Allen Blagden

Blagden was born in Salisbury, Connecticut to a family of artists; his father and two sisters were painters and his brother was a photographer. Blagden's first art teacher was his father, Thomas Blagden, and since he rejected the popular abstract style of the time, he studied realism in the tradition of Winslow Homer (1836-1910) and Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009). Blagden's lifelike watercolors are meticulously painted using a "drybrush" method in which he used a small paintbrush to achieve the characteristic scratchy and textured look. He received a fellowship to study at Yale University's Summer School in 1961 and graduated with a B.F.A from Cornell University the following year. Early in his career he was an illustrator for the department of Ornithology at the Smithsonian Institute. Later on, he won an Allied American Artist's Prize in 1964 and a National Academy of Design Award in 1976.