William Worcester Churchill (1858-1926) American
Birthplace/Origin: b. Massachusetts, died Washington DC
Biography/Statement:
William Worcester Churchill was born in Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts, in 1858 and died in Washington, DC in 1926. He was a painter of figure studies, portraits, female nudes, and landscapes in oil and pastel, and entered the Boston Museum School in 1877. He then trained in Paris in the late 1870s with the French Salon artist Leon Bonnat.
Churchill returned to his native Boston to establish his career as a portraitist and a landscape painter. In addition to his membership in the Guild of Boston Artists and the St. Botolph Club, he showed at Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and later won awards at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, and the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.
According to the “Boston Art Guide” of 1893, he worked from a studio on Irvington Street, where he received students on Saturday afternoons. His own advertisements in that issue offered his availability to “pupils in oil painting from life and landscape at Kennebunkport, Maine, during the summer” (Boston Art Guide, 1983, P. 38)
Churchills figure studies are similar in style to William Paxtons often depicting young women in carefully defined interiors.