Horace Bonham

United States · 1835–1892

Horace Bonham was a 19th-century American painter. He was the well-educated son of a judge, and passed the bar but never practiced law. He worked as a newspaper editor, and as a revenue agent during the American Civil War, and then took up the study and practice of oil painting. Bonham remains "little-known." His most famous work is Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit, which is in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. He spent most of his life, except for a grand tour of Europe, in southeastern Pennsylvania. Most of his work was never sold commercially and is now held at a historic house museum in his hometown of York, Pennsylvania, with a few works in the hands of private collectors.