Canal at Lumberville

Portrait and landscape painter Frederick R. Wagner was born in Port Kennedy, Pennsylvania, a small village near Valley Forge, in 1860. From 1879 until 1884, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, where he served as a demonstrator in Eakins’s anatomy classes. He taught for seven years at the Pennsylvania Academy’s Chester Springs summer school and opened his own summer school in Addingham, Pennsylvania.

Wagner is probably best known for his urban scenes of industrial life in Philadelphia and New York City. However, he also painted such Bucks County landscape scenes as Canal at Lambertville. His landscapes of the countryside were regularly included in annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy and National Academy of Design and in the biennial exhibitions of the Corcoran. Wagner’s facility for capturing the vital energy of a specific place was noted by Philadelphia art critic Dorothy Grafly, who observed, “Wherever there is abundant life and abundant color, wherever there is quietude of the countryside, there Fred Wagner pitches his easel and makes himself at home.”