(1859–1886)
William Bliss Baker was born in New York City in 1859 and grew up in Ballston Spa, New York. He studied at the National Academy of Design from 1876 to 1880, winning the Elliott prize for drawing in 1879, and he also studied under Albert Bierstadt and Mauritz F. H. de Haas. Baker began to exhibit his work at the National Academy of Design in 1881, where he won the prestigious Hallgarten prize in 1884. By 1883 Baker’s Tonalist woodland interiors and landscapes, which are remarkable for their detail and evocative moods, had attracted the interest of the most important collectors of American art. Baker’s tragic death in 1886 was, in the words of a contemporary critic, “a distinct loss to American art. What plane of excellence he might not have reached in advancing years (he was but twenty-seven when he died) can only be premised from the work he had already accomplished, but certainly that promised the highest results.”[1]
Baker exhibited at the National Academy of Design from 1881 to 1886, Brooklyn Art Association from 1882 to 1886, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1883 and 1884, American Art Association and Union League Club in 1884, American Watercolor Society in 1884 and 1885, Boston Art Club, and the Prize Fund Exhibition in 1885. His work can be found in the Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, New York; Saint Bonaventure University, New York; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee; University of Minnesota, Duluth; Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah; University of Washington, Seattle; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada.
[1] “Art Notes,” Art Review 1, no. 2 (December 1886), 19.