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Home : Quarterly Archives : Volume 4 |
Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society |
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Source: April 1941 Volume 4 Number 2, Pages 20–21 Thomas Buchanan Read Thomas B. Read was born in 1822 at Corner Ketch, Chester County, Pennsylvania. He was of Scotch-Irish and English descent. His great-grandfather was a Presbyterian minister and he was also the president of Classical Academy of Newark, Delaware. As a boy, Thomas Read was apprenticed to a tailor. He was harshly treated, so he ran away, becoming a grocer's helper and also learning cigar making in Philadelphia. He traveled to Pittsburgh by foot, then to Cincinnati, to the home of his sister. Rolling cigars, painting canal "boats, and odd jobs gave him his living. Shobel Vail Clevenger hired him to chisel figures and inscriptions on tombstones. It was here that he received lessons in sculpture. Read then opened a painter's sign shop, practicing drawing and writing verse for the Times and Chronicle. He wandered through Ohio as an itinerant portrait painter, and as a player of female parts in a theatrical troup in Dayton. Finally, with the generous patronage of Nicholas Longworth, he fitted up a studio in Cincinnati. He made a portrait of General William H. Harrison. "A sad daub" his own criticism. In 1841, Read came to New York, then left for Boston. His studio here was in Park Street Church. Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart were his first sitters. In 1845, he published a novelette - "Paul Redding", a tale of the Brandywine. He moved to Philadelphia in 1846. This was the turning point of his career. This city was his home for the rest of his life, where he made his closest friends and most constant patrons. Newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses printed most of his verse. He compiled an anthology, "The Female Poets of America", 1849, with short biographical notices cribbed from Rufus Griswold, who trounced him for the theft and then forgave him. Among his many poems are "Poems", "Lays and Ballads", "The New Pastoral", "The House by the Sea", "Drifting", and "Sheridan's Ride". His poetry was praised extravagantly in the United States and England. He was regarded as one of the foremost American poets. But he was an artificer in verse rather than a poet. His work lacks concentration and polish and is plainly imitative of Hilton, Cowper, Scott, and Longfellow. His longer poems are practically forgotten. "Drifting" and "Sheridan's Ride" alone are remembered. His reputation as a painter has declined to the vanishing point. Few of his paintings in public collections. He was a competent but not brilliant portrait painter. Inclined to prettify his feminine sitters. His best known pictures are "Sheridan's Ride" and a portrait of "Longfellow's Daughters". Read lived in London, Florence, and Rome. In 1853, he established himself in Florence to spend the rest of his life there, but cholera in 1855 took the life of his wife and daughter. He then returned to the United States. During the Civil War, he was a major on the staff of General Lew Wallace, but his chief service was on the lecture platform. In 1868, his health began to fail. On his way to New York from Rome in 1872, he contracted pneumonia on ship board. A few days later, he died at the Astor House. He is buried in Central Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia.
Poems: "Drifting" Portraits: "George Peabody" in the Peabody Institute, Baltimore. Sculpture: Bust of General Sheridan. Critics have said:
"Read loved to be hospitable and to occupy high social rank."
Birthplace of Thomas Buchanan Read |
