Who is William Turner Dannat?

William Turner Dannat (July 9, 1853 – March 12, 1929) was an American artist known especially for paintings of Spanish subject matter.

William T. Dannat was born in 1853 at Hempstead, New York the younger of two boys raised by William H. and Susan (née Jones) Dannat. His dad was a rich lumber dealer who, with Charles E. Pell, founded the resolved Dannat and Pell. Later William’s older brother David would succeed their father as a assistant in the firm.

When Dannat was something like the age of twelve his parents contracted to send him to Germany to supplementary his education. He would superior study architecture at Hanover and Stuttgart before choosing otherwise to become an artist. Dannat attended art classes at the Munich Royal Academy of Fine Arts and later under Mihály Munkácsy in Paris. Dannat became an accomplished draughtsman and a distinguished figure and portrait painter. He at the forefront attracted attention as soon as sketches and pictures made in Spain. A large composition, The Quatuor Espagnol, that was displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was one of the successes of the Paris Salon of 1884. Dannat well ahead settled in Paris, where he taught at the Académie Julian. He was influenced by a number of masters including Carolus Duran and Munkácsy, though more by the latter as can be observed in his paintings Contrebandier Aragonais and Quatuor Espagnol.

Though at one times his publish was mentioned to the side of other great American painters such as Sargent and Whistler, Dannat’s popularity was more in Europe than his homeland. As he approached middle age the financially safe artist began to devote more and more of his grow old to further interests: fencing, boxing and far along automobile racing. For nearly twenty years Dannat ceased painting and next he resumed going on for 1913 his art had adopted a more surrealistic style bearing in mind illusionary landscapes and bizarre themes. During his hiatus from painting Dannat spent much of his era touring Europe studying the techniques of the good masters while long-lasting active in artistic circles in Paris where he served at one time as the president of the Society of American Painters.

William Turner Dannat died in 1929, aged 75, while at Monte Carlo.