Leon Dabo

Leon Dabo apprenticed in his father’s Detroit studio, then divided his time between Paris and New York. He studied with the artist Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, who advised him to learn decorative arts because “if you don’t you won’t eat and you will die.” Dabo focused on architectural decoration until the early 1900s, when he was invited to exhibit his landscapes in New York. (Pancza, “Leon Scott Dabo,” in Artists of Michigan from the Nineteenth Century, 1987) He painted broad views of mountains and rivers that emphasized the changing effects of light on the landscape. These images, which show nature in soft, glowing colors, appealed to nineteenth-century Americans, who saw the countryside gradually disappearing as a result of industrialization.