Robert Vonnoh Biography

Robert William Vonnoh (1858-1933) was an American Impressionist painter known for his portraits and landscapes. He travelled extensively between the American East Coast and France, more specifically the artists' colony at Grez-sur-Loing.

Vonnoh was born on 17 September 1858 in Hartford, Connecticut. He studied in Boston at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, now called Massachusetts College of Art and Design, then in Paris at the Académie Julian under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre.

He taught at the Massachusetts Normal Art School (1879-1881), at the Cowles Art School in Boston (1884-1885), at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1883-1887), and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1891-1896). Vonnoh became a member of the National Academy of Design in 1906.

His most well-known work, In Flanders Field (also known as Where Soldiers Sleep and Poppies Grow or Coquelicots), was painted in 1890 in the fields of Grez-sur-Loing. 

In the 1900s, Vonnoh helped develop several buildings in the West 67th Street Artists' Colony in New York City.

Vonnoh died on 28 December 1933 in Nice and is buried alongside his wife in the Duck River Cemetery in Old Lyme, Connecticut.