Eighty-eight years ago today Gari Melchers slipped the bonds of earth. In the wake of his unexpected death, a great outpouring of tributes testified to a life well lived. It was evident that his passing was felt as a distinctive loss to American art. T …

While headed to Italy on a transatlantic cruise ship in 1902 with her mother and younger brother, twenty-one year old art student Corinne Lawton Mackall writes in her diary, I am prostrate and overjoyed at finding Gari Melchers’ name on the passenger l …

The name Gari Melchers once held true star power.  At the pinnacle of his career, Melchers occupied studios in Paris, Holland and New York, was represented in museums at home and abroad, and was a critical and commercial success. He was exceptiona …

As an expatriate in Holland, Germany, and Paris and back in the United States, every time Gari Melchers pulled up stakes he was compelled to find a new studio to work in. First considerations were always given to light —and not just any light—northern …

Gari Melchers was a painter in oil, watercolor and pastel. While some explored the possibilities of photography as an art form, the technology held little attraction for him other than how it might save him time and expense. Preliminary photographic re …

Wonderful Wallpaper Whenever American artist Gari Melchers (1860-1932) found something he thought especially aesthetically pleasing, he tended to incorporate it in his work over and over again. Whether a favorite patterned cape, a particular dress, or …

The creation of a work of art, just as with music or poetry, begins with the germ of an idea or a sudden inspiration, suggested by, say, the flash of a girl’s smile or the wind whispering in the trees. The painter is quick to express his first response …

Reproduced in the 2019 Summer issue of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Magazine is a 1930 portrait painted by Gari Melchers of John Barton Payne.  The caption with it announces a new practice being instituted by museum conservators to display on-going …

Sometimes when our guests enter the dining room and encounter the monumental painting Market Scene (above, 12′ x 7′) they profess to having seen it somewhere before. Are they imagining it? Probably not!  Many of our guests are true globetrotters who mi …

Gari Melchers Home and Studio docent Murray Corliss contributed to this post. This life cast, or three-dimensional plaster cast made from a mold of a living body, is placed high on a Dutch cabinet in Gari Melchers’ Falmouth studio quietly watching over …