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William Preston Phelps (1843-1923) was known as "the painter of Monadnock," for his paintings of his native New Hampshire and the state's most prominent peak.
Phelps grew up working on his family's farm in Chesham, New Hampshire, and by his early twenties owned his own sign business in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, his first exhibition of paintings in Lowell, Massachusetts, attracted the attention of some local businessmen who funded an education for Phelps in Europe. During the late-1870s to the mid-1880s, Phelps studied in Munich and Paris with William Merritt Chase and others. Upon returning to the United States via England and Scotland, Phelps set up a studio in Lowell and then traveled west in 1886 where he painted a notable series of western landscapes, with subjects including the Grand Canyon. Following his father's death, Phelps took over and settled on the family farm, and painted the New Hampshire landscapes for which he is best known.
Following his son's death in an accident in 1901, and his wife's death six months later, Phelps's financial situation began to unravel and his health entered a steady decline. In 1914 he turned over his estate to an auctioneering firm, J. E. Conant & Co., from which he had borrowed money for a number of years. Phelps's daughter, Ina Phelps Hayward, herself an artist, attempted to ensure that her father's property was handled fairly in the estate sale, but much of his property and paintings, including some of his best known pictures, were sold for very little or disappeared with no record of provenance. Phelps, who was in the Concord State Hospital at the time, died five years later and his daughter's attempts to pursue J. E. Conant & Co. through the courts, were unsuccessful.
Phelps's paintings can be found in the collections of the William Benton Museum of Art, the New Hampshire Historical Society, the Shelburne Museum, and others.