William Baxter Palmer Closson

Place: Thetford

Born: 1848

Biography:

William Baxter Palmer Closson was an American painter and wood engraver. He was born on October 13, 1848, in Thetford, Vermont. His father David served as a Vermont legislator and his mother Abigail was a descendant of the painter Benjamin West. As a young adult, he attended Thetford Academy before working as a clerk for the railway. He then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he apprenticed as a wood engraver with Samuel Smith Kilburn while taking drawing courses at the Lowell Institute. Closson was employed by various book publishers in Massachusetts and later studied in Europe from 1881 to 1883 on a traveling commission by Harper's to engrave Old Master paintings, exhibiting at the Paris Salon during his time there. After returning to the United States, he contributed illustrations to Louis Prang's Homes and Haunts of the Poets in 1886 and continued to exhibit nationally. Feeling a desire to learn more about painting, Closson returned to Europe from 1888 to '89, exhibiting once more in the Paris Salon before establishing connections in Washington D.C., where he became known as a leading painter. He married Grace Worden Gallaudet Kendall, daughter of Edward Miner Gallaudet who founded the United States' first university for the deaf and hard of hearing, Gallaudet University (then Gallaudet College).