July 10, 2023 • 36 mins
Frank Duveneck was lauded as a genius artist in his youth, and when he started teaching, he met Elizabeth Boott. Though their marriage was short, she had a significant impact on his work.
Research:
- F.P.V. “Frank Duveneck.” Boston Evening Transcript. August 10, 1875. https://www.newspapers.com/image/735164156/?terms=frank%20duveneck&match=1
- “How a Cincinnati Artist Stands in Boston.” The Cincinnati Enquirer. April 30, 1875. https://www.newspapers.com/image/30481304/?terms=frank%20duveneck&match=1
- Findsen, Owen. “More Than a Painter’s Place.” The Cincinnati Enquirer. Aug. 29, 1999. https://www.newspapers.com/image/103110515/?terms=frank%20duveneck
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Frank Duveneck". Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Jan. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frank-Duveneck
- Young, Mahonri Sharp. “The Two Worlds of Frank Duveneck.” American Art Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 1969, pp. 92–103. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1593857
- “William Morris Hunt.” Smithsonian American Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/william-morris-hunt-2359
- Osborne, Carol M. “Frank Duveneck & Elizabeth Boott Duveneck: An American Romance.” Traditional Fine Arts Organization. https://www.tfaoi.org/aa/2aa/2aa572.htm
- “ELIZABETH BOOTT DUVENECK.” Mary Ran Gallery. https://maryrangallery.com/elizabeth-boott-duveneck
- Duveneck, Frank. “Tomb Effigy of Elizabeth Boott Duveneck.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/10807
- “Frank Duveneck.” National Gallery of Art. https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.1258.html
- “Frank Duveneck: Father of American Art.” Cincinnati Art Museum. Jan. 28, 2021. https://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/about/blog/frank-duveneck-father-of-american-art/
- Martin, McKenzie. “Frank Duveneck.” Kentucky History. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/354
- Quick, Michael. “American Painter Abroad: Frank Duveneck's European Years.” Cicinnati Art Museum. 1987.
- “Frank Duveneck lecture.” Cincinnati Art Museum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_odizZFhxg
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Welson. I was in New
York recently, and, of course, as I try to do
every time I get to New York, but it doesn't
(00:22):
always work, I went to the Met. Oh I love
the Met had a little scare. People thought there was gunfire.
There wasn't, but it was scary in the moment, so
I didn't get to hang as long as I wanted to.
But while I was there, there's a piece of art
I have seen there many times, and I have never
(00:42):
really stopped and read the little placard on it. And
then when I did, I felt sort of foolish because
it was a piece by an artist whose work I
already liked, and I just never had realized what that
piece was and what its significance was. I'm not even
gonna say right now what it was, because it up
later in the narrative of the episode, and I'll notice
(01:02):
as the inspiration then. But today we are talking about
two painters, Frank Duvenick and his relationship with Elizabeth Boot
And to start, we're gonna give Frank's background, We'll get
a little bit of Lizzie's later and how their lives
came together. It's sort of sweet, but a heads up,
there's a little bit of sorrow in here as well.
(01:23):
Frank Duvinick was born Frank Decker on October ninth, eighteen
forty eight, in Covington, Kentucky. His father was Bernard Decker,
a German immigrant, and his mother, Katherine, was also from Germany.
Frank was named after his father's brother, also Frank Decker.
When the younger Frank was only a year old, his father,
Bernard died of cholera. Catherine got married again to a
(01:46):
man named Joseph Duvenick, and Frank's last name changed to
that of his stepfather. When Frank was twelve, the family
moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, into a house at twelve twenty
six green Up Street that had been owned by Frank's uncle. Frank, Catherine,
and Joseph opened and ran a beer garden next to
the house. Just in case you don't know, Covington to
(02:08):
Cincinnati like today is like a seven minute drive. That
wasn't a big fat move. Yeah, they're pretty close to
one another, but not long after that move, when Frank
was fourteen, he started an apprenticeship with a church decorator
named Wilhelm Lamprecht, who was also German. Sometimes you'll see
this reported as him being thirteen when this starts. It's
(02:29):
not entirely clear, but the timeline that made the most
sense to me put him at fourteen, although it seemed
like the wheels were in motion before that. But this
work that he was doing with Lamprecht involved a lot
of work in primarily Catholic churches and monasteries, and this
was a big operation. There was a pretty wide geographical
range of clients, so their work would reach us far
(02:49):
north into Quebec and also east into Pennsylvania. And doing
this exposed Frank to a lot of religious art, and
he learned how to paint and sculpt to fill the
needs of the very churches that they decorated. But he
didn't really have artistic freedom. But boy, he was getting
a technical education. Again. It's an interesting thing to me
(03:10):
to think of an artist getting all of the technical
stuff and none of the art stuff until later. But
that is how his life worked. His earliest signed and
dated picture is from this time in his life. And
that's a painting that he did of the Madonna and
Child in eighteen sixty seven for a church. An offshoot
of that work was that being an apprentice to a
(03:32):
German decorator meant he heard a lot about Germany, specifically
about Munich and the art scene there, and because of that,
when he was twenty one, Frank traveled to Munich to
study at the Munich Academy study art specifically. This was
something that his mentors had been advocating for with his
parents as well, and Frank found that Germany and art
(03:53):
school were very much to his liking. Because Frank had
grown up in a German speaking home and was bilingual,
he didn't have any problems with language. In Munich, he
fit right in with his peers, and as an American
student from abroad, he was popular. This was a lot
different from being an apprentice in Cincinnati. Yeah. I read
(04:15):
one article that said it was essentially like going from
even though he did not have a lot of money,
going from being you know, a pauper in Cincinnati to
being a prince in Munich because everyone loved him and
he was like the coolest kid on the block. As
an art student, Frank studied under Wilhelm Dietz and Alexander Strauber,
and he really flourished in art school. He was deeply
(04:38):
influenced by the work of the Baroque and Renaissance masters,
which he was exposed to for the first time while
he was in Munich. Because he had so much technical
skill from that apprenticeship, he was able to learn really
quickly about art and then express his ideas really well.
And when it came time for the student prizes, he
won most of them his first year. That was kind
(05:01):
of unheard of, and Duvinac's reputation at the school became
one of consistent excellence. He was a very fast painter.
