(1867–1945)
Hermann Dudley Murphy was born in Marlboro, Massachusetts, in 1867. After studying at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School in 1886 with Otto Grundmann and Joseph DeCamp, he worked as a mapmaker for the Nicaraguan Canal Survey. The project, which laid the groundwork to build a canal across Central America, was ultimately discarded by Theodore Roosevelt in favor of the Panama Canal. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Murphy was an illustrator for magazines such as Harper’s and Scribner’s, but he decided to devote himself to painting in 1891, studying for the next five years at the Académie Julian in Paris with Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant.
During his stay in Paris, Murphy came to know and admire the work of the great expatriate painter James Abbott MacNeill Whistler, whose abstract tonal paintings greatly influenced Murphy’s style. Murphy also acquired Whistler’s taste for designing frames that complemented his paintings, and after he returned to the United States, he partnered with Charles Prendergast in a highly successful frame business. Settling in Boston, Murphy painted elegant portraits, poetic landscapes, and exquisite still lifes in an Impressionist style. He also devoted time to teaching, first holding classes on Cape Cod in 1899, and then taking a position at Harvard, where he continued to teach for 36 years.
