Edwin Austin Abbey
1852–1911 · United States · Illustration, Muralism, Academic art, Victorian art
The story
Edwin Austin Abbey began as a magazine illustrator in Philadelphia and New York, best known for pen-and-ink scenes from Shakespeare and old English poetry. In his thirties he moved to England for good, chasing the look of the past in the country where more of it survived.
There he grew into an ambitious muralist. His largest work is the Quest of the Holy Grail, a frieze running around a hall of the Boston Public Library, painted over more than a decade with the seriousness of a life's project.
His standing was high enough that when Edward VII was crowned in 1902, Abbey, an American, was chosen to paint the official record of the coronation inside Westminster Abbey. He died in 1911 with another huge commission, murals for the Pennsylvania State Capitol, still unfinished on his easel.
