Henry Rankin Poore

Henry Rankin Poore (1859–1940) was an American painter and illustrator, known for incorporating human and animal figures into his landscape and genre paintings. He was also a lecturer and critic, and a prolific author on art and composition.

Painter and teacher

Poore was born on March 21, 1859, in Newark, New Jersey, to Rev. Daniel Warren Poore and Susan Helen Poore née Ellis. He spent his childhood in California and then studied at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1883. That same year, The New York Times identified him as "a promising young Philadelphia painter," and wrote approvingly of his illustrations for a new edition of The Night Before Christmas.

Poore studied privately with Peter Moran in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, and then at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He studied further at the Académie Julian in Paris, where his teachers included Évariste Vital Luminais and William-Adolphe Bouguereau. He exhibited The Night of the Nativity at the Salon of 1889.

Returning to the United States, he opened a studio in Philadelphia, shared with illustrator Joseph Pennell. Poore had gone on summer sketching trips to the American Southwest during college, and some of his illustrations were used in The Story of the American Indian (1887). He returned to New Mexico in 1891, sponsored by the U.S. government, to study the Pueblo Indians and report on their living conditions.

Poore made his reputation as a "Horse and Hound" painter, but his subjects ranged widely. He painted hunting scenes in England in 1893, including Queen Victoria's stag hounds at Ascot Heath. One critic wrote of a retrospective of his works: "In his long career... he wielded a versatile brush and his exhibition reveals a catholicity of view which embraces with equal enthusiasm the hunting field, the New England farmer and the character revealed by the face before the portrait painter."