page_title: Sears Gallagher
section_title: Mature career
hierarchical_section_title: Sears Gallagher / Mature career
caption_attribution_description: English: Sears Gallagher (left) painting on painting Frank Pierce on Fish Beach, Monhegan Island, Maine.
context_page_description: Sears Gallagher was a prolific, commercially successful American artist proficient in multiple media: drawing, etching, watercolor and oil painting. His work consists largely of landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes depicting his native Boston and northern New England, especially Monhegan Island, Maine. Illustrating magazines and books provided steady work and income, and his etchings and prints attracted popular demand. Gallagher took his art seriously, adapted new techniques, and was open to the influence of European Impressionism. During the height of his career his watercolors were favorably compared to those of Winslow Homer and F. W. Benson, and his etchings and drypoints to those of James McNeill Whistler.
context_section_description: Before 1900, Gallagher had eight exhibits in Boston, Providence, and Lowell: one of oil paintings and the rest watercolors and pen and ink drawings.  The pace of exhibitions picked up considerably after the turn of the century, with a total of 46 between 1900 and 1929 and then tapered off to 11 between 1930 and 1939 and three in the 1940s. His exhibitions were routinely and positively reviewed in the two major art journals of the period, The Art News and American Art News, as well as in the popular press, and his work was collected by individuals and major museums. Gallagher undertook numerous commissions to illustrate books and magazines. He did a series of 40 etchings of iconic Boston buildings and landscapes that were widely distributed and followed these with series on New York, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. Sales of his paintings and prints and his work as an illustrator earned Gallagher a steady income. He complemented this with teaching at Boston University's evening school.
caption: Photograph by Warner Taylor of Sears Gallagher (left) painting Frank Pierce on Fish Beach, Monhegan Island, Maine. Photograph courtesy of Anne Burr Czepiel.
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