Junius R. Sloan (1827-1900), portrait and landscape painter, and Sara Spencer Sloan (1832—1923), teacher and penmanship promoter.  Buried in Forest Park.

Sloan left his hometown of Kingsville, Ohio at age twenty-one to make his living as an itinerant painter. His first sales were in Ashtabula, Ohio: several portraits at $10 each. He traveled extensively across the Midwest and dirough New England, occasionally painting signs and houses in exchange for room and board.

In 1849, he visited his friend Robert Spencer in Geneva, Ohio. He painted a portrait of Roberts father, Platt R. Spencer, founder of the Spenceman method of penmanship, and wed Robert's sister Sara in 1858. Robert Spencer's son, also named Robert, was a noted Prairie School architect who lived in River Forest for a time and designed the original Oak Park High School building.

After 1863, Sloan produced only six more portraits, all of family members. His shift to landscape painting may be explained by several factors, including his self-described preference for nature over human company. Without any formal training or the benefit of study abroad, the shy Sloan developed his own style, one that depicts the American countryside in pastoral repose.

Sloan typically worked in oils and is considered by some to be the most talented landscape artist in Illinois during the period 1860-1890. His work has a freshness based on his strong personal vision which gives it an "American look" that rises above provincialism.

Throughout her husband's career, Sara Spencer Sloan promoted her father's penmanship method -- and supplemented her husband's sometimes sporadic income—by teaching school. The Spencerian handwriting method was taught with engraved and lithographed copybooks and became the most widely known system of handwriting instruction in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

More than 250 of Sloan's paintings form the nucleus of the Sloan Collection of American Paintings at the Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University. The collection was donated by Sloan's son Percy (1858—1950), an art teacher and supervisor in the Chicago Public Schools from 1892 to 1926.