Gari Melchers

Gari Melchers was an American painter of Dutch peasant life, portraits and murals, working in a solid, naturalistic style with a love of clear northern light. His figures are painted with honesty and quiet dignity.

Born in Detroit, he trained at the Düsseldorf Academy and then in Paris at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1884 he co-founded an artists’ colony at Egmond aan Zee in the Netherlands with George Hitchcock, and he spent many years painting the fishermen, farmers and churchgoers of the Dutch coast. He painted murals for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the Detroit Public Library and the Missouri State Capitol, and later settled at Belmont, an estate in Falmouth, Virginia, now the Gari Melchers Home and Studio museum.

His portrait of Andrew W. Mellon and his religious pictures, such as Christ, show his range, from formal commissions to simple devotional scenes.