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Frank Duveneck

American, 1848-1919

BiographyDuveneck was born in Covington, Kentucky, the son of German immigrant Bernhard Decker.Decker died in a cholera epidemic when Frank was only a year old and his widow remarried Joseph Duveneck. By the age of fifteen Frank had begun the study of art under the tutelage of a local painter, Johann Schmitt, and had been apprenticed to a German firm of church decorators. While having grown up in Covington, Duveneck was a part of the German community in Cincinnati, Ohio. However, due to his Catholic beliefs and German heritage, he was an outsider as far as the artistic community of Cincinnati was concerned. In 1869, he went abroad to study with Wilhelm von Diez and Wilhelm Leibl at the Royal Academy of Munich, where he learned a dark, realistic and direct style of painting. He subsequently became one of the young American painters in the 1870s overturned the traditions of the Hudson River School and started a new art movement characterized by a greater freedom of paint application.

His work, at first ignored, when shown in Boston and elsewhere about 1875, attracted great attention, and many pupils flocked to him in Germany and Italy, where he made long visits. At 27, he was a celebrated artist. In 1878, Duveneck opened a school in Munich, and in the village of Polling in Bavaria. In 1886, Duveneck married one of his students who was much admired by Henry James, Boston-born Elizabeth Boott. They lived in Bellosguardo for two years where she produced a son, Frank Boott Duveneck. She died later in Paris of pneumonia. Duveneck was devastated. After returning from Italy to America, he gave some attention to sculpture, and modelled a fine monument to his wife, now in the Cimitero Evangelico agli Allori in Florence. Despite this activity, Elizabeth's death marked a slowing in his productivity; a wealthy man, he chose to lead a life of relative obscurity. He lived in Covington until his death in 1919 and taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In later years, he often spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

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