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for JOHN TULLIDGE
JOHN TULLIDGE
1836 - 1899
Although he was not associated with a particular art school, and is reputed to have had no formal training outside of England, he evidently did receive some artistic schooling which served him well, for he was later considered "an excellent instructor of perspective, landscape painting and life drawing" at the Deseret Academy.
Tullidge painted in the so-called "Dusseldorf style" popular in Europe at the time, a style best exemplified by the work of Albert Bierstadt. One source has also asserted that Tullidge had a meager art education with William Mulready, an Irish artist in England."
Following in the path of his elder brother, Edward William ("Wheelock"), Tullidge, the prolific biographer, playwright, publisher, editor and chronicler of early Utah and Mormon history, he was converted to Mormonism by the missionary Orson Pratt, and subsequently immigrated to Utah from Liverpool, England in 1863 with his wife, Mary Jane Mathews, and his father, John Edward, for the elder gave a Haydn and Rossini concert at the Salt Lake Theatre that same year. Edward William was already well established in literary circles in Salt Lake City in 1863, and later in New
York City as a contributor to Harper's Monthly magazine.
Tullidge began life in America painting scenery at the Salt Lake Theatre, as well as murals for the ceremonial chambers of the Mormon Temple. Here he met, and befriended, the artists Danquart Weggeland and George M.Ottinger, also recent recruits to the faith working as scene painters and muralists, and together the three founded the short lived Deseret Academy of Fine Arts in 1863. Albert Bierstadt came to Utah the same year to paint landscapes.
Little is known of the last few years of his life. Certainly, by the 1890's, a revolution had taken place in the art world, and 19th-century landscape painters, including the Hudson River school, were suddenly out of favor. John Tullidge died on June 20, 1899. Alfred Lambourne delivered his eulogy, "A Farewell To My Friend John Tullidge", which was later published among Lambourne's letters. Of his "attractive" landscapes, one critic wrote that "a calm luminism prevails."
From website: http://www.askart.com/askart/artist.aspx?artist=9967
Tullidge, John Elliott (1836-1899), a native of Weymouth, England, was a pioneer Utah painter whose work attracted an important Denver patron as well as members of the powerful Walker family in Salt Lake City. Even though he had had only a brief apprenticeship in his teens with an English decorative painter (a factor preventing further homeland "formal art study except for a meager training at Milready"), Tullidge was able to develop into a landscape painter in America, using a calm, but nicely brushy luminism in his works not unlike effects seen in the pictures of some secondary figures associated with this country's Hudson River School. Then, like Dan Weggeland (q.v.) and C.C.A. Christensen (q.v.), he eventually capped his studio-carreer by painting in various LDS temples (St. George, Logan, and Manti). Edward W. Tullidge, a brother of Jon Tullidge, was the most prominent nineteenth-century writer on Utah art and one of several leaders of the Godbeite movement in dissent from Mormonism beginning in the 1860s. (b. April 17)
Olpin, Robert S., William C. Seifrit, and Vern G. Swanson. ARTISTS OF UTAH. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1999: 269.
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