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Clement Drew is best known as a painter of stormy seascapes of the New England coastline, but was a jack of all trades, including librarian, art dealer, framer, photographer, realtor and avid abolitionist. He was born in Kingston, Massachusetts in 1806 and lived and worked in Boston from 1827 to 1873.
As a young man, in addition to being an artist, he worked as an art dealer, framer, ship carver, and librarian. In the years leading to the Civil War he became active in the Abolitionist movement with William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and later the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Influenced by living in a major port city, his earliest paintings depicted the coastline south of Boston. Marine activity would become a lifelong fascination, and a career that would span nearly fifty years and lead Drew to travel extensively from Maine to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. 
These travels became an important documentation of early American seafaring. Drew passed away in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Drew’s son George H., born in 1833, became an artist himself, and the two worked together in a photography business in 1863 and operated a shop for artists’ materials. Several of Clement Drew’s paintings of ships and lighthouses were made into lithographs during the 1850s and 1860s, and today several museums have examples of his work in their permanent collections, including the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.
Drew’s works can be found in the collections of The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; Fleischer Museum, Scottsdale, Arizona; Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum in Rochester, New York; Brockton Art Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts; Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; Mystic Art Association Gallery, Mystic, Connecticut; Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California; Penobscot Marine Museum, Searsport, Maine; United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland among others.
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USEFUL LINKS
- Artist Clement Drew - Incollect
- Clement Drew - Wikipedia
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- Clement Drew (1806-1889) Biography and Maritime Paintings and Art - - Vallejo Maritime
- Clement Drew Auction Results - Clement Drew on artnet
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