Frank Duveneck

Frank Duveneck (October 9, 1848 - January 3, 1919) was an American figure and portrait painter. Frank Duveneck was born in Covington, Kentucky, the son of German immigrant Bernard Decker. Decker died 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, just across the Ohio River.

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-others were William Merritt Chase, John Henry Twachtman, and Walter Shirlaw-who 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.