William Posey Silva

William (Billy) Posey Silva, habitually cited as William Silva (1859 – 1948), was an early 20th century American painter noted for atmospheric landscapes painted in a lyrical impressionist style. His work is associated with the Charleston Renaissance and with the art colony in Carmel, California, where he lived for thirty-six years.

William Posey Silva was born in Savannah, Georgia, on October 23, 1859. His paternal grandfather was a Portuguese immigrant from the Azores. He graduated from Chatham Academy in 1875 and went on to study engineering for a short time at the University of Virginia. While still a young man, he inherited his father's prosperous china and hardware business, which he ran until he sold the business in 1906. He married Caroline Walker Beecher and had a son, Abbott, who joined the Forest Service.

Silva had been interested in painting for many years, and some of his earliest canvases are of coastal Georgia and the Tennessee mountains. Between 1900 and 1905, he spent the summers studying composition with Arthur Wesley Dow in Ipswich, Massachusetts. In 1907, he went to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens and Henri Royer, as well as with Chauncey Foster Ryder at Étaples; he painted in Venice and Spain. In 1908 three of his works were accepted at Paris’ Salon d’Automne; two were entitled Pines of Picardy and Quiet Village. His first solo exhibition was at the fashionable Georges Petit Gallery in 1909. This was followed by other European shows.

When he returned to the United States in 1910, he first set up studios in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. (where he wintered), and spent much of the next three years traveling around the South, searching out painting sites and exhibiting his work. He painting trips took him to New Orleans, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina; and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. During this period he began to develop a reputation for "ethereal garden landscapes" painted in a style of lyrical impressionism. Just outside of Charleston the Magnolia Plantation and Gardens provided the inspiration for his series of paintings entitled Garden of Dreams. In 1910, he had a one-person show at the Gibbes Art Gallery (now the Gibbes Museum) in Charleston, one of the key venues associated with the Charleston Renaissance. In Washington D.C. he joined the local Society of Artists and exhibited at the Corcoran Art Gallery (1910), Veerhoff Gallery (1911), and Sloan Galleries (1913). He became an exhibiting member of the Salmagundi Club of New York, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Water Color Clubs on Chicago and New York.

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