The product of good New England stock, George Fuller was born at Deerfield, Mass., in 1822, his father being a farmer and his mother the daughter of a lawyer. At thirteen years he was taken to Boston and put first into a grocery and later into a shoe store, but only for a short time, soon returning to the home farm and resuming his studies at the country school. Already he had displayed a taste and aptitude for drawing. When fifteen, he joined an expedition to Illinois that was engaged in making surveys for the first railway in the state, and then again, after two years, returned to school at Deerfield. It soon became evident that the youth had more leanings toward art than business, and he was allowed to accompany his half-brother Augustus, a deaf mute who painted miniatures, in a ramble through the smaller towns of New York State, executing portraits at fifteen dollars apiece. How much of simple romance there was in these beginnings: the early influence of the hill life, for Deerfield is a village among the hills; the wider freedom on the western prairies; and the roaming from place to place with paint box and wallet, light of heart and heel! All these influences tended toward independence, self-reliance, and wholesomeness of mind, to the natural and firm upbuilding of the individuality in himself, before he came in contact with influences directly artistic. He was fortunate, also, in his early friendship with artists of so fine a quality of mind and beautiful personal character as the sculptors Henry Kirke Brown and Thomas Ball. The former, eight years his senior, invited him to his studio in Albany, where he studied drawing for nine months, until Brown and his wife went to Europe. Then he spent the winters of 1842 and 1843 in Boston, returning to Deerfield each summer. In the latter year, having been elected a member of the Boston Artists’ Association, he wrote to Brown, who was then in Rome, “I have concluded to see nature for myself, through the eye of no one else, and put my trust in God, awaiting the result.” It is just such simple-souled, reliant men who can possess their souls with patience and reach their end by waiting.
In these early days at Boston, during part of which he shared a studio with Thomas Ball, he was painting portraits; but in 1846, the year after his mother’s death, he sold his first imaginative picture, “A Nun at Confession,” to a patron in Pittsfield, Mass., for six dollars! In the following year he moved to New York at the solicitation of his friend Brown, who had returned home, eager to devote the experience he had gained abroad to the representation of American subjects in America. During the ten years which followed of study and work in New York, varied with visits to Philadelphia and the South, it is not difficult to trace the effect of Brown’s influence upon his earnest friend. One result of it was to prepare the latter for his own visit to Europe; to open his understanding beforehand to the wonders that he was to see, and at the same time to habituate him to an attitude of study, which would enable him to receive the technical lessons of the various schools and their stimulus to the imagination without being lost in the wealth of impressions or unduly influenced by any one of them. The opportunity to visit Europe came in 1859, when, at an interval of only a few months, both his elder brother and father died, so that the duty of caring for the farm and for those left dependent upon it fell to him. But before settling down he made a tour of five months, visiting London,--where he met Rossetti and Holman Hunt,--Paris, and the chief cities of Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Holland; making sketches in the galleries, and finding especial delight in Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Correggio, and Murillo, apparently with a particular admiration for the colourists.