By 1900, Guy and his family had moved to The Bronx, where he lived until his death in 1910. Although Guy left Brooklyn he continued to exhibit there, continuing until 1887. By 1869 the family had moved to Hackensack, New Jersey (this information comes from the 1870 United States Census). 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. (Brown was a fellow Englishman who had immigrated in 1853 and also painted genre subjects.) Guy and his wife had a growing family. 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 organisation. He remained involved when the Art Social nucleus founded the Brooklyn Art Association two years later in 1861. In 1859, Guy was among the artists who founded the Brooklyn Art Social. 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. (Barber went on, in 1869, to become chief engraver at the Philadelphia mint.) 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. Anna’s father, William Barber, was an English engraver who had come to America in 1852. Guy arrived with a wife, Anna, and a one-year-old daughter, Edith. In 1854, the thirty-year-old artist immigrated to America. This was so atypical a subject for the artist that it is the first and last mention of such a work. In 1851, Guy exhibited a painting depicting a mythological topic at the British Institution. He then apprenticed with Ambrosini Jérôme (John Parker Jerome, 1810–1883), an academic history painter. His first teacher is believed to have been Thomas Buttersworth, a marine painter (it is not certain whether this was Thomas Buttersworth, Sr. The details of Guy’s early training in art are unclear. Only after the guardian also died was Guy free to pursue his intention of becoming an artist. His early interest in art was discouraged by his legal guardian, who wanted a more settled trade for the young man. Born in Greenwich, England, he was orphaned at the age of nine. Guy’s path to a successful career as an artist was by no means smooth or even likely. Though he lived at first in Brooklyn with his family and then in New Jersey, from 1863 to his death in 1910 he maintained a studio at the Artist’s Studio Building at 55 West 10th Street, a location that was, for much of that period, the centre of the New York City art world. Guy was as easy to find as his canvases were omnipresent. Some pictures were shown multiple times in the same or different venues. A good number of these works were already privately owned they served as advertisements for other pictures that were available for sale. From 1864 to 1887, he sent about forty pictures to the Brooklyn Art Association. From 1871 to 1903 he contributed over seventy times to exhibitions at the Century Club. Primarily a genre artist, but also a portraitist, between 18 Guy showed more than seventy works at the National Academy of Design. In the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the first decade of the twentieth, New York City art aficionados could count on finding recent work of Seymour Joseph Guy hanging on the walls of the city’s major galleries.
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