A highly respected painter who hailed from the Midwest, George Henry Yewell enjoyed a successful career that took him to such disparate locales as Iowa City, New York, and Rome. His oeuvre consists of portraits of record, landscapes, and genre subjects. Yewell also applied his brush to building interiors, attracting acclaim from contemporary critics such as Henry T. Tuckerman, who admired his ability to paint architectural elements with “elaborate care” (Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists: American Artist Life [New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867], p. 493).
Yewell was born in Havre de Grace, Maryland, the son of Solomon Yewell and his wife, Harriet. Following the death of his father in 1831, Harriet and her son moved to Cincinnati, where George’s schoolteachers included Theodore S. Parvin, who later became a well-known educator in Iowa and the editor of the Annals of Iowa. Ten years later they moved again, this time to Iowa City, where Mrs. Yewell later remarried and young George spent his formative years.
Yewell was initially apprenticed to a local tailor. However, his interest in art proved stronger. Having dabbled with pencil and watercolor as a boy, he persevered in his artistic efforts as a teenager and became particularly adept as a caricaturist, known for his humorous point of view and his facility in portraying likenesses. One such work—a political cartoon titled Removal of the Capitol—created a sensation in the local and regional press and was widely published, attracting considerable attention throughout the Hawkeye State. In fact, Charles Mason, the Chief Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, was so taken with the sketch that he and a group of colleagues decided to sponsor Yewell’s studies at the school of the National Academy of Design in New York.
After traveling by stagecoach and then rail, Yewell arrived in Manhattan on October 9, 1851. Armed with an introduction from the journalist and editor Charles A. Dana, then the assistant editor of the New York Tribune, Yewell immediately sought out Thomas Hicks, a talented European-trained painter who gave him his earliest formal training. Following his admittance to the school of the National Academy of Design, Yewell studied there until 1853, refining his skills as a figure painter. Returning to Iowa City, he painted portraits (especially likenesses of children), executed drawings of local buildings for a newly issued map of Iowa City, and continued with his highly creative political cartooning. However, by January 1856 Yewell was back in New York, where he took additional training at the National Academy school. Inspired by Hicks’s example—and with new financing from Mason, who had become a good friend—Yewell went to Paris in July 1856. He subsequently spent the next five years studying with Hicks’s former instructor, Thomas Couture, an influential teacher and academic realist painter who stressed qualities such as close observation, a restricted palette, solid draftsmanship, and the use of emphatic tonal contrasts to represent light and shade. Yewell also honed his technical skills by copying Old Master works at the Louvre and the Luxembourg Palace, and impressed his friends and colleagues, as well, by painting a much-admired copy of a work by the animal painter, Rosa Bonheur.
Upon returning to the United States in 1861, Yewell opened a studio in Des Moines. Around the same time, he also maintained a workplace at the Dodsworth Building in New York. In 1862—the year he exhibited five of his paintings at the National Academy’s Spring exhibition—Yewell was elected an associate member of that august institution. Among the numerous American artists seeking inspiration from Italy, Yewell and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Coast, settled in Rome in 1867. There, Yewell fraternized with fellow members of the American art colony, including painters such as Elihu Vedder and Charles Caryl Coleman, who both became close friends. Yewell also made seasonal visits to Perugia and Venice, and in 1875, he traveled and sketched in Egypt. During these years abroad, Yewell painted landscapes in the Italian countryside. He also began depicting interiors, focusing his attention on the intimate spaces he encountered in old churches and other buildings, as apparent in works such as Interior of St. Mark’s Venice (circa 1870s), which Yewell presented to the National Academy in 1881 upon his election as an Academician.
In 1878, following a breakup with his wife, who had become involved with the British painter Edwin Ellis, Yewell returned to New York. He subsequently leased space in the venerable Tenth Street Studio Building, using that venue as his studio during 1879–80 and again from 1894 to 1920. Portraiture—including ongoing commissions to paint likenesses of Iowa politicians and members of the judiciary—occupied much of Yewell’s time during these later years. However, he also painted oils based on sketches made during his sojourns in Italy and Egypt, and was active, as well, as an etcher and engraver. In 1881, along with fellow painter Francis D. Millet, Yewell was hired by Louis Comfort Tiffany to execute the frieze of war scenes throughout the ages for the Veterans Room at the Seventh Regiment Armory Building in New York.
Yewell, who eventually remarried, was an active figure in New York art life, known for his wit and congeniality: in addition to his association with the National Academy of Design, he was a member of the Century Association and the Artists’ Fund Society and a patron of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yewell typically spent his summers at his home in Diamond Point, a village located on the western shore of Lake George in the southern Adirondacks. He died there on September 26, 1923, with numerous obituaries identifying him as a distinguished artist and the National Academy’s oldest member.