His style of quickly getting work onto canvas with at
this point little or no sketching, focusing on spontaneity instead
of planning, is also known as fa presto. That's an
Italian word for me quickly. The style that this was
(05:24):
part of, which was very very sort of assertive, is
one of the words that comes up a lot. Was
very popular in Munich at the time, and this was
kind of a perfect match for Frank Duvinik. When he
was just twenty four, Duvenec painted one of his most
famous works called The Whistling Boy. This is a dark,
(05:44):
kind of moody piece. It features a young boy with
a cigarette in one of his hands. The idea of
kids with jobs being depicted in sort of adult attitudes
really echoed through several of his paintings. Others included The
Cobblers of pres which was in eighteen seventy seven, and
He Lives by his Wits, which he painted in eighteen
(06:05):
seventy eight. This period was one in which Duvenik was
creating a lot of the art that would define his legacy,
including Professor Lufts, which is a portrait of one of
his friends from school. That's a relatively simple composition. Ludwig
van Luft sits in partial profile, wearing a dark jacket
and hat and gazing out at the viewer, and overall
(06:27):
this is pretty indicative of all of his work of
this time. The palette is very dark, but there little touches,
like a pink flushed cheek that make it feel really
just incredibly alive. Descriptions of Duvenik, who was called Duf
by his friends, make him sound like somebody a lot
of folks would really want to be around. He was
really supportive of other students, and because of his excellence,
(06:51):
he naturally fell into a leadership role with his peers.
He made people feel at ease, and he sort of
swept his friends up into his work old he shared
things that he loved with them. By all the accounts
that we have, he was very well loved. And in
eighteen seventy three he had his first solo show in
(07:12):
Munich and that show went well. But later that year
Duvenik moved back to the United States to Cincinnati, Ohio.
He probably would have stayed in Munich much longer had
it not been for a cholera outbreak in Germany. Additionally,
his family just did not have the money to keep
supporting his life abroad. And there's another little twist, which
(07:34):
is it in nineteen ninety nine, that's not a misstatement.
In nineteen ninety nine, letters were found in the home
that the Duveniks lived in in Cincinnati, and those letters
suggested that Frank's half sister, Mollie, had gotten into our
relationship with a married man, and that Frank had been
asked to come home to help sort out that matter
(07:54):
and keep Molly from ruining her life. And even though
Frank was returning home. It seems like he may have
had a much harder time adjusting to life back in
Ohio than he had to life abroad. In Germany. He
was the toast of his school and his social group,
and in Cincinnati there really was not much fanfare over him,
(08:15):
no matter how good he was as an artist. Those dark,
sort of brooding pieces were not popular at the time.
He did a little more work in decorating churches, but
it wasn't enough. He kind of had to rebuild his
reputation there because he had been gone for several years,
and so ultimately he decided to move to Chicago, but
that also did not work out, and then he moved
on to Saint Louis, which also was not a great fit.
(08:39):
After almost two years of struggling, Frank had a solo
show at the Boston Art Club in eighteen seventy five.
It really wasn't especially successful, but then that same selection
of paintings was shown a second time in Boston, this
time at the doll And Richards Gallery, and with that
second show, almost overnight, his life changed. Both painter William
(09:03):
Morris Hunt and writer Henry James were really vocal in
their support of his work. They called him a genius.
There's really not a lot of documentation about what pieces
were in this show, though, and what we do know
about it is largely from different descriptions that were written
in reviews. It included portrait of William Adams, portrait of
(09:24):
Ludwig Loffs, and the old Professor. Yeah, there's some question
marks about how many pieces were even in that first show,
and some of this is going to come up in
behind the scenes. So the Boston Evening Transcript wrote of
that show, quote, the name of this gifted young painter,
almost unknown in our art world a few months ago,
(09:46):
has been made famous by the exhibition of a small
number of portraits and studies in our city. These works
displayed such striking originality, vigorous painting, close observation, and power
of rendering individual character that one was forced to admire
and even compare him with the great masters. The same
write up reported that because the exhibition had gone so
(10:09):
very well, Dubenac sent additional portraits to Boston. He kind
of added to it as like a second phase of
the show. And while this initial group for display only
included male figures, in that second batch, he included a
portrait of a woman that earned him a new round
of acclaim for being able to quote paint a refined
and graceful portrait of a lady as well as the
(10:30):
courser more powerful types of manhood. We'll talk about Frank's
process as a painter, which he apparently told to the
reporter who wrote this piece about the Boston exhibition. First, though,
we will have a quick sponsor break. Perhaps most interesting
(10:55):
in that August eighteen seventy five Boston Evening transcript write
up is a pretty detailed description of how Duvenek worked,
which the writer says came from speaking directly to the artist,
and it reads, in part quote, his palette is very
simply made up, the only thing essentially different from that
in use by most portrait painters being his use of
(11:15):
black in the grays instead of blue. Upon a slight drawing,
he begins painting in thick, square patches of color, laying
a broad mass wherever it is possible, and imitating the
model at once as closely as he can. He depends
very much upon his background color to assist in modeling
the face, as for instance, on the shadow side. He
(11:37):
will paint that color in first, then overlay the flesh
tones firmly, and then, according to the article, he lets
his what they call his first painting they really mean
his first pass dry and then, according to the write up,
he quote rubs the surface down with ossiscipia until he
obtains a surface almost as smooth as glass, and by
(11:57):
using raw linseed oil upon it and with his color,
keeps it wet as long as possible. Okay for art
folks in the crowd, this description is confusing. Osiscipia is
used to refer to a couple of different things, one
being one use mold casting that's obviously not what would
(12:17):
have been going on here. The other is a lithographic
negative technique that involves pitting a stone surface, so that
is not what this is either. It's hard to know
what specifically the writer was talking about here, but suffice
it to say Duvenik was smoothing out his painting with
(12:38):
something to prepare it for further work on it, and
he would, according to this account, sometimes work for weeks
on a painting, not because he was spending so much
time on the actual painting, but because he liked to
go to museums in the early part of the day
and then paint in his studio for a few hours
in the afternoon. That sounds like pretty good life to me.
It does to me as well. We do. I also
(13:00):
know that he liked to really lay varnish on quite heavily,
because he wanted to make his paintings look like the
old Masters, just kind of charming. The other tidbit that's
dropped in that discussion of Frank's work is that he
was headed back to Europe, but that he planned to
move to Boston once he returned. It's unclear whether that
was true. It certainly wasn't how things actually played out.
