Frank Duveneck - Guard of the Harem Circa 1880 Painting
None other than Henry James was one of his greatest champions. He attributed to Mr. Duveneck certain qualities observed in the work of Diego Velazquez, the 17th century Baroque Spaniard whose influence has been felt in the Impressionist era in the 19th century and in such 20th century figures as Picasso, Dali, and Francis Bacon. Early in his experience with Mr. Duveneck, Mr. James wrote that he would “take it hard” if Mr. Duveneck failed to do something of the first importance.
After viewing Mr. Duveneck’s work in Boston, Mr. James praised it in critical essays published in The Galaxy and the Nation in 1875.
Mr. James was fascinated by the triangle of Mr. Duveneck, Ms. Boott Duveneck, and Francis Boott – the heiress daughter, the father, and the outsider bidding for the daughter’s affection. The web of relationships suggest some of the materials for Mr. James’s last great novel, The Golden Bowl (1904), which the master called “the most finished of my productions.”
The exhibition catalogue includes a chapter on the real-life relations among Duveneck and the Boots, and how traces of them can be found in Mr. James’s work, contributed by the contemporary Irish-American novelist Colm Toibin.
Mr. Duveneck’s work earned devotion elsewhere in the highest critical and curatorial circles.
“The artist’s [Mr. Duveneck’s] power to bring out characters appears … in his portraits of buildings. He may take liberties with his boats and the graceful figures of his boatmen, but he takes no liberties with the fair-faced places beautifully devoid of superfluous features, serene, of classical proportions, yet piquant with the sprightliness of the race that built them,” enthused Henry McBride in the New York Times Magazine.
Mr. Duveneck was called “the greatest genius of the American brush” by John Singer Sargent, his equally eminent contemporary.
Selected himself as a juror for the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, Mr. Duveneck was ineligible to enter its competition, but an impromptu decision by foreign jurors who, after viewing a collection of his paintings, etchings, and sculpture, honored him with a special gold medal.
**********
For all of his virtuosity as an artist, Mr. Duveneck won even greater renown as an art teacher. He acquired a devoted following of students, known as the Duvenbeck Boys as early as his time in Munich.
A large photographic reproduction of the artist at his easel with a large contingent of students in rapt attention covers a curving wall at the exhibition. He taught as many as 100 students at a time.
Mr. Duveneck taught at the Ohio Mechanics Institute, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and at the art museum itself. He was a founder of the Cincinnati Art Club, where he gave painting demonstrations.
“He always inspired activity in others; he was rarely without a large and devoted following,” wrote Elizabeth Robbins Pennell in a narrative captured by the exhibition. It has been written that his influence as a teacher is his most important contribution to American art. It is reported at the exhibition that “Mr. Duveneck could keep his students “keyed up to the highest pitch of endeavor” and that the same time “he was endlessly patient.”
John Twachtman, whose elegant work has long hung in the Cincinnati Art Museum, was a student of Mr. Duveneck.
Elizabeth Boott persuaded Mr. Duveneck to move from Munich to Florence and to teach there, where she and her father had rented an apartment in the Villa Castellani at Bellosguardo. She facilitated arrangements with patrons and galleries and encouraged her classmates from the William Morris Hunt School in Boston “[T]o come and get a winter in Italy and the best teacher in the world.”
In 1917, two years before his death, the artist was granted a Doctor of Laws Degree from the University of Cincinnati in recognition of his accomplishments as an artist and teacher.
********
Celebrated in the citadels of art across the world, Mr. Duveneck has never stopped being a Cincinnatian, a Kentuckian, a Covingtonian, even more than a century after his passing.
The art museum’s current Duveneck gala follows one in 1987 that emphasized his work in Europe. It is easy to imagine that the museum will be putting on Duveneck galas every few decades long into the future. Mr. Duveneck has been the greatest benefactor in the history of the museum. It is inconceivable that there will come a day when Frank Duveneck will not be remembered as the museum’s most revered patron and artist.
The Frank Duveneck Arts and Cultural Center occupies the quarter of Covington where he was born and where he kept a studio. In the 1960s, Vance Trimble, then the editor of The Kentucky Post, helped to raise a fund which led to the aggregation of the ten Duvenecks that hang in the main branch of the Kenton County Library in Covington.
Two of the artist’s religious installations survive in Covington’s Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption.
To make distinctive a regenerating quarter of the city, Covington commissioned a sculpture depicting the artist that stands at the corner of Washington and Pike streets now known as Duveneck Square.
A large funerary sculpture in memoriam to the artist executed by Clement J. Barnhorn adorns Duveneck’s grave at Mother of God Cemetery in Fort Wright.
His work still is traded among the moneyed cognoscenti in and around his hometown.
An homage to Mr. Duveneck’s “The Cobbler’s Apprenticeship,” a collaboration of twelve young artists as part of ArtWorks’ street mural program, and called “The Cobbler’s Apprenticeship Plays Ball,” adorns a wall at 120 East Freedom Way in downtown Cincinnati near Great American Ballpark
Perhaps the best anecdote about the great man’s local imprint is attributed to Theodore Faurer, who ran a saloon in downtown Cincinnati Mr. Duveneck frequented. “Siesta,” (1900), the artist’s lovely pastel nude, scandalized viewers when first shown at the Cincinnati Art Club. Mr. Faurer purchased the picture and hung it in his saloon, but even there it caused talk. When Prohibition closed the establishment in 1919, Mr. Faurer gave “Siesta” to the art museum.
Mr. Faurer was heard to say, “That girl was too naked for my saloon, but she was not too naked for high society.”
**********
“Frank Duveneck: American Master” runs through March 28 at the museum. It is a ticketed event free to museum members. Access to the show has been curtailed by the Covid pandemic. But if it is believed that the highest expression of civilization is in its art, then the show will be a singular event in the life of its viewers and is not to be missed.
source: rcnky.com
While other late 19th century American painters were flocking to Paris for their training, returning with the influences of the Impressionists burning bright on their palettes, Kentucky-born Frank Duveneck, the son of a German Immigrant, studied at the Royal Academy of Munich, where he learned and equally new and painterly, but darker toned style of realism.
Many of his portraits were focused on bravura brushwork, with their backgrounds left rough and unfinished.
Duveneck’s work eventually attracted the attention of both patrons and prospective students, and he returned to Europe and established a school in Munich. He also traveled in Italy, painting particularly striking views of Venice, as well as creating a series of etchings, somewhat in the vein of Whistler’s. In italy, he brightened his palette, but restrained his bravura brushwork.
He was an influential teacher, whose students included John Henry Twachtman and John White Alexander. Duveneck was an associate and informal student of William Merritt Chase. and he associated with other well known artists of the time, painting portraits of several.
After the death of his wife, he returned to the U.S. where he taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. His legacy as both a painter and a teacher is still influential on numerous contemporary artists.
via: linesandcolors.com