The American painter, photographer and diplomat William James Stillman (1828-1901) knew just about everyone who was anyone. He befriended Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other pre-Raphaelite painters, traveled with art critic John Ruskin in Switzerland and crossed the Atlantic on the same ship as the singer Jenny Lind. He spent summers in the Adirondacks with the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, historian Charles Eliot Norton and geologist Louis Agassiz, and he numbered the poets James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow among his friends. The youngest of nine children born to the owner of a machine shop in […]
