Glenn Cooper Henshaw American / Indiana / New York / Maryland (1880-1946) The Tomboy, portrait of a young girl oil on canvas unsigned. Biography from the Archives of askART: Henshaw, born in Windfall, Indiana on 8 August 1880 (reportedly as Hinshaw), was a descendant of Francis Scott Key. At the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis he studied under Otto Stark, J. Ottis Adams and William Forsyth. After a year in Germany with Carl von Marr, Henshaw went to Paris. Although he enrolled in the Académie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Henshaw was attracted to impressionism. In London, he was commissioned to execute portraits and illustrations. Back in America, he established studios in New York and Indianapolis and in 1912 he painted a portrait of James Whitcomb Riley. Henshaw received praise from the art critic Joseph Lewis French in 1914, who admired how the artist strictly followed his own vision. Apparently, the name Henshaw was associated with good taste, for French declared, "To own a 'Henshaw,' even one of the smaller examples, was something that those in the know in New York had long coveted" (French, 1914). In addition, Henshaw was praised in International Studio (Harrington, 1917). He exhibited his works at the Corcoran Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere. Around 1930, Henshaw moved to Baltimore where he developed an affinity for Edgar Allan Poe: "his paintings tended toward the fantastic as he experimented with hidden images and double faces" (Letsinger-Miller, 1994, p. 172). In 1941, Henshaw, now out of favor with critics who had been swayed by modernism, returned to his Indiana roots, moving to Nashville. Local critics supported his art, which, for them, represented a defense of beauty against the overall threat of the avant-garde. Upon his death, it was decided to make his gallery in the Odd Fellows Building in Nashville into a memorial. Today, the Brown County Art Gallery has a Henshaw Room, dedicated to the preservation of his works that survived a fire in his old studio in 1966. Although Henshaw was by no means an impressionist in the strict sense of the term, his art does show an absence of contours, exuberantly free brushwork, and a love of spontaneous lighting effects, which owe a lot to Monet's original aesthetic. The artist died in Baltimore, on 5 April 1946. Sources: French, Joseph Lewis. Glen Cooper Henshaw, an Appreciation: Painter of New York Nocturnes. New York: 1914; Harrington, Mary. "Glen Cooper Henshaw." International Studio 62 (October 1917): 97-101; Letsinger-Miller, Lyn. The Artists of Brown County. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. Submitted by Michael Preston Worley, Ph.D. 27 1/2"H x 21 1/2"W (sight), 32 1/4"H x 26 1/4"W (frame)