Elmer E. Garnsey

Elmer Ellsworth Garnsey. [Born] 1862. Artist.

Fifty years a Centurion, sometime member of the Board of Management and of the House Committee. His arrival at the clubhouse was hailed with joy by every group. |He was a superb story-teller and his telling of a fight of camel drivers in the shadow of the Pyramids, or of costers in Limehouse, was almost the real thing in fidelity of language, accent and gesture

He came to New York at nineteen, on his own, and his first job was as a painter on the Brooklyn Bridge. But it was not long before he began to make his way upward in the company of the giants of those days, McKim, Burnham, Frank Millet, Richard Hunt, Blashfield, Vedder. Garnsey made a friend of every one and they entrusted him with the mural decoration of most of the important buildings built in the United States in his time: four State Capitols; the Columbia University Library; the New York Stock Exchange; the University, Yale and Union Clubs in New York; the St. Louis Public Library; the New York Customs House; and many banks.

Like Garnsey’s election to the Century at the rather early age of thirty-four, his career as a decorative painter and his generally happy life came in no small measure from his ability to make and hold friends. He himself, he used to say, had early recognized the necessity of developing a personality which would take him anywhere and an ability to sell the artistic goods he was preparing himself to deliver. That he succeeded his career shows: that he prepared himself to deliver first-class goods his work also shows. For he was a truly great colorist and his eye for harmony and fitness was unerring. With paint Garnsey was almost a magician.

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1946 Memorials