Frank Duveneck

American, 1848 - 1919

(not assigned)Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

SchoolPortraiture

Biography(b Covington, KY, 9 Oct 1848; d Cincinnati, OH, 3 Jan 1919).
American painter, sculptor, etcher and teacher. The eldest son of German immigrants Bernard and Katherine Decker, Duveneck, who assumed his stepfather's name after his father's death and his mother's remarriage in 1850, received his early art training in Cincinnati as an apprentice to Johann Schmitt (1825-98) and Wilhelm Lamprecht (b 1838), decorators of Benedictine churches and monasteries. In 1870 he went to Munich to study at the Königliche Akademie, where he was taught by Wilhelm Diez (1839-1907), among others. The school stressed the study of Old Master painters such as Velázquez and Hals and emphasized bravura brushwork. Duveneck was an adept pupil. His realistic portraits of the 1870s, such as Professor Ludwig von Löfftz (c. 1873; Cincinnati, OH, A. Mus.), show the sitter placed against a dark background, the face and hands bathed in an intense light and modelled with thick, broad, fleshy brushstrokes.
Duveneck returned to America in 1873 and in 1874 began teaching at the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati, where Robert Frederick Blum and John H. Twachtman were among his students. An exhibition at the Boston Arts Club in 1875 brought him his first major critical attention. Henry James, writing in The Nation (3 June 1875), called Duveneck 'an unsuspected man of genius'. Accompanied by Twachtman and Henry Farny (1847-1916), he returned that year to Munich, where William Merritt Chase and Walter Shirlaw were among his close associates. In May 1876 he visited Paris; the following March he, Chase and Twachtman went to Venice for nine months.
When he returned to Munich in 1878, Duveneck started his own painting classes, which, in the summer, he conducted in the Bavarian village of Polling. The American artists John White Alexander, Joseph Rodefer De Camp, Julius Rolshoven (1858-1930) and Theodore Wendel (1857-1932) were among his students and companions. In 1879 some of Duveneck's group left for a two-year stay in Florence and Venice. Known as the 'Duveneck Boys', they provided the model for the 'Inglehart Boys' in Indian Summer by William Dean Howells. In Venice, Duveneck met Whistler and with his assistance and that of Otto Bacher (1856-1909) began to experiment with etching. Although Duveneck's prints are more densely detailed than those by Whistler, when they were first shown at the New Society of Painter-Etchers in London, 1881, they were thought to have been done by Whistler under an assumed name. The resulting furore ended the friendship between the two artists.
During this stay in Italy, Duveneck's work began to change. His subject-matter now included more landscapes and genre scenes. His palette became more colourful and his paint surface less dense. In 1886 Duveneck married his pupil Elizabeth Boott (1846-1888), a Bostonian who resided primarily in Florence. The large, elegant portrait of her (1888; Cincinnati, OH, A. Mus.) typifies the change in his portrait work. The face is more carefully delineated, and the background brushwork, while still lively, reveals a lighter, more delicate touch. After his wife's unexpected death in Paris in 1888, Duveneck returned to Cincinnati to teach. While there he modelled a memorial for his wife. A bronze version of this full-length reclining figure marks her grave in the Allori cemetery in Florence. Duveneck remained in Cincinnati except for trips abroad and summers in Gloucester, MA, where he painted brilliantly coloured landscapes in an impressionistic manner, such as Dock Sheds at Low Tide (c. 1900; Newport News, VA, Mar. Mus.). He was made a member of the National Academy of Design in 1905. In 1915 a major exhibition of his work was presented at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. (Source: CAROLYN KINDER CARR, "Frank Duveneck," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, (Oxford University Press, Accessed July 7, 2004), )

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