Poet, Artist, Sculptor. Thomas Buchanan Read was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania and attended Hopewell School until his widowed mother apprenticed him to a tailor shop at age ten. Disillusioned, he ran away to Philadelphia where he gained employment in a tobacco shop while learning cigar-making. Thomas then joined a sister in Cincinnati where he found an apprenticeship with a sculptor. Showing talent as a portrait painter, he opened a studio which was short-lived. He began to wander from town to town painting signs, portraits and even reverting back to cigar-making before ending up in Boston. Here he wrote his first essays as a poet and was published. He ventured to Europe spending some ten years studying art, while painting and writing. He authored a verse narration on the American Revolution which was published. He returned to America at the start of the Civil War and served the Union by giving readings, singing and reciting his Civil War songs in military camps across the north. Read was inspired by accounts of an exploit by General Phillip Sheridan. During a campaign against Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley when after being informed that his troops were being flanked and overrun at the ensuing Battle of Cedar Creek, Sheridan leaped on his favorite horse, Rienzi, and galloped from his post at Winchester some twenty miles at breakneck speed to rally them. He arrived on the field in two hours and turned an almost certain defeat into a victory. Read immortalized the general and his horse by penning a rousing seven stanza poem entitled "Sheridan's Ride." It was printed in many newspapers in the north and it became very popular as a moral booster after years of news about northern reversals suffered during the civil war. After the war, the Union League of Philadelphia commissioned Read to paint a life-size image of Sheridan aboard his famous horse. He returned to Europe where he executed a number of versions of the painting over the next four years, including several in a small size. Read up to this point had never received any monetary returns from his poem. Every newspaper in the North published it for their own benefit and the Republicans used it to get Abe Lincoln reelected for his second term. He had plans to issue the painting as a color lithograph suitable for framing and sell it to the public. He headed back to America to launch his scheme. While at the Liverpool dock in England waiting to board a vessel home to America, he caught a cold, which became pneumonia during the sea voyage. A week after returning to New York, he died at the age of 50. His remains were transferred to Philadelphia with burial in historic Laurel Hill Cemetery. His legacy: He was a prolific artist and poet. His art was mostly allegorical and mythological and some of his best: "The Spirit of the Waterfall", "The Lost Pleiad", "The Star of Bethlehe", and of course"Sheridan's Ride". He did one notable work of sculpture, a bust of Sheridan. He was above all a poet and his works were mostly patriotic: "The New Pastoral", "The House by the Sea", "A Summer Story", and of course, the stirring work "Sheridan's Ride". The large oil on canvas painting "Sheridan's Ride" was purchased by General Grant after the war and remained with the Grant family until 1939 at which time it was donated by Ulysses S. Grant III to the National Museum of American History and today hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute. Most of his art today is housed in museums located in the East and Midwest.