Francis Humphrey Woolrych Art

Francis Humphrey Woolrych was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1868. After his early education in Sydney, Woolrych traveled to Paris, France, the capital of the 19th century art world after a short stay in Berlin, Germany, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Berlin in the early 1880s. Because Woolrych found the dark palette of German romantic painting unsatisfying, he moved to France. In Paris, Woolrych studied painting and murals with academic en plein air painter Raphael Collin (1850–1916) and Gustave Courtois(1852–1923), an important academic pupil of Jean-Leon Gerome. Collin and Courtois taught at the Ecole Colarossi and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. During his work at the academies, Woolrych met and soon married another student also studying in Europe, Bertha Hewitt, an artist born in Alton, Illinois. In 1887, Woolrych’s Portrait of Miss Naylor was accepted in the Paris Salon followed by additional works accepted in important juried exhibitions throughout Paris. After several years of productive work in and around Paris, Woolrychs returned to the United States where they settled in St. Louis, Missouri. Woolrych was widely known as a portrait painter, landscape artist and muralist. Woolrych’s large masterpiece mural, The Wealth of the North is located in the dome of the Missouri State capital in Jefferson City, while other large murals can still be appreciated in public libraries throughout Missouri including the St. Louis Public Library. Woolrych also has work in the Vatican, Rome, Italy. Following a tour of St. Louis by Cardinal Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, soon to become Pope Pius XII, the Pontiff invited Woolrych to the Holy See where he completed a panoramic landscape of St. Louis, Missouri, now in the Vatican Collection. Additional works by Woolrych are in the collection of the White House, Washington, DC. At the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon in 1905, Woolrych won the bronze medal for a suite of watercolors, and in 1913, he won medals for his portraiture and additional watercolors at the Missouri State Fair. Woolrych was a member of the St. Louis Artists Guild, the American Federation of the Arts, the Hellas Art Society in Berlin, Germany, the St. Louis Brush and Pen Society. Woolrych is included in most major American reference works including The Artists Bluebook, Davenport’s Art Reference: The Gold Edition, Who Was Who in American Art and the Dictionary of American Artists and others. The Art Department of the St. Louis Public Library holds many original Woolrych documents gifted by the family and others after he died in St. Louis in 1941. Woolrych was 73 years of age.