Towson is an unincorporated community and a census-designated place in Baltimore County, Maryland, United States. The population was 55,197 as of the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Baltimore County and the second-most populous unincorporated county seat in the United States.
Jean-Édouard Vuillard was a French painter, decorative artist, and printmaker. From 1891 through 1900, Vuillard was a prominent member of the avant garde artistic group Les Nabis, creating paintings that assembled areas of pure color. His interior scenes, influenced by Japanese prints, explored the spatial effects of flattened planes of color, pattern, and form. As a decorative artist, Vuillard painted theater sets, panels for interior decoration, and designed plates and stained glass. After 1900, when the Nabis broke up, Vuillard adopted a more realistic style, approaching landscapes and interiors with greater detail and vivid colors. In the 1920s and 1930s, he painted portraits of prominent figures in French industry and the arts in their familiar settings.
Rembrandt Peale was an American artist and museum keeper. A prolific portrait painter, he was especially acclaimed for his likenesses of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Peale's style was influenced by French neoclassicism after a stay in Paris in his early thirties.
Towson University is a public university in Towson, Maryland. Founded in 1866 as Maryland's first training school for teachers, Towson University is a part of the University System of Maryland. Since its founding, the university has evolved into eight subsidiary colleges with over 20,000 students. Its 329-acre campus is situated in Baltimore County, Maryland eight miles north of downtown Baltimore. Towson is one of the largest public universities in Maryland and still produces the most teachers of any university in the state.
Rose-painting, rosemaling, rosemåling or rosmålning is a Scandinavian decorative folk painting that flourished from the 1700s to the mid-1800s, particularly in Norway. In Sweden, rose-painting began to be called dalmålning, c. 1901, for the region where it had been most popular and kurbits, in the 1920s, for a characteristic trait, but in Norway the old name still predominates beside terms for local variants. Rose-painting was used to decorate church walls and ceilings. It then spread to wooden items commonly used in daily life, such as ale bowls, stools, chairs, cupboards, boxes, and trunks. Using stylized ornamentation made up of fantasy flowers, scrollwork, fine line work, flowing patterns and sometimes geometric elements give rose-painting its unique feel. Some paintings may include landscapes and architectural elements. Rose-painting also utilizes other decorative painting techniques such as glazing, spattering, marbleizing, manipulating the paint with the fingers or other objects. Regional styles of rose-painting developed, and some varied only slightly from others, while others may be noticeably distinct.
Tole painting is the folk art of decorative painting on tin and wooden utensils, objects and furniture. Typical metal objects include utensils, coffee pots, and similar household items. Wooden objects include tables, chairs, and chests, including hope chests, toyboxes and jewelry boxes.
Joshua Johnson was an American painter from the Baltimore, Maryland area of African and European ancestry. Johnson is known for his naïve paintings of prominent Maryland residents.
Towson High School is a high school in Baltimore County, Maryland, United States, founded in 1873. The school's current stone structure was built in 1949. Located in the northern Baltimore suburb of Towson and serving the surrounding communities of Towson, Lutherville, and Ruxton, it is part of the Baltimore County Public Schools system, the 25th largest school system in the nation as of 2005. Area middle schools that feed into Towson High are Dumbarton Middle School, Ridgely Middle School, and Loch Raven Technical Academy, although students from other areas attend the Law and Public Policy magnet school.
Jane Schenthal Frank was an American multidisciplinary artist, known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, illustrator, and textile artist. Her landscape-like, mixed-media abstract paintings are included in public collections, including those of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She studied with artists, Hans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg.
Jacob Glushakow was an American painter known for his keen observations of life in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
Grace Hartigan was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and a significant member of the vibrant New York School of the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle of friends, who frequently inspired one another in their artistic endeavors, included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Frank O'Hara. Her paintings are held by numerous major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. As director of the Maryland Institute College of Art's Hoffberger School of Painting, she influenced numerous young artists.
