Eugene E. Speicher (1883-1962)
Oil on canvas, 1914
Gift of the Partnership for New York City, Inc.
NYSM 2003.41.75

John Claflin posed for this portrait about the time his chain of forty department stores, including Lord & Taylor, merged with the stores of Henry Siegel of Chicago to form the American (later, Associated) Dry Goods Corporation, the largest department store chain in the country. As a young man, Claflin entered his father’s dry goods firm, H. B. Claflin & Co., and distinguished himself as an extremely successful entrepreneur in the decades following the Civil War.

In 1936, Esquire magazine called Buffalo native Eugene Edward Speicher “America’s most important living painter.” The description, perhaps somewhat exaggerated, described, however, an artist who enjoyed a distinguished reputation as a painter of landscapes and portraits in the first half of the twentieth century. He studied at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri in New York City. In 1907 Speicher helped establish the Woodstock Art Colony and was the friend and contemporary of a number of American Realists of the period.