Seymour Joseph Guy

Seymour Joseph Guy’s path to a successful career as an artist was by no means smooth or even likely. Born in Greenwich, England, he was orphaned at the age of nine. His early interest in art was discouraged by his legal guardian, who wanted a more settled trade for the young man. Only after the guardian also died was Guy free to pursue his intention of becoming an artist. The details of Guy’s early training in art are unclear. His first teacher is believed to have been Thomas Buttersworth, a marine painter (it is not certain whether this was Thomas Buttersworth, Sr. or Jr.). He then apprenticed with Ambrosini Jérôme (John Parker Jerome, 1810–1883), an academic history painter. In 1851, Guy exhibited a painting depicting a mythological topic at the British Institution. This was so atypical a subject for the artist that it is the first and last mention of such a work. In 1854, the thirty-year-old artist immigrated to America.
 
Guy arrived with a wife, Anna, and a one-year-old daughter, Edith. Anna’s father, William Barber, was an English engraver who had come to America in 1852. Guy began his American career as a portrait painter, the most direct means of turning his English training as a figure painter into a source of support for his family. He found a congenial group of artists in Brooklyn, which was an independent city from 1834 until it became part of greater New York in 1898, and played an active role in local art activities. In 1859, Guy was among the artists who founded the Brooklyn Art Social. He remained involved when the Art Social nucleus founded the Brooklyn Art Association two years later in 1861. In 1866, Guy and John George Brown (1831–1913) were the only two artists involved with both earlier groups who were among the founders of the Brooklyn Academy of Design, an artists-only organization. Guy and his wife had a growing family. Alfred was born in 1855, Anna in 1857, Charles in 1859, Frederick in 1861, Arthur in 1864, Jennie in 1866, Seymour in 1869, and Amy in 1873. By 1869 the family had moved to Hackensack, New Jersey (this information comes from the 1870 United States Census). Although Guy left Brooklyn he continued to exhibit there, continuing until 1887. By 1900, Guy and his family had moved to The Bronx, where he lived until his death in 1910. 

In 1861, Guy was elected an associate at the National Academy of Design in New York. He was admitted as a full academician in 1865. In 1863, Guy moved his studio from 806 Broadway, the old Dodsworth’s Dancing Academy Building between 11th and 12th Streets, to Richard Morris Hunt’s prestigious Studio Building on Tenth Street, where he maintained a presence until at least 1908. In 1867, Guy was among the founders of the American Society of Painters in Water Color. He was also a member of the Artists’ Fund Society, a benevolent organization that raised funds for indigent artists and their families. Guy was invited to join the Century Club as an artist-member in 1888, an affiliation that he greatly valued, judging from his participation in Club exhibitions. 

Guy attracted prestigious patrons throughout his career. In 1867, Henry Tuckerman reported that New York collector Marshall O. Roberts owned four of the artist’s genre works (Book of the Artists, p. 491). Leland Stanford owned a Guy painting that was shown with his collection in San Francisco. Among the owners of his works at the National Academy of Design were William H. Vanderbilt and Thomas B. Clarke. George Sheldon devoted a chapter to Guy in his 1879 book, American Painters. According to Sheldon, the financier Jay Gould owned Guy’s The Father’s Return. Sheldon appears to have interviewed Guy in 1878. Sheldon tended to be positive about all of his artists, and was no less so about Guy. He describes the artist as “a genre painter almost exclusively, a painter of scenes in American domestic life, an historian in a sense, but never a moralist . . . (p. 69),” and praises his steady work habits and his mastery of “the laws of light and shade,” quoting an anonymous viewer as saying “‘Your pictures look as though I could walk into them.’” “There is no doubt that some of them really look so,” writes Sheldon, “and this is one excellence of Mr. Guy’s professional performances” (p. 67).

Though Guy may have preferred genre to portraiture, he continued to produce portraits for important clients. An early portrait that Guy exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1859 is of a socially-prominent Brooklyn merchant and militia officer, Captain Benjamin G. Edmonds (The New-York Historical Society). In 1866, the artist painted the wife and children of Robert Gordon, a banker and art collector who lived at 7 West 33rd Street, The Contest for the Bouquet: The Family of Robert Gordon in their New York Dining Room (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). This ambitious canvas, a so-called “conversation piece” is a tour-de-force combining elements of portrait and genre painting. Gordon was an original founder of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and served as its first Treasurer. He remained a museum trustee until 1884. Twelve years later Guy painted another group portrait, Going to the Opera: Family Portraits, which was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1878 (no. 207) and owned by William H. Vanderbilt.