Henry Rankin Poore

Henry Rankin Poore, often Henry R. Poore, (1859 – 1940) was an American artist, known for incorporating human and animal figures in his landscape and genre paintings. He was also a prolific illustrator, critic, and author on art and composition.

Poore was born on March 21, 1859, in Newark, New Jersey, to Rev. Daniel Warren Poore and Susan Helen Poore née Ellis. He spent his childhood in California and then studied at the University of Pennsylvania from 1881 to 1883, when the New York Times identified him as "a promising young Philadelphia painter" as it wrote approvingly of his illustrations for a new edition of The Night Before Christmas.

He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy and then at the National Academy of Art. He then studied in Paris where his teachers included Évariste Vital Luminais and William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Returning to the United States, he had a studio in Philadelphia. The American Art Association awarded his painting "The Night of the Nativity" its grand prize in 1889.

In 1891, working for the U.S. government, he produced illustrations of the life of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and wrote a report on their living conditions. He painted hunting scenes in England in 1893.

He also taught at the Chautauqua Art School and served as its director from 1896 to 1902. He taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts beginning in 1904.

The National Academy of Design award him its Hallgarten Prize and elected him an associate member in 1888. At the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 he won a bronze medal, at the International Exposition at St. Louis in 1904 a silver medal, and at the International Exposition in Buenos Aires a gold medal.

He spent several summers at the Old Lyme Art Colony, which he helped found.

His subjects ranged widely. One critic wrote of a retrospective of his works: "In his long career ... he wielded a versatile brush and his exhibition reveals a catholicity of view which embraces with equal enthusiasm the hunting field, the New England farmer and the character revealed by the face before the portrait painter."

He published Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures in 1903, which he described as a "handbook for students and lovers of art". He recommended both painters and photographers to consider how to use the fundamental forms he presented to draw the viewer "into the picture", including, in one critic's summary, "left-right balance and the aesthetic application of triangles, circles, crosses, S-curves, and rectangles". A century later, that critic wrote that the volume "still provides a thoughtful analysis of composition".

He married Katherine Goodnow Stevens of Worcester, Massachusetts, on June 30, 1896. He died in Orange, New Jersey, on August 15, 1940, after a long illness.