Richard Teller Crane

Richard Teller Crane had two or three years of schooling in all. He was working in factories as a boy, and in 1855, at 23, he opened a small brass foundry in Chicago that grew into the Crane Company, one of the country's great makers of valves, pipe fittings and plumbing. In his last years he became an outspoken opponent of college education and published pamphlets arguing against it. Anders Zorn painted him in 1904 in Pasadena, in southern California, when Crane was in his early seventies. Zorn was on one of his American working trips that year, and he had travelled out to California from Chicago with his friend Charles Deering, heir to a farm-machinery fortune. In Pasadena he also painted Crane's young wife, Emily. Crane sits outdoors in a grey hat with a cigar in his hand and a sunlit garden behind him, and he looks straight at us. The portrait was shown at the world's fair in St Louis that same year. Later it hung in the directors' room at the Crane Company headquarters in Chicago, and it stayed in the family until 2013, when his great-grandson Charles Bacon gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts.