John M. Tracy

John M. Tracy is a nineteenth-century artist who is best known for paintings of hunting dogs and thoroughbred horses.

Tracy attended Oberlin College in Ohio and Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. He served in the Union Army in the Nineteenth Illinois Infantry during the Civil War for four years beginning in 1861. During his service, he attained the rank of lieutenant. After the war, Tracy taught school and worked in an orchard in southern Illinois.

In 1867 and 1868, Tracy studied art in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Charles Emile Auguste Durand and Isidore Pils. In the 1870s, Tracy returned to the United States. From 1872 to 1873 he had a studio in Chicago and studied there with Albert Leighton Rawson. He returned to Paris in 1873 and studied with Adolphe Yvon and Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran. During his studies with Boisbaudran, he learned precise drawing from memory. While in France, Tracy was a part of a circle of artists working in France near the forest of Fontainebleau that included John Singer Sargent, James C. Beckwith, Will H. Low, George Inness and Theodore Robinson.

Tracy moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1878. He began his career in St. Louis as a landscape painter and portraitist, and painted portraits set outdoors. In his first year in St. Louis, Tracy was commissioned to paint a champion Irish setter, and afterward he received commissions for paintings of animals, including dogs and horses. Tracy established himself as a portrait painter who was particularly adept at painting sporting dogs as part of hunting parties. 

Tracy moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, around 1881, and continued to paint animal subjects. His paintings were considered accurate depictions of dogs and other animals. He also participated in events as a bench show and field trial judge. 

In 1893, five of the paintings he was to exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago were destroyed in a fire. He was in the process of repainting them at his studio in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, for the exhibition when he died.