Charles Fox

Born to impoverished parents and raised in Boston, George Peter Alexander Healy's early artistic talent was quickly recognized by the renowned portraitist, Thomas Sully, and at age seventeen, Healy opened his own portrait studio. In 1834, supported by Sully and his early patron, Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, Healy left on the first of many trips to Paris where he studied with Antoine Jean-Gros and with Thomas Couture, who became a close friend. He worked in Paris for several years as a court portrait painter and gained an international reputation. In 1855, Healy established a home in Chicago from which he frequently traveled to the East Coast and the South to paint portraits of leading politicians and the socially elite. After the Civil War, Healy returned to Europe for twenty-five years, but left at age 79 because of his disdain for new turns in the Parisian art scene, particularly Impressionism.

Healy was a remarkably facile, courageous, and industrious portraitist. He painted more portraits than any other American artist, numbering among his sitters Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lord Lyons, Franz Liszt, Louis Philippe, and Pius IX. While in London, in 1869, Healy executed this portrait of the English general, Charles Rich Fox (1796-1873). Fox, a naval officer and later a general of the grenadiers, was also an avid collector of antiquities, and his collection of Greek coins would be purchased by the Royal Museum of Berlin in 1873. In this portrait, Healy depicts Fox as a private person in Victorian fashion, smoking his cigar and reading.