William Rimmer Biography | Oil Paintings

William Rimmer (the painter) was the son of French refugees, who emigrated to Nova Scotia in 1818 when he was two years old. In 1826 the family moved to Boston, and Rimmer learned his father's trade as a shoemaker, at fifteen he became a draftsman and sign-painter, then worked for a lithographer, opened a studio, and painted some ecclesiastical pictures.

In 1840 William Rimmer made a tour of New England from his home base in Randolph, Massachusetts painting portraits, then between 1845–1855 as a shoemaker again. He received a diploma from the Suffolk County Medical Society in 1855 and for the rest of the 1850's he practiced medicine, supplementing his income by carving granite portraits.

In the 1860s William Rimmer made numerous clay sculptures that were somehow destroyed. From 1866 to 1870 he was director of the Cooper Union School of Design for Women in New York City.

Rimmer published Elements of Design in 1864 and Art Anatomy in 1877, but his great work was in the classroom, where his lectures were illustrated with blackboard sketches.

William Rimmer's most famous work, though not normally associated with him, is Evening: Fall of Day, which was the basis for the Swan Song record logo that the English rock group Led Zeppelin used. Another celebrated painting is his Flight and Pursuit. William Rimmer was one of the artists who exhibited in the groundbreaking Armory Show of 1913, where he showed 4 drawings.

Art Movement: Romanticism.
He Traveled To USA, Canada.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.