Gari MELCHERS (1860-1932) ✿

American artist Julius Garibaldi Melchers (1860-1932) was one of the leading American proponents of naturalism. He won a 1932 Gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The son of German-born American sculptor Julius Theodore Melchers, Gari Melchers was a native of Detroit, Michigan, who at seventeen studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under von Gebhardt and is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting. After three years went to Paris, where he worked at the Académie Julian, and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he studied under Lefebvre and Boulanger.

He became a member of the National Academy of Design, New York; the Royal Academy of Berlin; Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, Paris; International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, London, and the Secession Society, and besides receiving a number of medals, his decorations include the Legion of Honor, France. In 1904 he was named an Officer in the French Legion of Honor. In 1909 he was appointed Professor of Art at the Grand Ducal Saxony School of Art in Weimar, Germany. In 1915 he returned to New York City to open a studio at Abraham Archibald Anderson's Bryant Park Studios building. From 1920 to 1928 he served as the president of the New Society of Artists. He was a member of the Virginia Fine Arts Commission and a trustee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He served as chairman of the Art Committee of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.