Eugene "Bud" Leake pronounced "Leaky" was a landscape painter and president of the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work was characterized by a consistent commitment to the depiction of the landscape, not following ever-changing trends of contemporary art in the 20th century. In an October 2000 Baltimore Sun article Glenn McNatt wrote that, "For the past quarter century, Leake has been recording that landscape in all its moods and seasons, from riotous sun-drenched spring mornings to the magical glow of autumnal sunsets. His paintings are imbued with an unmistakable sense of place that only one who has lived in and loved the surrounding landscape can create."
East Monument Historic District or Little Bohemia, is a national historic district in Baltimore, Maryland. It is a large residential area with a commercial strip along East Monument Street. It comprises approximately 88 whole and partial blocks. The residential area is composed primarily of rowhouses that were developed, beginning in the 1870s, as housing for Baltimore's growing Bohemian (Czech) immigrant community. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the neighborhood was the heart of the Bohemian community in Baltimore. The Bohemian National Parish of the Roman Catholic Church, St. Wenceslaus, is located in the neighborhood. The historic district includes all of McElderry Park and Milton-Montford, most of Middle East and Madison-Eastend, and parts of Ellwood Park.
The history of Czechs in Baltimore dates back to the mid-19th century. Thousands of Czechs immigrated to East Baltimore during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, becoming an important component of Baltimore's ethnic and cultural heritage. The Czech community has founded a number of cultural institutions to preserve the city's Czech heritage, including a Roman Catholic church, a heritage association, a gymnastics association, an annual festival, a language school, and a cemetery. During the height of the Czech community in the late 19th century and early 20th century, Baltimore was home to 12,000 to 15,000 people of Czech birth or heritage. The population began to decline during the mid-to-late 20th century, as the community assimilated and aged, while many Czech Americans moved to the suburbs of Baltimore. By the 1980s and early 1990s, the former Czech community in East Baltimore had been almost entirely dispersed, though a few remnants of the city's Czech cultural legacy still remain.
David Brewster is an American painter active in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States.
William Oktavec was a Czech-born American artist, draftsman, butcher and grocer, best known for inventing screen painting.
Hugh Bolton Jones was an American landscape painter. He grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where he received his early training as an artist. While studying in New York he was strongly influenced by Frederic Edwin Church of the Hudson River School. After spending four years in Europe he settled in New York in 1881, where he shared a studio with his brother Francis Coates Jones for the rest of his long life. He was celebrated for his realistic depictions of calm rural scenes of the eastern United States at different times of the year, usually empty of people. He won prizes in several major exhibitions in the US and France. His paintings are held in public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.
Frederick Kemmelmeyer was a German-born American painter. He was entirely self-taught and his work is generally classified as folk art.
Jacob Hall Pleasants (1873-1957) was an art historian and genealogist who researched and wrote about people of Maryland and especially Baltimore. Most notably he wrote scholarly articles and books about painters and silversmiths in Maryland, and early American artists such as the African-American portrait artist Joshua Johnson and landscape painter Francis Guy which led to exhibitions and more scholarship about these artists.
Shelby Shackelford (1899–1987) was an American artist who worked mainly within the art communities of Baltimore, Maryland, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her paintings, drawings, and prints were abstract, but not nonobjective. Each of them had, as she said, "a beginning in a visual experience". Early in her career, during a period when many in Baltimore were hostile to what locals called "advanced" trends in art, her paintings were stigmatized as "meaningless stuff". After helping to counteract these local prejudices, she embarked on a long period of experimentation in media and technique, maintaining, as she wrote in 1957, that painting was, "an adventure, a process of discovery for which there should be no end". Critics praised Shackelford for "refinement and sureness of approach and execution", "unusual and amusing arrangements of color and line", "taste and imagination", and "paintings [that] are abstract, well-constructed, with variety of forms, and outstanding color". In addition to making art, Shackelford taught art classes to children and adults, was an active participant in arts organizations, and both wrote and illustrated books that received extensive attention from book reviewers.
