CHARLOTTESVILLE.- John Toole: Itinerant Painter," which opens June 21 and runs through Aug. 9 at the University of Virginia Art Museum, offers a glimpse into 19th-century, middle-class Virginia life.

Toole's career as a painter in Charlottesville spanned a 35-year period of the mid-19th century. This exhibition, drawn from more than 40 paintings and drawings that comprise the collection, as well as his extensive archive that together makes up the John Toole Memorial Trust, examines the life and profession of an itinerant portrait painter. Though Toole's paintings are mostly commissioned portraits, his breadth of subject matter — from his own family, to landscape and American history — demonstrate the artist's unwavering pursuit of a profession that demanded both skill and imagination.

Christopher Oliver, graduate student in the McIntire department of art and curator of the exhibition, will give a gallery talk about Toole’s work on June 28 at 2 p.m. in the museum.

John Toole (1815-1860) was born in Dublin, Ireland, and taken to Charlottesville, Virginia, as a young boy. Many documents relating to him and his art survive. From them it is possible to reconstruct both his private and his professional life and to see how a primitive painter could blossom into a highly competent artist. Toole began painting at the age of seventeen, and soon after his marriage in 1836 he began to rely entirely on commissions to support his growing family. Little is known about Toole's general education, but it is certain that in either 1832 or 1833 he journeyed to Harper's Ferry, where he achieved a fair measure of success. ... In addition to full-sized portraits, Toole painted numerous miniatures... Upon his death in 1860, Toole left behind a large body of work, which in recent years has been catalogued and studied. ... [H]is pictures reveal the lifestyle, the working methods, the trials, and the tribulations of the journeying painter in the South and his never-ending quest for commissions."