(13:22):
One point of interest regarding the sales of duven 's paintings, though,
in that successful Boston show, one of them, portrait of
William Adams, was purchased by kind of a he's sometimes
referred to as an amateur composer named Francis Boot, and
that name is going to come up again just a
little later. Frank Duvenec's decision to return to Europe just
(13:45):
as he was gaining success in the United States might
seem counterintuitive, but he really wanted to return to Munich.
He knew he could always send art back to the
United States if he wanted to for shows, which he did.
He had ample opportunity, on the heels of that instant
name recognition to stay in the United States, and particularly
(14:07):
to stay in Boston, but he took the advice of
other artists who had gone abroad and then returned home
in the United States to find us audiences kind of
slow to engage with their art. William Morris Hunt, in particular,
had traveled through France, Italy, and the Middle East and
then had returned to the United States to find that
American audiences had what he called the quote unpardonable conceit
(14:32):
of looking down on French painting. French painting was one
of his most significant influences, so it makes sense that
Frank wanted to recapture the joy and enthusiasm that he
had experienced in Munich during his early twenties. This actually worked.
Duvenec spent two years back in Munich and became known
(14:52):
as much for his fondness for parties and socializing as
he was known for his art. Next, Frank moved on
to Venice with two of his friends from art school,
and at this point they were pretty low on cash.
They kind of made a go of things, but then
a serious illness hit one of his best friends, and
then a lucrative job offer was tendered as that friend
(15:13):
was recovering to that friend, not to Duvenik, and Duvenik
went back to Munich with his friends to kind of
get them ready to leave again. But when they headed
back to the United States, he decided that he was
going to stay in Munich and to support himself he
started teaching. So at this point in Frank's story, we
need to pause for a minute and catch up with
a young woman named Elizabeth Boot. We mentioned composer Francis
(15:37):
Boot earlier. On April thirteenth, eighteen forty six, Francis and
his wife, Elizabeth Lyman Boot, welcomed a daughter into the family.
They named her Elizabeth Lyman Boot after her mother, although
she went by Lizzie. In a sad parallel to Frank's life,
you we said earlier, he lost his father when he
was just a year old, Lizzie lost her mother when
(15:59):
she was on that same age. Unlike in Frank's family, though,
Francis did not remarry and instead decided to move with
his infant daughter to Europe. Lizzie grew up traveling, but
the Boots eventually called Florence, Italy home. Francis saw to
it that Lizzie had a comprehensive education, and particularly in
(16:20):
the arts. She took music lessons right alongside her father,
and when she expressed interest in visual art, he was
very supportive and made sure she had lessons in tutors.
She also had language instruction in French, Italian and Latin.
Lizzie spent her entire childhood in Europe until she and
Francis moved back to Boston when she was nineteen in
(16:42):
eighteen sixty five. It was in the eighteen sixties that
the Boots became close with the people who would be
influential in Frank Duvinik's career. They were close to the
James family and Henry, who was three years older than Lizzie,
he was particularly fond of her. The families were so
close that they vacationed together, and it was during one
(17:03):
of those vacations that the Boots met William Morris Hunt.
At the time, Hunt was putting together an art class
for women's students and Lizzie enrolled. And it was while
Lizzie was in Boston taking lessons from Hunt that she
went to an art exhibition of paintings by Frank Duvenek,
And while some sources suggest that she was the one
(17:23):
who purchased portrait of William Adams, it kind of seems
like it was more like she convinced her father to
buy it, kind of for her. He probably had the
cash to do it and she didn't. But that's kind
of a picking knits thing. But sometimes you'll see that
Francis purchased it, and other times you'll see that Lizzie
purchased it. So if this were a romantic comedy, that
would sort of seem like things were conspiring to put
(17:46):
Frank and Elizabeth in each other's paths more than anything, though,
this was just the result of both of them traveling
in the same circles. But it is kind of romantic
to think that Elizabeth's art tutor Hunt was one of
Dubank's early supporters and that her father had been one
of his earliest benefactors by purchasing a painting from the
Boston Show. But that romanticized version kind of robs Lizzie
(18:10):
of her agency, because she later sought Frank out herself.
When he was in Venice. She was taking lessons in
Villiers Le Belle, France, and she decided to go to
Italy to see him. There's some debate about whether she
met him in Boston. It seems like probably not, but
she wanted to meet him at least, so she did
(18:30):
some travel because if you look at this whole situation
on a map, it is obviously that she was not
at all in the part of France that would have
been nearest to Venice. This wasn't like a quick hop.
She was in the north of France and it was
a hike. It was almost eleven hundred and forty kilometers,
that's more than seven hundred miles. And then when Frank
(18:51):
traveled back to Munich and started teaching, Lizzie went to
Munich and signed up for lessons. Frank moved his painting
school to Florence, something that Lizzie may have been the
one to suggest. She encouraged him to start a class
for women there, similar to the one that she had
taken with Hunt. She was instrumental in managing all the
(19:11):
move logistics, and this was a considerable task because Frank
moved all of his students with him. Lizzie also kind
of taught Duvenak how to move in higher society circles
among the expatriots in Italy. He had been a really
poor artist right up until his success at the age
of twenty seven, and this was only a couple of
(19:32):
years after that. They still really hadn't gotten the knack
of handling his own finances. He had to have proper
clothes picked out for him. The young men who were
Frank's devoted students had gained the nickname the Duvenik Boys,
and one of them became Frank's sort of de facto accountant.
Since Frank struggled so much with handling money. I had
(19:55):
such a bless your heart moment when I was reading
about that. He's like, I had nothing, now just have money.
I don't know how to do any of this. It
didn't seem like he was like spendy spendy. He just
literally had no concept of that much money coming in.
What Frank was really good at, though, was being the
life of the party. There are stories of him climbing
under tables in restaurants to make animal noises to confuse
(20:18):
the diners. He would also stage elaborate audio dramas from
under tables in the same way, making people think, for example,
that they were overhearing a couple in the crowd having
an argument. During this time, Duvenik was as popular in Venice.
It seemed as he had been in Munich as a
younger man with an endless array of romances, and his
social schedule sounds quite dizzying. Frank Duveneck was young, talented,
(20:43):
suddenly flush with cash, admired by his peers, and really
had a very carefree personality and everyone wanted to be
in his circle. His students absolutely adored him. There are
lots of accounts that people are like, yes, they all
worshiped him, and it's because he was all of these
fun things. But he was also a really good teacher.
