By Anna Lee Ames Frohlich
Thomas Allen, Jr. (1849-1924) was born and grew up in St. Louis, where most of his congressman father’s railroad business was centered, and in Pittsfield, Mass., his father’s birthplace and summer retreat. Part of his early education was under a tutor, Albert Pulitzer, after whose brother, Joseph, the Pulitzer Prize was later named. He began studies at Washington University in St. Louis but he never graduated because of a lengthy illness. In 186,9 James William Pattison, an art teacher at Washington University, was taking a group of students on a sketching expedition to the Rocky Mountains, and Thomas Allen joined them. This was to be a life changing experience for him.
Thomas Allen Jr. enrolls in the Royal Academy (Kunstakademie) in Dusseldorf in 1872 to learn how to paint.
To reach the mountains, the group went through Denver, the capital of Colorado Territory. There had been a race between the Colorado Central RR out of Golden and the Denver Pacific RR to get the right-of-way to join the Union Pacific in Cheyenne. The Denver Pacific got the funds first, but the connection had not yet been made and would not be completed until 1870. So, in 1868 when Kit Carson, famous western scout, trapper and soldier, was returning from the East to Colorado to die he took the North Western RR from Chicago to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and boarded a ferry to Omaha to catch the Union Pacific to Cheyenne, Wyo. (It was the lack of a bridge over the Missouri River from Council Bluffs to Omaha that kept the Central Pacific RR and the Union Pacific RR from being a true “transcontinental” railroad.)
Carson then had to take a stagecoach to Colorado. This is probably much the same way that the group of artists from St. Louis traveled after making a train connection to Chicago. The year 1869 would have been an exciting year to take the Union Pacific.
On May 10 the tracks of the Central Pacific out of California had joined the tracks of the Union Pacific from Omaha, Neb., at Promontory Summit, Utah. That year was a banner year for travel around the world because France completed the Suez Canal. The two projects considerably shortened the time it would have taken to circle the globe. Thomas Allen, Jr. kept an illustrated journal of his trip, which, after much searching by earlier family members and myself, has sadly never been found. Based on his newfound passion, he decided to pursue art as a career. He studied art in St. Louis probably at least in part with James Pattison until 1871 when he left to study for a time in Paris.
In 1876, Thomas Allen Jr’s painting, The Bridge at Lissengen, was his first work chosen of many to be exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York. Photos courtesy of Anna Lee Ames Frohlich
There was good reason that he would not have left until late in 1871. In 1870, France declared war on Prussia. That led to the siege of Paris by Prussia followed by the hideous reign of the Communards. Then the city was “rescued” by the National Guard troops from Versailles leading to even greater atrocities. It wasn’t until the last half of 1871 that Americans and American artists began filtering back to Paris, according to The Greater Journey, Americans in Paris by David McCullough.
In 1872, Thomas Allen, Jr. enrolled in the Royal Academy (Kunstakademie) in Dusseldorf, a part of Prussia, to learn painting. In 1876 his painting, The Bridge at Lissengen, was his first work chosen of many to be exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York. After spending vacations visiting the art centers of Great Britain and the Continent, he graduated from the school in 1877 and moved to the artists’ colony of Ecouen, France, where his early instructor J.W. Pattison was also living. He continued to travel throughout Europe in the company of noted artists of those times.
He also made voyages back and forth to see his family in Missouri and Massachusetts. On one of these trips he toured the American West, and it is for the historic paintings he did then that he is best known. That will be my next story.
