Born in Maryland, George Henry Yewell moved with his family at an early age to Cincinnati, Ohio, before settling in Iowa City, Iowa, by 1843. As a young man, Yewell gained renown in Iowa for his political cartoons. These drew the attention of one of the Supreme Court justices of the state, who helped arrange for Yewell’s travel to New York to study art. In New York, Yewell was introduced to Thomas Hicks, who helped the young artist gain admission to the National Academy of Design. He studied there for five years before traveling to France in 1856 to further his studies under Thomas Couture. Yewell was back in New York by 1862, but he returned to Europe in 1868 and settled in Rome. He traveled to Egypt in 1875 and returned to America in 1878, where he lived in New York City until his retirement to Lake George, New York.
Yewell was elected an Associate of the National Academy in 1862, and an academician in 1880. Yewell exhibited regularly at the Academy from 1852 to 1916, and at the time of his death was the oldest member of the National Academy. The Academy also has several of his portraits in its permanent collection. Yewell’s work is held in a number of public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The New-York Historical Society; The Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; and The Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin.
Yewell is the most important early artist from Iowa City. He is best known for a series of portraits of prominent men from Iowa, painted beginning in the 1850s, which are now in the Iowa Department of History and Archives in Des Moines, and his pencil sketches are some of the earliest extant renderings of Iowa City. Yewell’s personal papers, diaries, and other ephemera, as well as his sketchbooks and thirty-six paintings, are at the University of Iowa library.
