Thomas C. Corner

Corner was born in Baltimore. He became interested in art at the age of seventeen while a student at Baltimore City College. He studied first under George B. Way, a local landscape painter, then attended the Maryland Institute (now Maryland Institute College of Art). He spent three winters in New York at the Art Students League and in 1888 went to Paris. There, he studied at the Académie Julian. His self-portrait was accepted by the Salon of 1891.

Returning to Baltimore in 1892, he concentrated on portrait work, painting men almost exclusively. His subjects included many distinguished Baltimoreans and such nationally prominent men as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Associate Justice Pierce Butler of the U.S. Supreme Court; and art collector Henry Walters. He also painted a posthumous portrait of Edgar Allan Poe for the Enoch Pratt Free Library, which was given as an anonymous gift. Later it was revealed that Corner had donated the work. During his fifty years of professional activity, he painted over 400 portraits.

In 1936, the University Club of Baltimore held an exhibition of seventy of his portraits. He was a founding member and trustee of the Baltimore Museum of Art.