Flavius Josephus Fisher (9 February 1833–8 May 1905), painter, was born in Wythe County and was the son of Jacob Fisher, a builder, and Rebecca Rader Fisher. The family moved to McMinn County in eastern Tennessee about 1835. Fisher demonstrated a talent for drawing at an early age and may have studied with James Reid Lambdin in Philadelphia. About 1855 Fisher settled in Richmond, where he became friends with the sculptor Edward Virginius Valentine. Fisher may have resided for a time in Petersburg, which he gave as his address in 1858 when he exhibited two works at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia.

Fisher left for Germany in the autumn of 1859 in order to continue his studies and was reportedly one of the first Americans admitted to the Berliner Kunstakademie, where he studied under Julius Friedrich Anton Schrader. Choosing to remain in Europe during the American Civil War, he studied in Düsseldorf, London, and Paris and supported himself with orders from European patrons. While in Berlin, Fisher renewed his friendship with Valentine and his brother, who tended to the painter after he contracted smallpox in December 1862. In gratitude Fisher presented them with a crayon portrait of Edgar Allan Poe based on a daguerreotype William Pratt had made. Fisher returned to the United States via Cuba in July 1865 and established a studio in New York. He worked with Hatch and Company, a lithographic business, for about a year. Despite an offer to manage the art department at Hatch, Fisher had settled in Lynchburg by 1867.

At his Lynchburg studio, Fisher produced numerous portraits of local residents and landscapes of the surrounding area. He memorialized a social club's Fourth of July gathering in Hog Island Picnic of the Hyena Club (1868). As a member of the club himself, Fisher acquired the comic nickname Vermillion Splotch. While he was in Cleveland, Tennessee, a devastating fire in November 1868 destroyed his Lynchburg studio and its contents, including many studies and sketches. Fisher also worked in Knoxville, and in 1870 the Tennessee legislature commissioned him to paint a portrait of a former governor. By 1874 he had moved to Richmond and set up a studio on East Main Street. That year the Commonwealth of Virginia paid Fisher for a portrait of the immediate past governor and for copies of portraits of two other former governors. To finance another trip to Europe, Fisher held an auction in Lynchburg on 5 September 1879. The forty-one landscapes offered included scenes from the mountains of eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and southwestern Virginia; the Occoquan and Potomac Rivers; and Washington, D.C.

Fisher moved once more in 1882, this time to Washington, where he set up his studio in the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He remained there for more than twenty years, although he maintained his ties to Lynchburg and often spent summers in Virginia, where he painted such well-known landmarks as Natural Bridge (1882) and the Dismal Swamp (1885). Working primarily in oil, Fisher favored the darker tonalities characteristic of the Berlin and Munich art academies where he had studied. Critics noted objections to Fisher's work, specifically his "sparing use of color and his too rigid adherence to nature." Fisher continued to receive commissions for portraits of prominent Washingtonians and Virginians, including Senator John Warwick Daniel, whose portrait was exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at Saint Louis in 1904. Fisher was credited with an exceptional visual memory that enabled him to paint accurate portraits with as few as two sittings by the subject.

On 27 June 1883, in Washington, D.C., Fisher married Elizabeth Patten Brewer, one of his pupils. Over the years she continued to paint and occasionally exhibited with her husband. They had one son. Flavius Josephus Fisher died at his home in Washington on 8 May 1905 and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. His widow mounted an exhibition of his paintings at his former studio in April 1906. Fisher's gubernatorial portraits are part of the Virginia State Artwork Collection. The permanent collections of the Lynchburg Museum System, the Tennessee State Museum, the Valentine, and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture contain other examples of his work.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Southern Literary Messenger 1 (1895): 33–34, L. Moody Simms Jr., "John Blennerhassett Martin, William Garl Brown, and Flavius James Fisher: Three Nineteenth-Century Virginia Portraitists," Virginia Cavalcade 25 (1975): 72–79 (variant middle name, portrait on 77), and Skipper Steely, "Flavius James Fisher: From Vermillion Splotch to a Washington D.C. Favorite" (typescript, n.d. but after 1997), with variant middle name, The Valentine, Richmond; self-reported birth date and place in passport application, 3 Oct. 1879, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C; name appears as Josephus Fisher in United States Census Schedules, McMinn Co., Tennessee 1850, Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; full name in Marriage Certificate, District of Columbia, Department of Health, Washington, D.C.; Lynchburg Daily Virginian, 20 May 1867, 14 Nov. 1868; marriage in Lynchburg Virginian, 30 June 1883; Lynchburg Tri-Weekly News, 24 Nov. 1873 (quotation); Lynchburg Daily News, 5 Sept. 1879; Washington Post, 8 Apr. 1906; Lucille McWane Watson, "Relic of Reconstruction," Iron Worker 24 (autumn 1960): 8–10; Richard N. Gregg, The Artist's Studio in American Painting, 1840–1983 (1983), plate 13; full name in Death Certificate, District of Columbia, Department of Health, Washington, D.C.; obituary and funeral account in Washington Post, 9, 11 May 1905; obituaries in Washington Times, 9 May 1905, Lynchburg News, 10 May 1905, and Washington Evening Star, 11 May 1905.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Barbara C. Batson.

How to cite this page:
Barbara C. Batson, "Flavius Josephus Fisher (1833-1905)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.php?b=Fisher_Flavius_Josephus, accessed [today's date]).

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