The Barber Shop

Henry Bayley Snell’s The Barber’s Shop is one of 14 works donated to the Michener Art Museum by Bucks County family practitioner Dr. Kenneth Leiby. Dr. Leiby obtained many of these works from artists in exchange for his medical services. Henry Snell’s wife gifted The Barber’s Shop to Dr. Leiby, who cared for Snell on the night of his death. The scene depicted includes a view of the barber’s shop in New Hope, Pennsylvania, as seen from the window of the artist’s residence on the top floor of the Solebury National Bank Building on Main Street.

Born in England in 1858, Snell immigrated to the United States at the age of 17. During the 1880s he studied painting at the Art Students League in New York, and in 1888 he married British artist Florence Francis. In 1899 Snell accepted a teaching position with the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art) in Philadelphia, where he remained as a faculty member until 1943. Snell and his wife settled permanently in New Hope around 1925.