William Parsons Winchester Dana (18 February 1833 – 8 April 1927) was an American artist who settled in France. Later he emigrated to London, and became a naturalised British Subject. His paintings were generally small, painted with oils on canvas in an anglicized tradition. Dana's transatlanticism influenced Monet and the French impressionists, whom he met in Paris and Normandy. But his most enduring feature as an artist was a highly personalised, naturalistic style, intimate and affective of familiarity. Yet he remained very much in the romantic vein of older painters from an earlier period, essentially conservative, but observant of minute detail.
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Early life
William Parsons Dana was born in Boston, Massachusetts on February 18, 1833. He was the son of Samuel Dana, a banker, and Nancy, daughter of Peter Winchester of Boston. He studied at the Chauncy Hall School and graduated from the Boston Latin School, intended for the law, but being from a large wealthy family was not short of money. He left home early and spent much time in New Hampshire, teaching himself to draw at Manchester, NH, learning to sketch in the early 1850s. Like so many American genre painters his early works were dominated by the attraction of rural landscapes that went down to the sea. The animals and children emerged at first in context, and then grew in importance as his career developed.