Blashfield studied engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a while, then left to pursue art. An inheritance allowed him to go to Paris in 1869 where he studied under Léon Bonnat. He remained in France until 1881.
Although his time in France coincided with the rise of French Impressionism, his style remained traditional, but not strictly Academic. This worked well for him as a muralist, because American government-funded murals in the decades around 1900 tended to have uplifting themes often manifested by symbolic characters.
The examples of Blashfield's work shown below are mostly not murals because those could be huge, often integrated into a building's architecture, and hard to photograph. Instead, I feature easel paintings and drawings. I should add that some of his best-known easel paintings are quite large -- almost mini-murals.
From his Paris days.
Blashfield traveled a good deal, and this is an oil sketch made in Egypt.
Probably destroyed when the West 57th Street house was altered or, later, demolished: I wonder what it actually looked like in color.
A Great War painting. Trumpeters from historical times are at the left, a doughboy trumpeter in the distance.
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