Junius Brutus Stearns

Junius Brutus Stearns was born Lucius Sawyer, on June 2, 1810, in Arlington, Vermont (one secondary account of a contemporary New York Times obituary instead cites Burlington, Vermont, so the exact town carries a small documented discrepancy). He adopted the name Junius Brutus Stearns after a falling-out with his father over his choice of an artistic career.

He moved to New York City and began attending the National Academy of Design around 1838, matriculating on and off in the antique and life classes through 1849 while exhibiting there for the first time in 1838. He was elected a National Academician in 1849 and served as the Academy's recording secretary from 1851 to 1865. During the 1850s he also traveled in Europe and worked as a portrait, genre, and history painter, producing domestic scenes and sporting pictures alongside his historical work.

His major achievement, the Washington Series, was painted between 1847 and 1856 and depicts scenes from Washington's life as farmer, citizen at his wedding, soldier, statesman at the Constitutional Convention, and Christian on his deathbed. Four of the five canvases entered the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as a gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, and Washington on His Deathbed is held by the Dayton Art Institute. A self-portrait is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Stearns died on September 1885 in Brooklyn, New York, after a horse-and-carriage accident near his home; he was thrown from the vehicle and suffered a fractured skull. Most sources, including Wikipedia, give the date as September 17, 1885, while the near-contemporary Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings (1887) gives September 16, 1885; the year, location, and accidental cause are consistent across sources. He was 75 years old and was interred at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn.

In his own time, Stearns's standing rested on his membership and long service at the National Academy of Design, where he was elected Academician in 1849 and served as recording secretary for fourteen years. His enduring reputation, however, rests on the Washington Series, which became some of the most widely reproduced popular images of the first president and shaped how generations of Americans pictured Washington's private and civic life. That same visual authority has made the paintings a subject of renewed scrutiny: the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts's 2026 pairing of his Washington canvases with work by contemporary artist Titus Kaphar frames Stearns's series as history painting whose polish and popularity outran its documentary accuracy, prompting institutional reconsideration of how such images shaped, and sometimes distorted, public memory of Washington. No verifiable verbatim critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

The one clearly documented auction result for Stearns is USD 81,250, achieved at Doyle in New York on February 22, 2012, for a painting attributed to the artist; the specific lot title is not confirmed in the available record. Beyond that sale, Stearns's market is defined more by dealer listings and institutional holdings than by a deep or frequent auction trail, and no gallery or estate currently represents his work. Collectors should expect an occasional, rather than continuous, market, concentrated among specialists in 19th-century American painting.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Junius Brutus Stearns and no gallery or estate manages his market, so provenance and museum exhibition history do the work that a raisonne or dealer program would otherwise do. His most valuable and most exhibited works, the Washington Series, are institutionally held and unlikely to reach the market, which leaves collectors mainly to genre, portrait, and sporting subjects with a comparatively thin public sales history. Even basic biographical facts, his exact birthplace and the precise day of his death, carry small documented discrepancies across otherwise reliable sources, a reminder to treat any single citation with care and to cross-check against museum and near-contemporary records.