He was very insightful and could give people critiques that
(21:05):
actually made them better artists. Duven X started to create
etching pieces in Italy and also started experimenting with different
styles of art. Sometimes this is attributed to his desire
to make more saleable art, but it's also sometimes attributed
to Frank's developing relationship with Elizabeth Boot. We'll talk more
(21:26):
about their relationship right after we hear from some of
the sponsors that keep the show going. While in Italy,
Lizzie and Frank fell in love, much to the dismay
(21:47):
of the men who they had in common. Francis Boot
and Henry James both thought that Duvenik was a great
painter and a charming man, but neither of them thought
he was refined enough to be with Lizzie. Francis Boot
probably resented someone else becoming important to his daughter, and
he was worried that Duvenik was after her for her money.
(22:07):
It has long been theorized that Henry James may have
been in love with Lizzie himself. He was very public
in his negative opinion of the couple. There was also
a concern that Frank, because he was kind of a
party boy, was a little bit unfocused and that he
wasn't going to be able to maintain his reputation as
an artist. But Lizzie really seemed pretty good for his art.
(22:29):
She seemed intent on making sure his work was a success.
Several of her society friends commissioned portraits by Frank, including Gertrude,
Elizabeth Blood and Mary E. Goddard. Blood and Duvenac were
even interested in each other and may have had a
brief affair for a short period of time, but it
obviously didn't last. Frank even painted during this time a
gorgeous portrait of Lizzie's father, Francis. It kind of mimics
(22:52):
Titian's portrait of a man in a link's trimmed coat.
This is the postulated that this is a thing he
painted as a way to curry favor with France's Boot.
It is a gorgeous painting, although Francis seems to have
been kind of unconvinced when it came to Frank's suitability
as a suitor to his daughter Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Lizzie was
(23:13):
busy working on her own painting career, and during their
breakups she would travel for that. She had her first
exhibit in Boston at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery in
eighteen eighty three alongside Annie Dixwell. Lizzie also traveled to
the United States Southern States in eighteen eighty three and
painted several pieces depicting farm and plantation life there. The
(23:36):
relationship between Boot and Duvenek was kind of on again
and off again as they would travel away from each other.
They loved each other. They would be engaged and then
break off their engagement, try to end things, only to
realize again that they wanted to be together. All of
that happened multiple times, but after several years of being
engaged on and on, I think it's like over five years,
(23:58):
during which Lizzie often saw other society women basically throwing
themselves at Frank, the pair finally decided they wanted to
be together forever, and they got married. Lizzie wrote to
a friend, quote, this has been a long affair, lasting
for years. The thing was given up entirely at one time,
but on meeting again, we find the old feeling is
(24:19):
not dead and we are going to make up life
together as we did not like it very well apart.
Their ceremony was performed by a civil servant at Lizzie's
apartment in Paris on March twenty fifth, eighteen eighty six. Frank,
still kind of a mess financially, had to borrow money
from one of his students to pay for that service.
Lizzie was thirty nine at the time and Frank was
(24:41):
thirty eight. This is also allegedly when it became a
parent due to some needed paperwork that although Frank had
been using the name Duvenik since he was a tiny child,
his name had never legally been changed from Decker. Henry
James wrote of this marriage, quote for him, it is
all gain. For her, it is very brave. But the
thing is Francis Boot, her father, had actually intervened to
(25:04):
make sure Lizzie was financially protected before the marriage. Allegedly,
just the day before, he had required Frank to sign
a document that gave up all rights to Lizzie's estate.
Frank had moved to Paris the year prior with the
hope of exhibiting at the salon there. Lizzie followed, and
they announced their plan to get married not long after,
(25:26):
although Francis might not have been a fan of the union.
When the newlyweds finished their celebratory travels, they moved in
with him at Villa Castillani in Florence. They set up
a studio space. They both worked there. Frank's work changed,
which we will talk more about in just a minute,
and more and more he was capturing the sunny scenes
(25:48):
that were unfolding before them in Tuscany. This was also
a time of anticipation because Frank and Lizzie were expecting
a baby at the end of eighteen eighty six. Baby
Frank was born on December eighteenth and Lizzie wrote in
a letter to a friend, quote, it seemed so strange,
after so many years of spinsterhood to get so much
(26:08):
domestic life in so short a time. With the whole
family living together, Francis Boot had softened on his opinion
of Frank Duvenek. He withdrew the legal papers that had
kept Lizzie from combining her estate with Frank's. Yeah, it
seems like because Frank really did seem to be a
very good husband and he was very devoted to the baby.
(26:31):
Francis kind of realized, like, oh, he's actually in love
and not trying to just steal from my family. Uh.
The Duvenec and Boot household traveled to Paris in eighteen
eighty eight, and while they were there, they saw a
lot of their old friends and they kept a very
busy social schedule. But though she was painting a large
watercolor for the Paris Salon, Lizzie was not entirely happy.
(26:53):
They had a nurse for the baby, but they had
trouble finding a doctor for the baby. Lizzie was still
really tired from child care and trying to make art
and keeping up with all of their social engagements. The
late winter in Paris that year was especially cold, and
Lizzie caught a chill which quickly developed into pneumonia, and
she declined very rapidly, and just over the course of
(27:15):
a few days, things got very bad, and she died
on March twenty second, eighteen eighty eight. Francis wanted baby
frank to be raised by the Boot family with relatives
of Lizzie's who lived in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Duvenac agreed
to that. Frank moved back to Cincinnati, but spent summers
at the Rocky Neck Art Colony in Gloucester, which was
(27:38):
close enough that he could see his son. Yeah. Sometimes
he would bring baby Frankie over to the art colony
and spend time with him there, and sometimes he would
go into to Waltham and spend time there. Frank was
unsurprisingly devastated by the loss of Lizzie, and his reaction
to her death was art. He sculpted a funeral effigy
(27:58):
monument to her that completed in eighteen ninety one. I
have also seen later years, but that is the most
common one that I see, and it was placed on
her tomb in the Cemeterio Evangelico dely Alori in Florence.
This monument depicts Lizzie lying down peacefully, and her face
was created using her funeral mask. She's draped in folds
(28:19):
of fabric and there is a palm covering most of
her body. This is a spectacularly beautiful piece of sculpture
and her father was so moved by it that he
asked Frank to make a copy of it in marble
that could be displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts
in Boston so that the Boot family could always see it.
