An Impressionist figure, genre, and landscape painter, Charles Curran is known as a prolific artist who created light-filled paintings, often of young women.

Curran was born in 1861, in Hartford, Kentucky, but in 1881 moved to Sandusky, Ohio. After studying one year at the Cincinnati School of Design, he began a distinguished career when he moved to New York City in 1882 and enrolled in the National Academy of Design. There he studied under Walter Satterlee. At age 23, he had his first public exhibition at the Academy and won numerous prizes from that time onward. Five years later he received the Academy's Third Hallgarten Prize for A Breezy Day, which was considered the most "meritorious pain...