Happy Birthday, William Tylee Ranney!
William Tylee Ranney was born in Middletown, Connecticut on May 9, 1813. He was the son of William Ranney, a sea captain, and Clarissa Ranney. At the age of 13, he moved to North Carolina to live with his maternal uncle and was apprenticed to a tinsmith. When he was 20, Ranney moved to Brooklyn to study painting. Six days after the fall of the Alamo in 1836, he volunteered in the Texas army to fight the Texas War of Independence. Ranney served for almost nine months; when he left the army, he remained in Texas and made sketches that he used as inspiration for many of his later paintings. He returned to Brooklyn in 1837 to continue his drawing and exhibited his work for the first time in 1838, at New York City's National Academy of Design.
Throughout his twenty year career, Ranney made 150 paintings and 80 drawings. He came to be considered the first major genre painter of New Jersey and one of the most important pre-Civil War American painters. He is best known for his depictions of Western life, sports, history painting, and portraiture.
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