Lyell Carr is a painter who deserves to be better known for scenes that accurately and charmingly portray life in the South at the close of the nineteenth century. Carr was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1857. By the time he was twenty-three, he had a studio in that city, but in late 1880 or early 1881 he moved to New York, which he would make his home for the rest of his life. There he would become associated with artists of the National Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists.

For one year, in 1884, Carr studied in Paris. He enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where his teachers were J.J. Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. These masters emphasized the importance of drawing to good painting. The effect of their traini...