Gallery

George Frank Higgins was born in Massachusetts in July of 1834, the son of John and Mary A. Higgins. His first appearance as a professional artist was at the 33rd Annual Exhibition of the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Street, in Boston, during April of 1859. Higgins displayed one painting, Boston Common, from the Public Library. Exhibiting with Higgins were icons of early 19th Century American art, including Washington Allston, William Morris Hunt, Albert Bierstadt, and Fitz Henry Lane.

Higgins exhibited at the Boston Art Club from 1873 to 1891. The Boston City Directory of 1890 noted Higgins had a home at Atlantic and a studio at 110 Tremont, room 26. He also exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum and Leonard’s Auction Rooms.  In a review of Higgins’s work that appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript of March 18, 1874, the correspondent noted that Higgins’s work did not embrace the “sensational,” but would hold its interest and “improve by age as choice scenes in nature do to the lover of her occult mysteries.”

Known paintings depicting New Hampshire subjects include:
Kearsarge Brook, North Conway
Lake Winnipesogee (sic)
Landscape Scene In New Hampshire
On The Androscoggin
Rattlesnake Island, Winnipesogee (sic)
Rustic Bridge, Washington, New Hampshire
Squam Lake, Near Center Harbor
View at Littleton, NH
View at North Conway
View at Wolfborough, NH and
The White Mountains

Higgins was last listed in the Boston Directory in 1899, with a 1 Somerset address. The United States Federal Census of 1900 provided another glimpse of the artist. His parents had passed away, his wife, Annie A. Higgins, had died, and Higgins was listed as living in the home of Samuel and Mary Merrill and their twenty-six-year-old daughter, Kittie, as a boarder. Higgins was described as “65-year-old white male, widowed, ARTIST.”

Higgins moved to Tampa, Florida, in 1903. A report in the Tampa Tribune, Thursday August 25, 1904, noted “Mr. G. F. Higgins, of Boston, who has been well- known in Tampa for the past two years, has several beautiful oil paintings on exhibition at the Tampa Bay (Hotel). They represent Florida landscape scenery mostly, and are very attractive.”

Higgens died on August 17, 1906, in Tampa, Florida.

Obituary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Signatures

References
New Hampshire Scenery
Artists of Old Florida, 1840-1960