Visual art
Amelia Van Buren
1856–1942 · photographer, painter
Detroit-born portrait photographer, a student of Thomas Eakins and the subject of his celebrated painting Miss Amelia Van Buren.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan- Died
Tryon, North Carolina- Birth name
- Amelia Culver Van Buren
- Also known as
- Amelia Culver Van Buren
- Detroit years
- 1856–1884, 1890s–1900s
- Field
- Visual art
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Van Buren was born in Detroit around 1856 and was already exhibiting her artwork in Detroit for at least four years before she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia to study with Thomas Eakins. She became one of his close students and friends, and around 1891 he painted her seated in thoughtful profile, a portrait now counted among his finest works and held by the Phillips Collection in Washington. During the 1886 controversy that forced Eakins out of the academy, a committee led him to believe she had brought charges against him, though she had in fact gone home to Detroit to recover from nervous exhaustion. She turned to photography and became a respected portrait photographer in the pictorialist movement, working in partnership with Eva Watson. By 1900, when she sent prints to Frances Benjamin Johnston for an exhibition of American women photographers, she was living in Detroit again. She died in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1942.
Highlights
- Exhibited art in Detroit before studying with Thomas Eakins
- Subject of Eakins's portrait Miss Amelia Van Buren (about 1891)
- Recognized pictorialist portrait photographer
- Back in Detroit by 1900, when she sent prints to Frances Benjamin Johnston