Painter, craftsperson and art restorer, Charles Xavier Harris was born 1856 in Foxcroft, Maine. He spent his childhood in Minneapolis from where he did a lot of traveling in the United States with his father.

Harris studied in Paris in 1875 at the Ecole Des Beaux Arts and with Alexandre Cabanel. He also traveled in Spain, Sicily, Italy and North Africa; by 1882, he was returned to the United States, settling in New York City. There he acquired a modest reputation for Italian immigrant genre scenes and paintings of historical Colonial Dutch subjects, an interest that likely led him to the profession of his later years, which was restoration, copying and conservation of historical paintings. In this capacity as resto...