It would be the first of many copies of that.
(28:39):
The bronze and gold leaf cast of it that was
made in nineteen twenty seven that is on display at
the MET in New York was what inspired this episode.
It is so pretty. If you're at the Met, it's
in that big sculpture garden that's right by the little cafe.
Highly recommend going to see it. Frank's longtime critic when
it came to matters involving Lizzie, Henry James, wrote that
(29:00):
the sculpture exemplified quote the jolly great truth that it
is art alone that triumphs over fate. The impact of
Lizzie on Frank's work in both her life and her
death has been something that art historians have analyzed and
theorized about for a long time. His work shifted pretty
markedly in tone. From the darkness that he had become
(29:25):
famous for. This moved to a much lighter style associated
with the French school of the time. This change is
really obvious when you look at his body of work.
His painting The Whistling Boy, which he completed in eighteen
seventy two, is right in line with the detailed description
of his work that we gave earlier. He clearly used
(29:47):
a deeply dark background to create a bed against which
he painted this figure of a boy. It's really dramatic
in its contrast. But then when you look at the
painting The Water Carrier, which he painted in Venice in
eighteen eighty four, it almost looks like the work of
a different artist. The brushstrokes have some commonality, with some
(30:10):
sections sort of having the suggestion of a shape rather
than a realistic rendering, but overall it's a lot more
detailed and realistic than The Whistling Boy. Most obvious is
the fact that it is set against a light gray
background the painting. That's perhaps the most obvious moment of
(30:31):
Transition is a portrait of Lizzie that he was working
on when she died. It is light in its background,
although she's depicted in a dark brown gown with a
muff that was actually her wedding dress. Yeah, it's an
interesting reversal because his early work was dark background, lighter
(30:51):
figure than he had done some of those light background,
more detailed figures, and this one is light background with
a darker figure. It's quite drmant and beautiful. Frank continued
to teach after Lizzie's death in Cincinnati, in New York,
and in Chicago, and he also traveled to Europe frequently,
so though he was in mourning, he was still Frank.
(31:13):
After teaching with the Art Academy of Cincinnati for a decade,
he was made a member of the faculty in nineteen hundred.
Prior to that, he had kind of been a contractor.
He actually became head of the school in nineteen oh five,
and that was a position he held for the rest
of his life. Without Elizabeth, it seems that Frank really
poured all of his love into his work and his students.
(31:34):
He also became a member of the Cincinnati Art Club
and was really influential in the city as both a
painter and a supporter of other artists. He kept working
in his studio in Covington, Kentucky, and also managed to
ruffle some feathers still. His nineteen oh two painting Siesta
depicts a naked woman asleep on a bed and her
(31:55):
body is twisted in this unself conscious way. That was
bought for a saloon but turned out to be too
salacious even for that venue. Yeah, there's kind of a
joke that the person that owned the saloon was like,
this is actually too much. Maybe this would be better
in a high society place, even though it was, you know,
(32:16):
Lascivius allegedly for the time, it's quite beautiful. In nineteen fifteen,
he traveled to the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco
with his sister Molly and some friends of theirs, and
while there he received the Medal of Honor for his
contributions to art as an artist and a teacher. Duveneck
died on January third, nineteen nineteen. One of the things
(32:40):
that Duvenac believed was most important for young artists was
to have access to art, so he bequeathed his entire
art collection, both his works and those of many other
important artists, to the Cincinnati Art Museum. You can still
see a lot of them there now. They did a
big exhibit two years ago, but I think it is
down now or it started in twenty twenty. Art historian
(33:04):
Mahonri Sharp Youung wrote of Duvenik when he died in
nineteen nineteen, he was worshiped locally and completely forgotten everywhere else.
Doesn't seem entirely true, since he had just gotten that metal,
but he did kind of fade out for a while,
and there's been a lot of effort in recent years
to recognize his work, which is really quite lovely. That
(33:25):
is Frank Duvnik. I have so many things to say
about Frank on Friday, you just get ready. I love him.
I have listener mail from Aaron about Lucy Stone, which
points out a thing that I don't think we expressly
said about Lucy Stone, but becomes kind of important to me. Okay,
(33:48):
So Aaron writes, dear Holly and Tracy, happy summer. I've
been listening to the podcast for about five years now,
and I love anything to do with history, especially stuff
that I have maybe heard about. But never really known
anything in detail. Something new by listening to your podcast
makes me happy. I recently caught up with the podcast.
By listening to your episode on Lucy Stone, I was
inspired to hear about her life growing up. Listening to
(34:10):
how her father paid for her brother's schooling but wouldn't
support her educational aspirations until later on reminded me of
my middle and high school years. I attended a challenging
all girls high school where I lived. When I complained
about the hard and difficult work out loud one day
to some close family members, they just told me I
should quit. This was sad and tough to hear when
(34:31):
many of my male family members attended the adjoining brother
school and no expense was spared for their tuition when
I attended my school on scholarship and the generosity in
my grandparents paying my way. However, this did not stop me,
and I later attended an all female college and graduated
with honors from grad school. All of these experiences made
me who I am today. Even though I have become
(34:53):
a wife and mom, it hasn't stopped me from running
two small businesses. Thank you for continuing to share inspiring
true store about women in our history who have overcome
challenges like this. To close out my email, I have
included a photo of my mom's two cats, Annie and Baxter.
My husband is allergic, so me and my kids spend
time with her pets. Looking forward to hearing more amazing episodes.
(35:14):
Thank you both for what you do. Aaron. I love this,
and here's why. I mean one congratulations, Aaron, because it
sounds like you made it happen and that's amazing. But
I think what's really interesting about Lucy Stone is that
she was so ahead of her time that that struggle
is something that is more common to hear a little
bit closer to our own point in the timeline, because
(35:38):
she was one of the first women who was like, no,
I would like to get an education please, yeah, which
just is one of those things where you know, history
is forever reverberating and we are not over those hurdles
for everybody, so it's important. That's why it's important to
tell those stories. Anyway, Lucy Stone, these cats are so
cute and they are spooned up together the way that
(36:00):
I love to see kiddies and I want to kiss
their faces. They may not like that, so thank you Aaron,
because now you have resulted in my poor cats getting
the kisses I would like to bestow on others. If
you would like to write to us, you could do
so at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
find us on social media as Missed in History, and
(36:21):
if you haven't subscribed yet, you can do so on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Welson. I was in New
York recently, and, of course, as I try to do
every time I get to New York, but it doesn't
(00:22):
always work, I went to the Met. Oh I love
the Met had a little scare. People thought there was gunfire.
