. John Johnston, Fred Wild, and Wallace. The group held an annual 'Whitman Day' celebration around the May 31st, the poet's birthday.
John Rowson Smith was an American painter and a pioneer in the creation of moving panoramas. His Leviathan Panorama of the Mississippi River was created in the 1840s, covered 20,000 square feet of canvas, and depicted approximately 2,000 miles of landscape along the Mississippi River that spanned nine states. The panorama was displayed at theaters in the United States and Europe from 1848 to 1852.
Jesse Talbot was an American landscape painter and a friend of the poet Walt Whitman. Born in Dighton, Massachusetts, Talbot worked for the American Tract Society and other evangelical Christian organizations in New York City before becoming a professional artist, first exhibiting in the National Academy of Design in 1838. His work was often favorably compared to that of Thomas Cole and other leaders of the Hudson River School of American landscape painters. Talbot developed a friendship with Walt Whitman in the 1850s. The notebook in which Whitman first wrote down the ideas for Leaves of Grass is known as the “Talbot Wilson notebook” because Talbot’s name and address are written on the inside front cover. Talbot died in relative obscurity in 1879.
Harry Shokler (1896–1978) was a 20th-century American artist known for his oil paintings and screen prints. Using a realist approach that produced what one critic called an "exactness of rendition", he made colorful landscapes, cityscapes, and marine scenes as well as some notable portraits. He helped pioneer silkscreen printmaking in the 1930s and wrote an influential guide explaining and demonstrating the method. He gave few solo or small group exhibitions in commercial galleries and showed his work mainly from his own studio and in non-profit venues.
Peter George Doyle was an Irish-born American transit worker, known for being an intimate companion of Walt Whitman from around 1865 to 1876, and to some extent to Whitman's death in 1892. Doyle also witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
