Thomas Alexander Harrison Biography

Harrison was born in Philadelphia, and after training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in 1879 he travelled to Paris to continue his studies, like many American artists of his generation. Here he enrolled at the Academie Julian, and studied in Gerome's atelier, where he met William Stott, who had arrived in Paris the same year. The two painters followed parallel paths, both exhibiting at the Salon, to French critics' acclaim, and both painting large-scale plein air nude subjects. Contemporaries saw them as being in competition, and there seems to have been truth in this.
Harrison continued to live and work in France, and in 1889 he opened an art school in Paris which was popular with American art students.