(1812–1867)
James Goodwyn Clonney was born in England, probably in Liverpool, and immigrated to this country by 1830, when he was in the employ of Mesier, a New York lithographer; he married Mesier’s daughter Margaret in 1836. After winning a prize from the National Academy of Design for a drawing after an antique plaster cast, he became an associate member of the Academy in 1834 and began to exhibit his portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes there. Manhattan, Peekskill, New Rochelle, and possibly Brooklyn and Newburgh were among Clonney’s residences in New York State before he bought property on Lake Otsego in Cooperstown in 1852. His last years, when he was no longer active as a painter, were spent in Binghamton.
Clonney participated in the antebellum florescence of American genre painting, which was initiated by figures like John Lewis Krimmel in the 1810s and led during Clonney’s time by William Sidney Mount. Clonney adopted Mount’s recognizably American subjects and simple, eloquent figural groupings, as well as the Scotsman David Wilkie’s expressiveness and more elaborate compositions, which Krimmel had emulated. Clonney’s early training and skill as a commercial draftsman, however, distinguished his work from that of Mount and Wilkie. Using a highly linear, shallow style, he distilled his subjects to an iconic purity only matched in the works of his contemporary George Caleb Bingham.
Clonney exhibited at the National Academy from 1836 to 1852, Apollo Association and American Art-Union from 1841 to 1850, Philadelphia Art Association, 1841, Brooklyn Institute in 1843 and 1845, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1845 and 1847. His work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York; Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