There wasn't, but it was scary in the moment, so
I didn't get to hang as long as I wanted to.
But while I was there, there's a piece of art
I have seen there many times, and I have never
(00:42):
really stopped and read the little placard on it. And
then when I did, I felt sort of foolish because
it was a piece by an artist whose work I
already liked, and I just never had realized what that
piece was and what its significance was. I'm not even
gonna say right now what it was, because it up
later in the narrative of the episode, and I'll notice
(01:02):
as the inspiration then. But today we are talking about
two painters, Frank Duvenick and his relationship with Elizabeth Boot
And to start, we're gonna give Frank's background, We'll get
a little bit of Lizzie's later and how their lives
came together. It's sort of sweet, but a heads up,
there's a little bit of sorrow in here as well.
(01:23):
Frank Duvinick was born Frank Decker on October ninth, eighteen
forty eight, in Covington, Kentucky. His father was Bernard Decker,
a German immigrant, and his mother, Katherine, was also from Germany.
Frank was named after his father's brother, also Frank Decker.
When the younger Frank was only a year old, his father,
Bernard died of cholera. Catherine got married again to a
(01:46):
man named Joseph Duvenick, and Frank's last name changed to
that of his stepfather. When Frank was twelve, the family
moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, into a house at twelve twenty
six green Up Street that had been owned by Frank's uncle. Frank, Catherine,
and Joseph opened and ran a beer garden next to
the house. Just in case you don't know, Covington to
(02:08):
Cincinnati like today is like a seven minute drive. That
wasn't a big fat move. Yeah, they're pretty close to
one another, but not long after that move, when Frank
was fourteen, he started an apprenticeship with a church decorator
named Wilhelm Lamprecht, who was also German. Sometimes you'll see
this reported as him being thirteen when this starts. It's
(02:29):
not entirely clear, but the timeline that made the most
sense to me put him at fourteen, although it seemed
like the wheels were in motion before that. But this
work that he was doing with Lamprecht involved a lot
of work in primarily Catholic churches and monasteries, and this
was a big operation. There was a pretty wide geographical
range of clients, so their work would reach us far
(02:49):
north into Quebec and also east into Pennsylvania. And doing
this exposed Frank to a lot of religious art, and
he learned how to paint and sculpt to fill the
needs of the very churches that they decorated. But he
didn't really have artistic freedom. But boy, he was getting
a technical education. Again. It's an interesting thing to me
(03:10):
to think of an artist getting all of the technical
stuff and none of the art stuff until later. But
that is how his life worked. His earliest signed and
dated picture is from this time in his life. And
that's a painting that he did of the Madonna and
Child in eighteen sixty seven for a church. An offshoot
of that work was that being an apprentice to a
(03:32):
German decorator meant he heard a lot about Germany, specifically
about Munich and the art scene there, and because of that,
when he was twenty one, Frank traveled to Munich to
study at the Munich Academy study art specifically. This was
something that his mentors had been advocating for with his
parents as well, and Frank found that Germany and art
(03:53):
school were very much to his liking. Because Frank had
grown up in a German speaking home and was bilingual,
he didn't have any problems with language. In Munich, he
fit right in with his peers, and as an American
student from abroad, he was popular. This was a lot
different from being an apprentice in Cincinnati. Yeah. I read
(04:15):
one article that said it was essentially like going from
even though he did not have a lot of money,
going from being you know, a pauper in Cincinnati to
being a prince in Munich because everyone loved him and
he was like the coolest kid on the block. As
an art student, Frank studied under Wilhelm Dietz and Alexander Strauber,
and he really flourished in art school. He was deeply
(04:38):
influenced by the work of the Baroque and Renaissance masters,
which he was exposed to for the first time while
he was in Munich. Because he had so much technical
skill from that apprenticeship, he was able to learn really
quickly about art and then express his ideas really well.
And when it came time for the student prizes, he
won most of them his first year. That was kind
(05:01):
of unheard of, and Duvinac's reputation at the school became
one of consistent excellence. He was a very fast painter.
His style of quickly getting work onto canvas with at
this point little or no sketching, focusing on spontaneity instead
of planning, is also known as fa presto. That's an
Italian word for me quickly. The style that this was
(05:24):
part of, which was very very sort of assertive, is
one of the words that comes up a lot. Was
very popular in Munich at the time, and this was
kind of a perfect match for Frank Duvinik. When he
was just twenty four, Duvenec painted one of his most
famous works called The Whistling Boy. This is a dark,
(05:44):
kind of moody piece. It features a young boy with
a cigarette in one of his hands. The idea of
kids with jobs being depicted in sort of adult attitudes
really echoed through several of his paintings. Others included The
Cobblers of pres which was in eighteen seventy seven, and
He Lives by his Wits, which he painted in eighteen
(06:05):
seventy eight. This period was one in which Duvenik was
creating a lot of the art that would define his legacy,
including Professor Lufts, which is a portrait of one of
his friends from school. That's a relatively simple composition. Ludwig
van Luft sits in partial profile, wearing a dark jacket
and hat and gazing out at the viewer, and overall
(06:27):
this is pretty indicative of all of his work of
this time. The palette is very dark, but there little touches,
like a pink flushed cheek that make it feel really
just incredibly alive. Descriptions of Duvenik, who was called Duf
by his friends, make him sound like somebody a lot
of folks would really want to be around. He was
really supportive of other students, and because of his excellence,
(06:51):
he naturally fell into a leadership role with his peers.
He made people feel at ease, and he sort of
swept his friends up into his work old he shared
things that he loved with them. By all the accounts
that we have, he was very well loved. And in
eighteen seventy three he had his first solo show in
(07:12):
Munich and that show went well. But later that year
Duvenik moved back to the United States to Cincinnati, Ohio.
He probably would have stayed in Munich much longer had
it not been for a cholera outbreak in Germany. Additionally,
his family just did not have the money to keep
supporting his life abroad. And there's another little twist, which
(07:34):
is it in nineteen ninety nine, that's not a misstatement.
