Harry Leith-Ross

Harry Leith-Ross was born on January 27, 1886 in the former British colony of Mauritius, an island off the southeastern coast of Africa. Harry spent his youth in England and Scotland. He attended the University of Birmingham in England for two years before leaving for America at the age of 17.

Leith-Ross came to the United States in 1903 to work in a coal business operated by his uncle in New Mexico. After living in New Mexico, he moved to Denver, Colorado, where he worked in commercial art and advertising.

In 1909 he traveled to Paris and studied for a year at the Academie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens. He studied the following year with Stanhope Forbes in England. Ross returned to America in 1910. Three years later, he studied painting with Birge Harrison and John Fabian Carlson at the Art Students League's summer school at Woodstock, New York. Leith-Ross moved permanently to the New Hope area of Pennsylvania in 1935 and settled in Solebury.

Leith-Ross excelled in finding the splendor in ordinary scenes of everyday life. His dramatic uses of lighting and poetic color harmonies reveal sensitivity to commonplace things. His realism although rooted in the world transcends the mere description of facts and depends on a sensitive connection to the motif, a more thoughtful look and a belief all things are beautiful.

In 1936, Leith-Ross was elected a full Academician in the National Academy of Design. He taught landscape painting classes in Woodstock, NY, Newport and Rockport, CT and Gloucester, MA. He was a visiting instructor at the University of Buffalo, New York and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. In 1956, he wrote The Landscape Painter's Manual for Watson Guptill Publications.

The artist won numerous awards in his lifetime for watercolor and oil paintings from the National Academy of Design, American Watercolor Society and the Salmagundi Club. Harry Leith-Ross died on March 15, 1973 in Pineville, Pennsylvania.

 


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