(Lang:- English, Pages 24, It is the reproduction of the o...)
Lang:- English, Pages 24, It is the reproduction of the original edition published long back in black & white format 1938. Hardcover with sewing binding with glossy laminated multi-Colour Dust Cover, Printed on high quality Paper, professionally processed without changing its contents.We found this book important for the readers who want to know about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Print on Demand.
Frank Duveneck was an American painter, etcher, sculptor, teacher. He was an outstanding figure in the art of his time, and a leader of remarkable influence, numbering many gifted painters among his disciples.
Background
Frank Duveneck was born on October 9, 1848 in Covington, Kentucky, United States. is parents were Germans. His father was Bernard Decker; and his mother’s maiden name was Katherine Seimers. They came to America from a small town not far from Vechta, in Oldenburg, and settled in Covington, Kentucky, where, in 1849, Decker died while his son Frank was an infant in arms. The widow subsequently married Squire Duveneck, and her son took the name of his stepfather, being known as Frank Duveneck.
Education
In Covington, his birthplace, Duveneck left school at an early age to begin work on the interior decorations of Catholic churches.
At the age of twenty-two, when he went to Munich and became a student of the Royal Academy, he was already so well equipped as a painter that, after three months of study in the antique class, he was promoted to Wilhelm Dietz’s painting class, where he distinguished himself by taking several prizes.
Career
In Covington Duveneck was employed in the modeling, carving, painting, and gilding of altarpieces and the like, and the unusual merit of his work soon led to his regular employment by a successful ecclesiastical decorator in Cincinnati.
At the age of twenty-two, when he went to Munich and became a student of the Royal Academy, he was already so well equipped as a painter that, after three months of study in the antique class, he was promoted to Wilhelm Dietz’s painting class, where he distinguished himself by taking several prizes.
In 1872 he won the composition prize, entitling him to the use of a studio of his own.
To this period belongs one of his best- known canvases, the “Whistling Boy, ” also several other notable pieces of precocious brilliancy and breadth.
“It was with the naturalists that he instantly aligned himself, ” writes his biographer, Norbert Heerman; “theirs was the spirit in which Duveneck approached his work. ” He approached it with superb confidence and ardor.
Nothing is more apparent in his paintings than the hearty gusto with which they were made. The “Young Man with Ruff” was painted at that time; the portrait of Mr. William Adams followed in 1874.
The year 1875 was signalized by a Duveneck exhibition in Boston, which proved to be a triumph for the young artist, owing to the vitality and spontaneity of his style.
The five canvases shown at the Boston Art Club created a sensation ; they were all sold ; and the painter was urged to leave Cincinnati and come to Boston, where a dozen commissions for portraits were promised him.
Much of this success was to be attributed to the influence of William Morris Hunt. Duveneck, however, was not yet inclined to forsake the training and surroundings of Europe; he went back to Munich, where he worked for two years, until 1877.
Then he went to Venice, and a year later we find him again in Munich.
The principal pictures of this time were the “Woman with Forget-me-nots, ” distinctly reminiscent of Rubens and not without a distant echo of Rembrandt ; the “Red-haired Man with Ruff, ” the “Man in Spanish Coat, ” “Beeches of Polling, ” and the monochrome self-portrait of 1877.
His “Turkish Page” (1876), first shown at the National Academy, New York, 1877, and now belonging to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, may be considered one of his most important early compositions.
It is rich in color and textures, and the still life is rendered with marked ability.
So striking, indeed, was the virtuosity of this and the succeeding works, that Duveneck ran some danger of establishing a reputation for science and manual skill, connoting superficiality and a lack of emotion, but if this be in a measure true of certain tours de force of the early days, it is far from being so in the typical examples of the ma- turer period, which owe much of their enduring worth and charm to their genuine human feeling and sympathetic quality.
To such personal characteristics as these, quite as much as to his knowledge and talent, Duveneck owed his notable success as an inspiring and beloved teacher.
All that he cared about, as Mr. Cortissoz has pointed out, was to see that they got hold of the root of the matter, to foster in them a love of the art of painting for its own sake.
He instilled in his boys “a sense of the thrilling excitement, the joy and the dignity, to be got out of the reverent exercise of a painter’s instruments. ”
Almost all of them, however, wisely turned away from the fascinating but treacherous bitumen of the Munich school, and several, notably Twachtman, became brilliant exponents of high-keyed luminous impressionism in landscape art.
When Duveneck moved from Munich to Florence, toward the end of 1879, about half of his pupils accompanied him.
They remained in Italy about two years, passing the winters in Florence and the summers in Venice, working and enjoying life as only care-free art students may.
An interesting glimpse of their boyish ways is given in William D. Howells’s Indian Summer (1886), wherein the badinage, mockery, and jollity of the Bohemian party as seen in a trattoria are picturesquely described.
What they thought about Botticelli and Michelangelo; of old Piloty’s things at Munich; of the dishes they had served to them; of the quality of the Chianti; of the respective merits of German and Italian tobacco; of the “over-rated coloring of some of those Venetian fellows”; of the delicacy of Mino da Fiesole; and of many other matters—such were some of the themes of discussion overheard by the hero of the story.
In his reminiscences of those student days in Italy, Oliver Dennett Grover has added his testimony to that of others of the group respecting the obligations they were under to the “Old Man. ”
Those days were all too short, he says, but while they lasted they were more significant than a similar period in the lives of most students, because more intensified, more concentrated.