In nineteen ninety nine, letters were found in the home
that the Duveniks lived in in Cincinnati, and those letters
suggested that Frank's half sister, Mollie, had gotten into our
relationship with a married man, and that Frank had been
asked to come home to help sort out that matter
(07:54):
and keep Molly from ruining her life. And even though
Frank was returning home. It seems like he may have
had a much harder time adjusting to life back in
Ohio than he had to life abroad. In Germany. He
was the toast of his school and his social group,
and in Cincinnati there really was not much fanfare over him,
(08:15):
no matter how good he was as an artist. Those dark,
sort of brooding pieces were not popular at the time.
He did a little more work in decorating churches, but
it wasn't enough. He kind of had to rebuild his
reputation there because he had been gone for several years,
and so ultimately he decided to move to Chicago, but
that also did not work out, and then he moved
on to Saint Louis, which also was not a great fit.
(08:39):
After almost two years of struggling, Frank had a solo
show at the Boston Art Club in eighteen seventy five.
It really wasn't especially successful, but then that same selection
of paintings was shown a second time in Boston, this
time at the doll And Richards Gallery, and with that
second show, almost overnight, his life changed. Both painter William
(09:03):
Morris Hunt and writer Henry James were really vocal in
their support of his work. They called him a genius.
There's really not a lot of documentation about what pieces
were in this show, though, and what we do know
about it is largely from different descriptions that were written
in reviews. It included portrait of William Adams, portrait of
(09:24):
Ludwig Loffs, and the old Professor. Yeah, there's some question
marks about how many pieces were even in that first show,
and some of this is going to come up in
behind the scenes. So the Boston Evening Transcript wrote of
that show, quote, the name of this gifted young painter,
almost unknown in our art world a few months ago,
(09:46):
has been made famous by the exhibition of a small
number of portraits and studies in our city. These works
displayed such striking originality, vigorous painting, close observation, and power
of rendering individual character that one was forced to admire
and even compare him with the great masters. The same
write up reported that because the exhibition had gone so
(10:09):
very well, Dubenac sent additional portraits to Boston. He kind
of added to it as like a second phase of
the show. And while this initial group for display only
included male figures, in that second batch, he included a
portrait of a woman that earned him a new round
of acclaim for being able to quote paint a refined
and graceful portrait of a lady as well as the
(10:30):
courser more powerful types of manhood. We'll talk about Frank's
process as a painter, which he apparently told to the
reporter who wrote this piece about the Boston exhibition. First, though,
we will have a quick sponsor break. Perhaps most interesting
(10:55):
in that August eighteen seventy five Boston Evening transcript write
up is a pretty detailed description of how Duvenek worked,
which the writer says came from speaking directly to the artist,
and it reads, in part quote, his palette is very
simply made up, the only thing essentially different from that
in use by most portrait painters being his use of
(11:15):
black in the grays instead of blue. Upon a slight drawing,
he begins painting in thick, square patches of color, laying
a broad mass wherever it is possible, and imitating the
model at once as closely as he can. He depends
very much upon his background color to assist in modeling
the face, as for instance, on the shadow side. He
(11:37):
will paint that color in first, then overlay the flesh
tones firmly, and then, according to the article, he lets
his what they call his first painting they really mean
his first pass dry and then, according to the write up,
he quote rubs the surface down with ossiscipia until he
obtains a surface almost as smooth as glass, and by
(11:57):
using raw linseed oil upon it and with his color,
keeps it wet as long as possible. Okay for art
folks in the crowd, this description is confusing. Osiscipia is
used to refer to a couple of different things, one
being one use mold casting that's obviously not what would
(12:17):
have been going on here. The other is a lithographic
negative technique that involves pitting a stone surface, so that
is not what this is either. It's hard to know
what specifically the writer was talking about here, but suffice
it to say Duvenik was smoothing out his painting with
(12:38):
something to prepare it for further work on it, and
he would, according to this account, sometimes work for weeks
on a painting, not because he was spending so much
time on the actual painting, but because he liked to
go to museums in the early part of the day
and then paint in his studio for a few hours
in the afternoon. That sounds like pretty good life to me.
It does to me as well. We do. I also
(13:00):
know that he liked to really lay varnish on quite heavily,
because he wanted to make his paintings look like the
old Masters, just kind of charming. The other tidbit that's
dropped in that discussion of Frank's work is that he
was headed back to Europe, but that he planned to
move to Boston once he returned. It's unclear whether that
was true. It certainly wasn't how things actually played out.
(13:22):
One point of interest regarding the sales of duven 's paintings, though,
in that successful Boston show, one of them, portrait of
William Adams, was purchased by kind of a he's sometimes
referred to as an amateur composer named Francis Boot, and
that name is going to come up again just a
little later. Frank Duvenec's decision to return to Europe just
(13:45):
as he was gaining success in the United States might
seem counterintuitive, but he really wanted to return to Munich.
He knew he could always send art back to the
United States if he wanted to for shows, which he did.
He had ample opportunity, on the heels of that instant
name recognition to stay in the United States, and particularly
(14:07):
to stay in Boston, but he took the advice of
other artists who had gone abroad and then returned home
in the United States to find us audiences kind of
slow to engage with their art. William Morris Hunt, in particular,
had traveled through France, Italy, and the Middle East and
then had returned to the United States to find that
American audiences had what he called the quote unpardonable conceit
(14:32):
of looking down on French painting. French painting was one
of his most significant influences, so it makes sense that
Frank wanted to recapture the joy and enthusiasm that he
had experienced in Munich during his early twenties. This actually worked.
Duvenec spent two years back in Munich and became known
(14:52):
as much for his fondness for parties and socializing as
he was known for his art. Next, Frank moved on
to Venice with two of his friends from art school,
and at this point they were pretty low on cash.
They kind of made a go of things, but then
a serious illness hit one of his best friends, and
then a lucrative job offer was tendered as that friend
(15:13):
was recovering to that friend, not to Duvenik, and Duvenik
went back to Munich with his friends to kind of
get them ready to leave again. But when they headed
back to the United States, he decided that he was
going to stay in Munich and to support himself he
started teaching. So at this point in Frank's story, we
need to pause for a minute and catch up with
a young woman named Elizabeth Boot. We mentioned composer Francis
(15:37):
Boot earlier. On April thirteenth, eighteen forty six, Francis and
his wife, Elizabeth Lyman Boot, welcomed a daughter into the family.
