Frank Vincent DuMond's Spark.
The fire of passion, and the fire of fire.
Frank Vincent DuMond working with a student at the Art Students League of New York, date and photographer unknown.
I’m not in the habit of falling in love with women in paintings. I know it happens in movies,1 and maybe it happened more often in an era when paintings were the only pictures we had, but mostly I don’t stop for portraits of anyone when sklinking through the museum. Such is the nature of portraiture: the people who commission portraits aren’t necessarily pleasant to look at, and the artist who has to paint them doesn’t necessarily sympathize with the subject. You can guess the exceptions: The Gross Clinic; Francis Bacon, if his paintings count; Madame X. Add to this an entry so magnetic I had to check the label three times. The identity of the woman in the full-length portrait was unknown, and the artist—who the heck is Frank Vincent DuMond?
II. To see rather than to paint.
Frank Vincent DuMond was born a few months after the end of the Civil War to iron-workers of French descent in Rochester, New York. He financed a tour of duty at the Art Students League under J. Carroll Beckwith, starting in 1884, with magazine illustration work. By 1888 he had demonstrated sufficient skill to merit doing what you do in 1888 when you’re good enough: he went to Paris. He studied at that cesspool of Americans expats, the Académie Julian, under Jules Joseph Lefebvre. It took DuMond a while to come back. He stretched his French years by petitioning to lead a class from the Art Students League in Paris, where they would learn the latest techniques—Tonalism, Impressionism, and emerging Post-Impressionism. Students signed up, and the League had its first study abroad program.
While teaching in a little village outside of Paris, DuMond made a series of paintings of a woman whose name we may never know. DuMond reportedly exhorted his students “to see rather than to paint,”2 and the work he did in the Crécy-en-Brie is like looking through brand-new lenses. You can find brushstrokes if you try—several studies from this time have delightfully scattershot dabs of paint on bare canvas—but mostly you see through the paint. Leaves and flower petals and draping folds of a silk gown invite you into the scene with their glassy presence—and never more successfully than in the portraits. The sitter meets your gaze with something smoldering. If the painting inspires passion from the viewer, this viewer can only conclude that the painter must have been deeply smitten by the sitter. It’s not the most cutting-edge painting, but DuMond was capable of a rare magic on canvas in 1894.
And then, all of that was engulfed in flames.
III. The fire next time.
DuMond taught at the Art Students League for nearly sixty years. That tenure is beyond impressive—just think of the breadth of his impact on the thousands of artists who studied under him—including artists as diverse in style as Georgia O’Keeffe, Norman Rockwell, and John Marin. When the list of most important instructors at the League is drawn up, William Merritt Chase3 and Robert Henri are always near the top, and deservedly so—but consider the fact that DuMond’s classes were still in demand in the era of Pollock and de Kooning. “No other man in the League’s history had any comparable influence on the League’s evolution,” opined Stuart Klonis, the League’s executive director, in 1952.4
Part of his legacy was his proselytizing for the “prismatic palette,” a way of laying out your paints that takes notes from Impressionism and from Tonalism. It’s not a manifesto-driven style but a highly versatile tool for creating lively, life-like paintings. His other signature initiative at the League was to bring his students outdoors to paint, dragging summer sessions out to the growing artist colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut. He lavished his immense talent for observation and the versatile palette upon the New England landscape, his favorite subject for the rest of his long and lauded career.
But that’s just the thing. In 1894, the painter, not yet thirty years old, lost nearly all of his work to a fire in his studio. Studios, being storehouses of oily rags and turpentine, were burning down all the time in those years, but DuMond’s conflagration was different. He took the opportunity to remake himself as an artist—to make himself into the painter that led all those landscape retreats to leafy Connecticut. Those paintings of swollen hillsides in summer sunlight and the cool shade of the vale of a whispering brook: they’re beautiful. And there’s some way in which you can find the ember of love in these landscapes—a fine example of which is at Graham | Shay right now, as part of its exhibition of works by the great League instructors. Something escaped from DuMond around 1894—or was it in 1895, when he married the love his life, fellow artist Helen Lydia Savier? Whatever the cause, the painter that emerged was considerably cooler, for better or worse.
There’s a real gambit to painting the portrait. A landscape can be exciting even when the place itself is not, but a boring person can’t be saved by virtuosic brushwork. On the other hand, can a painter fall in love with a hillside?
Thanks for reading. There’s still time to run to Lincoln Glenn and Graham | Shay for 150 Years of Influential Instructors, and look for more programming around the League’s 150th Anniversary here.
Jonathan
Jonathan@JonathanMillerSpies.com
Once a year someone asks me if I’ve seen Scarlett Street, the 1945 film in which Edward G. Robinson falls in love with a woman in a painting he sees in a storefront window, and I always say yes, but I think I’m actually thinking of The Woman in the Window, the 1944 film in which Edward G. Robinson falls in love with a woman in a painting he sees in a storefront window.
As quoted by Lisa Bush Hankin in Paintings by Frank Vincent DuMond (1865-1951), 2006.
Here’s our bit on Chase if you need any convincing.
As quoted by by Tanya Pohrt, “The Prismatic Palette: Frank Vincent DuMond and His Students,” Linea, June 9, 2021, with full text here.