(b Deerfield, MA, Jan 17, 1822; d Brookline, MA, March 21, 1884). American painter. The son of a farmer, he was partly self-taught. In 1842 he studied drawing in Albany, NY, with the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown (1814–86). Later that year he moved to Boston, where he attended drawing classes at the Boston Artists’ Association and admired the dreamy, imaginative paintings of Washington Allston. After 1847 Fuller was based in New York, but he made three extended journeys to the South before 1859 in search of portrait commissions. As a portrait painter, Fuller attained little distinction in the 1850s; his style was realistic, dark and somewhat dry. He executed several landscape studies and paintings, strongly reminiscent of the dominant Hudson River school manner in their clarity and tight brushwork. His most interesting earlier works are his many acutely observed sketches of black slave life in Montgomery, AL, where he lived in the winter of 1857–8. When his father died in ...