Name Paul Harney | Died 1915 | |
Education National Academy Museum and School | ||
Paul Harney was born on October 21, 1850 in New Orleans, the son of Paul and Susan Ferris Harney. They moved to St. Louis when he was very young. He was an early student of artist Albon Jasper Conant, a painter of Abraham Lincoln, and later studied art at the National Academy in New York and the Royal Academy in Munich under Barth and Lindenschmit.
Harney settled in Alton, Illinois and taught as a member of the faculty at Shurtleff College. After twenty years as both faculty and as Shurtleff's Director of Art, he moved to the Missouri side of the Mississippi River along with his wife Emma Stewart and his three children (his son Eliot had died while still in Alton). For several years Harney occupied a chair in the St. Louis School of Fine Arts (later called Washington University's Fine Arts Department). He was a founding member of the St. Louis Artists' Guild and a member of the Society of Western Arts.
Several unfortunate tragedies beset Harney's later years. All three of his remaining children died between 1906 and 1907, and his wife died in 1910. Harney died poverty stricken of tuberculosis on November 27, 1915 at the age of 65. The St. Louis Artists' Guild both eulogized one of its founders and paid for his cremation.