Sylvester Phelps Hodgdon (1830-1906)

Born in 1830, Sylvester Phelps Hodgdon began his artistic training in Salem, Massachusetts, with portrait painter Edward Holyoke. He arrived in Boston in the winter of 1856-57 and became a student of landscape painter Benjamin Champney, who had only recently returned from his travels in Europe and at the time was painting portraits and experimenting with lithography. Hodgdon produced a small number of lithographs in the late 1850s of landscape subjects, but thereafter directed his efforts entirely to painting. 

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Hodgdon’s work was inspired by his travels in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and along the New England coastline. He exhibited locally at the Boston Athenaeum and the Boston Art Club, and in New York at the National Academy of Design. Hodgdon was listed in the Boston City Directory with a studio on Summer Street as early as 1861, and one year later moved into the newly-finished Studio Building located at 110 Tremont Street. Hodgdon eventually moved again, this time to Dorchester, where he passed away in 1906. 

References: Groce and Wallace; Who Was Who in American Art (1986); Sally Pierce and Catharina Slautterback, Boston Lithography 1825 - 1880 (Boston: The Boston Athenaeum, 1991).