Frank Duveneck
Kentucky-born painter and teacher. He studied at the Munich Academy and developed a loose, broad painting style in the manner of Hals and Rembrandt. Whistling Boy (1872) is a signature work.
Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)
Frank Duveneck’s parents were German immigrants. He showed talent at an early age painting signs and decorating coaches, and by age fifteen was apprenticed to an altar-building shop in a German-American neighborhood of Cincinnati. (Quick, An American Painter Abroad: Frank Duveneck’s European Years, 1988) His teachers encouraged him to travel to Munich, where he could study the works of Europe’s masters. The training at Munich’s academies influenced a generation of American painters, who adopted their professors’ confident brushwork and direct application of paint. Duveneck established himself as a successful portraitist and teacher in Cincinnati and Munich, and toward the end of his life created landscapes during summer vacations in Massachusetts.
