Harriet (Hannah) Brown Skeele

Harriet (Hannah) Brown Skeele (1829-1901) was an American still life and portrait painter whose accomplished pictures secured her a place within nineteenth-century American painting despite her largely self-taught training. Although it is generally surmised that Skeele was a self-taught painter, her still lifes show such control of the brush and strength of composition that it has been speculated she may have received some instruction from Sarah Miriam Peale, or at the least drew inspiration from the celebrated Saint Louis painter's work. This possible connection to one of the leading American women painters of the era placed Skeele within an important lineage of American female artistic accomplishment.

Skeele was born in Portland, Maine, and spent her early years in the Northeast before making the significant move to Saint Louis, Missouri, sometime in the 1850s. It was in Saint Louis that she began to exhibit her still lifes and animal pictures, participating in the vibrant Midwestern art community that had grown up along the Mississippi River during the mid-nineteenth century. Her paintings from these years reflect both the technical assurance she had developed as a largely self-directed artist and her sensitivity to the specific character of American subject matter that appealed to her western audiences.

In 1871 Skeele returned to Maine, settling in Portland, where she concentrated primarily on portraiture during the later phase of her career. Her paintings are held today in significant American collections, where they remain valued examples of nineteenth-century American painting produced by a woman artist who built her practice largely on her own terms outside the formal academic system.