George H. Taggart

Taggart was born in Evans Mills, Jefferson County, New York and grew up in nearby Watertown. He was notable as both a portrait painter and a landscape painter. After graduating from high school, he moved to Buffalo where he was employed as a lithographer for three years. Taggart then toured and studied abroad for the next nine years. He studied in Paris under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Gabriel Ferrier, and Jules Joseph Lefèvre, three traditional painters at the Académie Julian.

While abroad, he exhibited a painting at the Paris Salon, and won an honorable mention at the International Exposition in Toulouse. In 1898, Taggart exhibited at the National Academy of Design’s Autumn Exhibition in New York. In 1900, he travelled to Salt Lake City where he received commissions from Brigham Young University and from the Mormon Temple of the Church of Latter Day Saints. In 1906, he had another portrait selected for an exhibition at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo. Other notable subjects of his paintings included Theodore Roosevelt and Mexican President Felix Diaz. In the early 1920s, he moved to Port Washington, New York where he built a house and studio entirely out of concrete in the Moorish tradition.

Taggart’s works were included in the collections of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and of Mexico City’s Governor Landa y Escandón.