The following is written and submitted by Kate Nearpass Ogden, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

The landscape painter George Washington Nicholson was born near Salem, New Jersey in 1832. As a boy Nicholson lived in Mannington Township. By the age of 17 he was apprenticed to a house painter named Daniel Woodruff in Salem. According to family tradition, he was encouraged in his artistic pursuits by his oldest sister, Rachel, and probably began painting in the 1850s.

Nicholson moved to Philadelphia sometime before 1861, the year he married a young woman named Jane Elizabeth Bray, known as Jennie. He may have met Jennie through her father, Job F. Bray, who had worked as a sign painter in Phi...