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James Edward Freeman (1808–November 21, 1884) was an American painter, diplomat, and author. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York City and in Rome, Italy. He expatriated to Rome in 1841 when he was appointed U.S. Consul to Ancona, in the Papal States. ==Early life and career in America== Freeman was born on Indian Island, in New Brunswick, Canada, less than one mile distant from Eastport, Maine, where his parents lived. His father, Joshua Edwards Freeman, was a merchant and navigated the waters between the bustling seaports frequently with his wife Eliza Morgan Freeman. In 1816 Freeman was sent to live with relatives in rural Otsego County, New York, but little else is known of his early life or his family circumstances. In 1826 Freeman moved to New York City in order to study painting. There he encountered William Dunlap, a noted portraitist and history painter, whose works the young Freeman could have seen in upstate New York. Dunlap encouraged Freeman to enroll in the National Academy of Design in New York City, a nascent institution of which Dunlap was a founding member. Freeman joined the National Academy of Design's Antique School in its inaugural year, 1826, alongside two other notable American painters, William Sidney Mount and William Page. Freeman debuted at the National Academy of Design's Fourth Annual Exhibition in 1829 with ''Portrait of a Gentleman'' (unlocated). He was elected an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design on May 14, 1831 and elected to the prestigious position of Academician on May 1, 1833. By 1831 Freeman began to paint fancy pictures, typically life-sized, single-figure (occasionally multi-figure) paintings which were similar in appearance to portraits but possessed a greater expressiveness and which frequently depicted hired models rather than paying sitters. Many of Freeman’s associates, including Samuel F. B. Morse, Charles Cromwell Ingham, Henry Inman, Mount, and Page, were also painting fancy pictures, as was Washington Allston, who began painting them in the first decade of the century. Freeman would also have been familiar with 18th-century European fancy pictures by Joshua Reynolds, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Thomas Gainsborough, as well as the 17th-century secular works by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo that inspired the genre. Like many aspiring American painters of the era, however, Freeman continued to rely upon bespoke portraiture for his livelihood and became semi-itinerant in the 1830s, seeking and fulfilling commissions in Cooperstown, New York, Litchfield, Connecticut, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Utica, New York, from his home base in New York City and, later, Albany, New York. Financed by his enlightened patron base in Albany, led by John Adams Dix, Freeman embarked for England in September 1836. He carried letters of introduction from Morse to the esteemed Anglo-American painter Charles Robert Leslie in London and the eminent Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen in Rome. Traveling through England, thence to Paris, Marseilles, and the Italian port of Leghorn, Freeman arrived in Rome on November 30, 1836, and took quarters at Via Laurina 97. There were only two other American artists concurrently residing at Rome, the neoclassical sculptor Thomas Crawford and the painter Frederick William Philip. Freeman and Crawford were allowed to attend the life school of the so-called English Academy, which convened nightly to work from nude models in the deconsecrated church of San Giovanni della Ficozza at Via dei Maroniti 29. Their British peers there included Morris Moore, Patrick Allan-Fraser, Edward Matthew Ward, and the brothers Robert Scott Lauder and James Eckford Lauder. During his brief nine-month sojourn in Rome Freeman painted ''Masaniello'' (private collection), a fancy picture of the Italian folk hero Tommaso Aniello, known as Masaniello, who led a successful uprising against Spanish rule of Naples in 1647 and became a potent symbol of Italian unification. Freeman's choice of subject matter reveals his own early support for the cause of the Italian Risorgimento.Freeman departed Rome in September 1837 and is recorded back in Albany, New York that December. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「James Edward Freeman」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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