Frank Duveneck

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.