Artist. Frank Weston Benson, an American Impressionist painter, was a member of a group called the Ten American Painters, which was shortened to "The Ten. He was last of the Great American Impressionist painters and one of the most honored and successful artists of his time. He is famed for works that capture dazzling plays of light in both indoors and outdoors settings. Born to a wealthy merchant family in Salem, his brother, John Prentiss Benson, was a well-known maritime realist painter. From 1880 to 1883, he received his first art training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1883, he along with other art students, who would become members of "The Ten," traveled to Paris and continued his studies at the Academie Julian under the instruction of Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. He returned home in 1885, rented a studio in Salem, and began to exhibit at the Boston Art Club and the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1898, he joined a group of painters from New York City and Boston, including Willard Leroy Metcalf, Joseph DeCamp, Edmund Tarbell, Robert Reid, Edward Simmons, Thomas Dewing, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, and John H. Twachtman, to form the Ten American Painters. This group, also known simply as "The Ten," seceded from the Society of American Artists, which they considered too conservative. "The Ten" included several of the most advanced and talented artists of their generation, many of whom worked in the French Impressionist style, exhibiting together for the next twenty years. His works may be found in other more recognized public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; with Edward Emerson Simmons at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Massachusetts; the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California; the Indianapolis Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; in 1938 with Edmund Tarbell at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and in Washington D.C. at the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. He and Robert Reid painted murals in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He received numerous awards, including the Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design in 1889 and a Columbian Exposition Medal in Chicago in 1893. His watercolors and wildlife etchings started at $75, whereas his oil-on-canvas "The Reader" sold at Christie Auction's House for $350,000. In 1888 he married Ellen Perry Peirson and the couple had three daughters and a son. After his health declined with age, he died at nearly 90 years old.