Frank Duveneck

1848 - 1919 • American • Painter • Realist

"American Velazquez." - Henry James,1875

Duveneck was born in Kentucky to German immigrants. His father was a shoemaker, and Duveneck worked as a sign painter and as an assistant to an itinerant church decorator. In 1870 he went to Munich, to study at the Royal Academy. On his return to the United States, he taught in Cincinnati; cox and TWACHTMAN were among his first pupils. He returned to Munich, where he started his own classes; several Americans, known as the Duveneck Boys, were enrolled. Duveneck had a PAINTERlY style and, typical of the MUNICH SCHOOL, his early works were dark, but his PALETTE brightened in the 1880s. The Turkish Page (1876) is both vintage Munich (realistic depiction of workers or peasants focusing on a certain picturesqueness of their clothes and way of life) and Duveneck in top form. The subject is a thin young boy, on a shiny marble floor, with a copper bowl on his lap. A white parrot, wings spread, is perched on the edge of the bowl. Henry James, quoted above, agreed with "aesthetic Boston" that Duveneck, then 26, was an American painter of resounding significance.