Richard Blossom Farley
Richard Blossom Farley was a Philadelphia painter who created the murals in the lobby of the L. W. Rogers Building, headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America. According to Georgine Wetherill Smith,
Mr. Farley was born at Poultney, Vermont, October 24, 1875, trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia when Cecelia Beaux and Wm. H. Chase were instructors in portraiture. He then went to Paris and studied under [James McNeill ]Whistler in 1898-1899. He won the Fellowship Prize of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1912; the Gold Medal of the Philadelphia Art Club; the W. A. Clark Prize of $5000 from the Corcoran Gallery in 1914, and the Silver Medal at the Panama Pacific Exhibit in San Francisco in 1915. He is represented at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia by "Morning Mists"; at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D. C. with "Fog" and "Blue and Gold"; and "The Passing Cloud" at Reading, Pennsylvania, Museum. The decoration at the New Jersey Teachers College, Trenton, New Jersey, showing the Peace Treaty with the Indians in 1758., is also one of his works; and the decoration at the Art Alliance, one of his outstanding murals. He worked at the Academy of Natural Science, studying nature's many patterns and his murals record the results of rich experience.[1]
The Philadelphia Sketch Club remembers him this way:
Notes
Additional resources
- Peter Hastings Falk, Who Was Who in American Art, Sound View Press, p. 1995.
- Robert Wilson Torchia, New Jersey Remembered, Schwartz Gallery, Philadelphia, pp. 58-59.