Lockwood De Forest (1850-1932)
Lockwood de Forest was born in New York in 1850 to a prominent family, he grew up in Greenwich Village and on Long Island at the family summer estate. Encouraged by his parents, Henry Grant de Forest and Julia Mary Weeks, Lockwood and his three siblings developed lifelong interests in the arts.
During a visit to Rome in 1868, nineteen-year-old de Forest first began to study art seriously, taking painting lessons from the Italian landscapist Hermann David Salomon Corrodi (1844–1905). On the same trip Lockwood met the American painter (and his maternal great-uncle by marriage) Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) who became his mentor. De Forest accompanied Church on sketching trips around Italy and continued this practice when they both returned to America in 1869. In 1872 de Forest took a studio at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York. During these formative years de Forest counted among his friend’s artists such as Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–80), George Henry Yewell (1830–1923), John Frederick Kensett (1816–72), Jervis McEntee (1828–91), and Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932).
Over the next decade de Forest experienced success as a painter. He exhibited for the first time at the National Academy of Design in 1872, and made two more painting trips abroad, in 1875–76 and 1877–78, traveling to the major continental capitals but also the Middle East and North Africa. His trip to the Middle East and the library at Church’s home, Olana, in New York East established his interest in design during his mid-twenties.
From about 1878 to 1902, landscape painting was overshadowed by his activities and preoccupation with East Indian architecture and décor, a style that became quite fashionable in late nineteenth century America. From 1879-1883, de Forest founded Associated Artists along with Louis Comfort Tiffany, Candace Wheeler and Samuel Colman. Assosciated Artists created an aesthetic which was inspirational and novel, particularly in its incorporation of American-based materials and motifs.
While working in the decorating business, De Forest had continued to paint at home and wherever he traveled, and he exhibited his work frequently at the Century Club and the National Academy of Design. In 1898, de Forest was made a full member of the Academy and it was around this time, with a declining market for exotic interiors, that de Forest became a prolific painter again.After beginning to winter in Santa Barbara, California around 1889 de Forest built a house and moved there permanently in 1922. De Forest created hundreds of oil sketches of Californian sites, and also traveled to the Pacific Northwest (1903), Maine (1905 and 1908), the Grand Canyon (1906 and 1909), Mexico (1904, 1906–7 and 1911), Massachusetts (1910), and Alaska (1912). Lockwood de Forest died in Santa Barbara in 1932.
Today de Forest’s work is featured in the collections of many prominent American museums such as the Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and New-York Historical Society. Whether working as a designer, decorator, or landscape artist, de Forest always maintained that art should have a useful purpose. As a painter, therefore, de Forest’s aim was to translate a truthful visual experience onto a flat surface.