Hugh Henry Breckenridge Biography
Hugh Henry Breckenridge was long associated with Philadelphia as a modernist painter and teacher. From 1887 to 1892 he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he then taught for more than forty years. In 1892 he was awarded a scholarship enabling him to study in Paris at the Academie Julian with William Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 1905) and to travel through Europe, going with the Pennsylvania impressionist Walter E. Schofield (1869 1944). His subsequent landscapes, portraits, and figure paintings reveal the influence of impressionism and an overwhelming fascination with color.
Breckenridge began teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1894. During the summer of 1900 he and Thomas Anshutz (18S1 1912) established the Darby School of Painting in Darby, Pennsylvania; Breckenridge later established his own school in East Gloucester, Massachusetts. In 1919 he became director of fine arts at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. In his last years Breckenridge sometimes returned to impressionism, painting landscapes of Gloucester and still life paintings.