William James Stillman
| William James Stillman | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
June 1, 1828 Schenectady, New York |
| Died | July 6, 1901 (aged 73) Surrey, England |
| Citizenship | United States |
William James Stillman (June 1, 1828 – July 6, 1901) was an American journalist, diplomat, author, historian, and photographer. Educated as an artist, Stillman subsequently converted to the profession of journalism, working primarily as a war correspondent in Crete and the Balkans, where he served as his own photographer. For a time, he also served as United States ambassador in Rome, and afterward in Crete during the Cretan insurrections. He helped to train the young Arthur Evans as a war correspondent in the Balkans, and remained a lifelong friend and confidant of Evans. Later in life, he seriously considered taking over the excavation at Knossos from Minos Kalokairinos, who had been stopped from further excavation by the Cretan Assembly; he was, however, prevented from pursuing that goal further by a failure to obtain a firman, or permission to excavate. Stillman wrote several books, one of which, his Autobiography of a Journalist, suggests that he viewed himself primarily as a writer.
Stillman was born in Schenectady, New York in 1828. His parents were Seventh Day Baptists, and his early religious training influenced him throughout his life. He was sent to school in New York by his mother, who made great sacrifices so that he might get an education, and he graduated from Union College of Schenectady in 1848. He studied art under Frederic Edwin Church and early in 1850 went to England, where he made the acquaintance of John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters he had devoured; was introduced to Turner, for whose works he had unbounded admiration; and fell so profoundly under the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais that on his return home in the same year he became known as the "American Pre-Raphaelite."
In 1852 Lajos Kossuth sent him on a fool's errand to Hungary to dig up crown jewels, which had been buried secretly during the insurrection of 1848-1849. While he was awaiting a projected rising in Milan, Stillman studied art under Yvon in Paris, and then, as the rising did not take place, he returned to the United States and devoted himself to landscape painting on Upper Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks and in New York City, where he started the Crayon. It numbered Lowell, Aldrich and Charles Eliot Norton among its contributors, and when it failed for want of funds, Stillman removed to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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