Christopher Pearse Cranch

Christopher Pearse Cranch was born in Alexandria, Virginia, on March 8, 1813. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1835. He studied art in Italy from 1846 to 1848 and lived and painted in both Paris and Italy from 1853 to 1863. 

Pearse Cranch is the author of Poems (Carey and Hart, 1844), and a translator of Virgil’s Aeneid (J. R. Osgood, 1872). An editor, painter, and poet, Cranch also served as a Unitarian minister until 1842, when he decided to devote himself to art. 

Pearse Cranch died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he spent the last decades of his life, in 1892.