Last of the Great American Impressionist painters and one of the most honored and successful artists of his time. He is famed for works that capture dazzling plays of light in both indoors and outdoors settings. He was born to a wealthy merchant family in Salem. His brother, John Prentiss Benson, was a well known maritime realist painter. Benson received his first art training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, from 1880-1883. In 1883, Benson traveled to Paris and continued his studies at the Academie Julian under the instruction of Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. He returned home in 1885, rented a studio in Salem, and began to exhibit at the Boston Art Club and the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1898, Benson joined a group of painters from New York and Boston, including Edmund Tarbell, Robert Reid, Edward Simmons, Thomas Dewing, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, and John H. Twachtman, to form the Ten American Painters. This group, also known simply as The Ten, broke away from the Society of American Artists, which they considered too conservative. The Ten included several of the most advanced and talented artists of their generation, many of whom worked in the French Impressionist style.  Benson’s works may be found in public collections including the Albright-Knox-Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, Ohio; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; the Huntington Library, Pasadena, California; the Indianapolis Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Academy of Design, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.    (bio by: Bob on Gallows Hill)