Charles Mount

Life & Legacy

Charles Merrill Mount (1928–1995) was an American artist. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1928 as Sherman Merrill Suchow, he later changed his name and studied at the Art Students League of New York. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956 and travelled to Europe where he worked in Italy, France, Britain and Ireland. He returned to the United States in 1969, and worked in New York and Washington, D.C. He specialized in portraits and also produced landscapes and streetscapes in oil and watercolor as well as charcoal drawings. He was interested in art history and published biographies of John Singer Sargent (1955), Gilbert Stuart (1964) and Claude Monet (1966). His career and personal life were marred by untreated bipolar disorder and a controversial later life, including a prison sentence for theft of rare documents. He died in 1995 in Washington, D.C. He is survived by five children from two marriages.