Career
William Powell studied under artist Henry Inman in New York City prior to receiving a commission from the United States Congress in 1847 to paint the last large historical painting in the Capitol rotunda. Powell selected the discovery of the Mississippi River by Hernando de Soto as the subject of the painting and completed it in 1853. Its positive reception nationwide lead to the Ohio legislature requesting that Powell paint Oliver Hazard Perry's victory in the War of 1812.
The result was the even more popular painting, Perry’s Victory on Lake Erie. The painting was so well received, that in 1865 the United States Congress requested that Powell paint them a copy for one of the stairwells in the north side of the Capitol building. The painting that emerged was created in a temporary studio in Washington, D.C. and larger than the original in Ohio. It was finished in 1873. William Henry Powell died six years later.
Read more about this topic: William Henry Powell
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)