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William Tylee Ranney (1815-1857), First News of the Battle of Lexington, 1847, American. Oil on canvas. 111.9 x 160.8 cm. Courtesy of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (http://www.ncartmuseum.org); purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina.

Once well known, lauded, loved, and sought after, today William Tylee Ranney (1813-1857) is little more than a footnote to the history of 19th-century American painting. The subject of a slim monograph and a single entry of a couple of dozen lines in a 30-volume dictionary of art, Ranney is eclipsed by the fame of his contemporaries: William Sydney Mount, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Eastman Johnson, George Caleb Bingham, John George (J. G.) Brown, George Henry Durrie, Karl Bodmer, Francis William Edmonds, to mention only a few of his generation. Like them, Ranney was primarily a genre or anecdotal painter, although he aspired to history paintings and did in . . . [Full Text of this Article]