Herbjorn (Bjorn) Peter Egeli (15 November 1900[1] – 20 October 1984)[2] was a Norwegian-born American portrait painter and maritime artist.
[7] It was the custom for young men to be on their own when coming to the confirmation age of 15 and so Egeli left to join the crew of a sailing ship out of Oslo.
[8] After seven years at sea,[9] during which time he painted maritime subjects and made ship models, he came to the United States in 1923 and entered Brooklyn Art School in New York.
Egeli did a painting of a medieval chase scene that showed the huntsmen leaving the castle, then pursuing a stag and finally, returning with it at the end of the day.
This includes two U.S. Presidents (Richard M. Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Capitol Hill Club,) several Supreme Court Justices (Melville Weston Fuller and James Clark McReynolds), leaders in medicine (Mayo Brothers, Charles Horace Mayo and William James Mayo for the Mayo Clinic, and Paul Henry Streit for Walter Reed Army Institute of Research), industrialists (Lamont DuPont for DuPont and James F. Donovan, among others), military leaders (Adm. Jules James, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Gen. Henry L. Benning, and others),[22] political leaders (Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates, Thomas Hunter Lowe[23] and others)[24] and educators (Canon Albert H. Lucas, of St. Alban's School in Washington, DC, and Pierre Samuel DuPont of the University of Delaware).
[25] Late in his life, Egeli turned his attention again to the sea and resumed painting maritime subjects including some of the ships he had once sailed.