It is necessary thus to emphasize Duveneck’s influence as a teacher if we would rightly understand the important part he played in the development of art in America.
Admirable as are his works in painting, etching, and sculpture, it may well be that in the final appraisal of his achievements his most valuable contribution to the cause of art will be found in his personal influence as a leader of his “boys. ”
Their doings have become a legend and a tradition, not to be omitted in any history of American art.
It was in 1879 that Duveneck painted the portrait of John W. Alexander, the “Woman in Black Scarf, ” and “The Blacksmith”; but during the two ensuing years he was too much occupied with his school work to find much time for painting.
He began to etch in 1880, at Venice, experimenting at first with some very small plates. Most of the dated prints, almost all of Venetian motives, were made in 1883, 1884, and 1885.
Characteristic examples, of the highest order of excellence, are the two versions of the “Riva degli Schiavoni, ” the “Grand Canal, ” the “Palazzo Ca d’Oro, ” and “The Rialto. ” The first- named plates were shown at the first exhibition of the New Society of Painter-Etchers, in London, in the spring of 1881. Apparently, certain members of this society, including Seymour Haden and Alphonse Legros, suspected for a moment that these etchings were the work of Whistler, and that Whistler was trying to play a practical joke on the society. The particulars of this esthetic tempest in a teapot may be found in Whistler’s Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890) and in the biography of Whistler by E. R. and J. Pennell. As a matter of fact, Duveneck’s etchings of the Riva degli Schiavoni were finished before Whistler made his plates of the same subject.
The later Venetian compositions, though interesting as fine drawings of architecture, are somewhat too much elaborated as to detail, and lack the stenographic suggestiveness that is proper to the process.
The only other sculptures of consequence made by Duveneck are the seated portrait statue of Ralph Waldo Emerson, now in Emerson Hall, Harvard University—a work in which Clement J. Barnhorn collaborated—and the bust portrait of Charles William Eliot.
He was never without a devoted following, and his influence as instructor during his last years did but continue and extend the extraordinary personal leadership that had been so conspicuous in Munich and Florence and Venice.
Thus his last twenty-five years, spent in the Cincinnati Museum and the Cincinnati Art Academy, of which he was the dean of the faculty, were fruitful and busy years.
It was his loyalty to the Museum and his many pupils that led him to make the very unusual disposition of his work, tie made over to the Museum by gift the great collection of paintings, etchings, sketches, etc. , which he considered fit material for continuing to students such help as his own life-work had afforded.
The most complete exhibition of Duveneck’s works ever made outside of Cincinnati was that at the Panama-Pacific exposition, San Francisco, in 1915.
This collection contained thirty oil paintings, thirteen etchings, and a replica of the monument to his wife.
A special gallery was set aside for the Duveneck exhibit. The exhibit as a whole was so impressive that the occasion constituted a veritable apotheosis for the artist.
In the words of Christian Brin- ton, it “served to rehabilitate his name and insure for him that position in the development of American painting which he so rightfully merits”.
The significance of the rare honor thus conferred on Duveneck only four years before his death lies not only in the fact that it gave expression to the deliberate opinion of experts, but also that it originated with foreign experts, who presumably could have no personal bias in the matter and were therefore able to take a purely detached view-point.
Temperament counts for so much more than schooling in Duveneck’s paintings that it is safe to say he would have gone as far, done as well, and developed as richly, had he obtained his training elsewhere than in Munich.
In other words, the Munich methods and the Munich palette formed no essential part of his artistic assets.
He outgrew them, and eventually they were abandoned in favor of better methods.
His debt was great to Rembrandt, Hals, and Rubens; and he learned more precious things in the Old Pinakothek than in Prof. Dietz’s classroom.
Naturally a rapid and skilful executant, with a hearty relish for the most rebellious of all mediums, oil paints, it would be little less than astounding that he did not fall a victim to his own wonderful facility, degenerating into a mere star performer of technical prodigies, were it not for the repeated proofs in his pictures of his fine moral qualities—his quick sympathy and the breadth and depth of his interest in human nature.
He joined craftsmanship with a kindly disposition; virtuosity with magnanimity; knowledge with modesty.
When John S. Sargent said of him that he was the greatest talent of the brush in this generation, he spoke truth, but “talent of the brush” tells only half the story.
What makes Duveneck the honored figure that he is in American art is the richness and warmth of his temperament, the generosity of his nature; without these qualities, easily to be discerned in his best works, he would have made no original contribution of enduring value to the sum total of modern art.
Achievements
Duveneck's own school of painting, which was started at Munich in 1878, became famous at once; some sixty students, of different nationalities, the majority of them Americans, were enrolled, and the enthusiasm, devotion, industry, and ambition which he knew how to evoke from these young followers proved that he had not mistaken his vocation.
Among his most famous paintings are Lady with Fan (1873) and The Whistling Boy (1872), both of which reveal Duveneck's debt to the dark palette and slashing brushwork of Frans Hals.
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Personality
Duveneck's judgment was always of the best; he was gifted with wonderful vision.
He had marvelous power.
Connections
Duveneck's wife, Elizabeth Boott was a pupil of Thomas Couture and of William Morris Hunt and was a painter of distinct merit. She was a daughter of Francis Boott, of Boston and Cambridge; her mother was a Miss Lyman, of one of the old families of Massachusetts Elizabeth Boott had lived and studied in Paris, Florence, and Boston, in 1879 she became a pupil of Duveneck in Munich.
