Gari Melchers

Gari Melchers (born Aug. 11, 1860, Detroit, Mich., U.S.—died Nov. 30, 1932, Falmouth, Va.) was a highly successful portrait painter and genre painter. Melchers worked extensively in both the United States and Europe and achieved an international reputation. When he was 17, he went to Düsseldorf, Germany, to study at the Royal Art Academy, and three years later he went to Paris to the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. Attracted by the picturesque quality of the Netherlands, he settled at Egmond aan Zee, where he portrayed genre scenes (e.g., milkmaids in the fields, villagers in church). The Sermon from this period brought him honourable mention at the Paris Salon of 1886. An academic painter of great technical ability, he executed portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and religious works in addition to his genre painting. In his later works he devoted himself to murals and portraits (e.g., Peace and War, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and President Theodore Roosevelt, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).