Frank Duveneck

Frank Duveneck, born as Frank Decker, ( born October 9, 1848 in Covington, Kentucky, † January 3, 1919 in Cincinnati ) was an American painter, etcher and sculptor of the impressionism.

Life

Francis Decker was the son of German immigrants and Schuster Family Bernard and Katherine Decker, born Siemers and later Duveneck. After Choleratod his father in 1849 and the second marriage of his mother with the grocer Joseph Duveneck 1850 he moved to Cincinnati and took the name of his stepfather. His earliest training in painting, he was in Cincinnati by Johann Schmitt and Wilhelm Lamprecht, who worked as decorators in churches and monasteries of the Benedictines. In 1870 he went to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. His principal teachers were William Diez and Wilhelm Leibl and he learned especially the pictures of Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals know. Duveneck painted in Munich especially very realistic portraits, including one in 1873 by Professor Ludwig von Löfftz, which hangs in the Art Museum today in Cincinnati. Already this image very dark held he designed the hands and face in thick and broad brushstrokes and gave them an especially intensive sculpture. Be Whistling Boy of 1871, today also in Cincinnati, too, was accordingly known.

1873 Duveneck returned back to the U.S. and began as a teacher at the Ohio Mechanics Institute a year later. Among his most famous pupils John Twachtman and Robert Frederick Blum were there ( 1857-1903 ). The first major attention learned Frank Duveneck by an exhibition of the Boston Arts Club in 1875, in particular by the well-known art critic Henry James, who was a man of unsuspected genius called him in The Nation on June 3, 1875. In the same year Duveneck again went to Munich, accompanied by his disciples and Henry Twachtman Farny (1847-1916), and met William Merritt Chase and Walter Shirlaw (1838-1910) know. In May 1876 he traveled to Paris and the following year he went along with Chase, and Twachtman for nine months after Venice.

In 1878, they returned to Munich and Duveneck was as a university teacher of the Academy in the Bavarian town polling his first painting lessons. Among his students there were a number of American students like Elizabeth Adela Forbes, John White Alexander, Joseph DeCamp, Julius Rolshoven (1858-1930) and Theodore Wendel ( 1859-1932 ). 1879 Duveneck went with several companions, known as The Duveneck Boys, again to Venice and Florence and met here on James McNeill Whistler and Otto Bacher ( 1856-1909 ), from whom he learned the art of etching. He exhibited his etchings in 1881 together with Whistler in an exhibition of the newly formed Society of Painter - Etchers in London and although his stitches were less detailed than those of his friend they were considered Whistler's work under a pseudonym and provided corresponding sensation in their course also ended the friendship between the two artists.

During his stay in Italy, however, also changed the style and especially the subject of the painting Duvenecks. Instead of the preferred portraits he painted more landscapes and genre pictures, giving them more color with less sculpture. In 1886 he married his student Elizabeth Boott, a native of Boston and living in Florence painter. However, she died in 1888, the same year in which Duveneck a large portrait of her created, and he went back to Cincinnati to teach there. There he created a large statue of his late wife and told them to put on the Allori Cemetery in Florence, a bronze copy of the statue on the grave. He himself remained largely in Cincinnati, traveled only from time to time in the area and spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he especially colorful and impressionistic landscape paintings such as Dock Sheds at Low Tide ( 1900, now in the Naval Museum in Newport News, Virginia ) painted. In 1905 he became a member of the National Academy of Design in 1915 and his work has been shown in a major exhibition at the World Exposition Panama - Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. Duveneck died four years later, in 1919, in Cincinnati.