They named her Elizabeth Lyman Boot after her mother, although
she went by Lizzie. In a sad parallel to Frank's life,
you we said earlier, he lost his father when he
was just a year old, Lizzie lost her mother when
(15:59):
she was on that same age. Unlike in Frank's family, though,
Francis did not remarry and instead decided to move with
his infant daughter to Europe. Lizzie grew up traveling, but
the Boots eventually called Florence, Italy home. Francis saw to
it that Lizzie had a comprehensive education, and particularly in
(16:20):
the arts. She took music lessons right alongside her father,
and when she expressed interest in visual art, he was
very supportive and made sure she had lessons in tutors.
She also had language instruction in French, Italian and Latin.
Lizzie spent her entire childhood in Europe until she and
Francis moved back to Boston when she was nineteen in
(16:42):
eighteen sixty five. It was in the eighteen sixties that
the Boots became close with the people who would be
influential in Frank Duvinik's career. They were close to the
James family and Henry, who was three years older than Lizzie,
he was particularly fond of her. The families were so
close that they vacationed together, and it was during one
(17:03):
of those vacations that the Boots met William Morris Hunt.
At the time, Hunt was putting together an art class
for women's students and Lizzie enrolled. And it was while
Lizzie was in Boston taking lessons from Hunt that she
went to an art exhibition of paintings by Frank Duvenek,
And while some sources suggest that she was the one
(17:23):
who purchased portrait of William Adams, it kind of seems
like it was more like she convinced her father to
buy it, kind of for her. He probably had the
cash to do it and she didn't. But that's kind
of a picking knits thing. But sometimes you'll see that
Francis purchased it, and other times you'll see that Lizzie
purchased it. So if this were a romantic comedy, that
would sort of seem like things were conspiring to put
(17:46):
Frank and Elizabeth in each other's paths more than anything, though,
this was just the result of both of them traveling
in the same circles. But it is kind of romantic
to think that Elizabeth's art tutor Hunt was one of
Dubank's early supporters and that her father had been one
of his earliest benefactors by purchasing a painting from the
Boston Show. But that romanticized version kind of robs Lizzie
(18:10):
of her agency, because she later sought Frank out herself.
When he was in Venice. She was taking lessons in
Villiers Le Belle, France, and she decided to go to
Italy to see him. There's some debate about whether she
met him in Boston. It seems like probably not, but
she wanted to meet him at least, so she did
(18:30):
some travel because if you look at this whole situation
on a map, it is obviously that she was not
at all in the part of France that would have
been nearest to Venice. This wasn't like a quick hop.
She was in the north of France and it was
a hike. It was almost eleven hundred and forty kilometers,
that's more than seven hundred miles. And then when Frank
(18:51):
traveled back to Munich and started teaching, Lizzie went to
Munich and signed up for lessons. Frank moved his painting
school to Florence, something that Lizzie may have been the
one to suggest. She encouraged him to start a class
for women there, similar to the one that she had
taken with Hunt. She was instrumental in managing all the
(19:11):
move logistics, and this was a considerable task because Frank
moved all of his students with him. Lizzie also kind
of taught Duvenak how to move in higher society circles
among the expatriots in Italy. He had been a really
poor artist right up until his success at the age
of twenty seven, and this was only a couple of
(19:32):
years after that. They still really hadn't gotten the knack
of handling his own finances. He had to have proper
clothes picked out for him. The young men who were
Frank's devoted students had gained the nickname the Duvenik Boys,
and one of them became Frank's sort of de facto accountant.
Since Frank struggled so much with handling money. I had
(19:55):
such a bless your heart moment when I was reading
about that. He's like, I had nothing, now just have money.
I don't know how to do any of this. It
didn't seem like he was like spendy spendy. He just
literally had no concept of that much money coming in.
What Frank was really good at, though, was being the
life of the party. There are stories of him climbing
under tables in restaurants to make animal noises to confuse
(20:18):
the diners. He would also stage elaborate audio dramas from
under tables in the same way, making people think, for example,
that they were overhearing a couple in the crowd having
an argument. During this time, Duvenik was as popular in Venice.
It seemed as he had been in Munich as a
younger man with an endless array of romances, and his
social schedule sounds quite dizzying. Frank Duveneck was young, talented,
(20:43):
suddenly flush with cash, admired by his peers, and really
had a very carefree personality and everyone wanted to be
in his circle. His students absolutely adored him. There are
lots of accounts that people are like, yes, they all
worshiped him, and it's because he was all of these
fun things. But he was also a really good teacher.
He was very insightful and could give people critiques that
(21:05):
actually made them better artists. Duven X started to create
etching pieces in Italy and also started experimenting with different
styles of art. Sometimes this is attributed to his desire
to make more saleable art, but it's also sometimes attributed
to Frank's developing relationship with Elizabeth Boot. We'll talk more
(21:26):
about their relationship right after we hear from some of
the sponsors that keep the show going. While in Italy,
Lizzie and Frank fell in love, much to the dismay
(21:47):
of the men who they had in common. Francis Boot
and Henry James both thought that Duvenik was a great
painter and a charming man, but neither of them thought
he was refined enough to be with Lizzie. Francis Boot
probably resented someone else becoming important to his daughter, and
he was worried that Duvenik was after her for her money.
(22:07):
It has long been theorized that Henry James may have
been in love with Lizzie himself. He was very public
in his negative opinion of the couple. There was also
a concern that Frank, because he was kind of a
party boy, was a little bit unfocused and that he
wasn't going to be able to maintain his reputation as
an artist. But Lizzie really seemed pretty good for his art.
(22:29):
She seemed intent on making sure his work was a success.
Several of her society friends commissioned portraits by Frank, including Gertrude,
Elizabeth Blood and Mary E. Goddard. Blood and Duvenac were
even interested in each other and may have had a
brief affair for a short period of time, but it
obviously didn't last. Frank even painted during this time a
gorgeous portrait of Lizzie's father, Francis. It kind of mimics
(22:52):
Titian's portrait of a man in a link's trimmed coat.
This is the postulated that this is a thing he
painted as a way to curry favor with France's Boot.
It is a gorgeous painting, although Francis seems to have
been kind of unconvinced when it came to Frank's suitability
as a suitor to his daughter Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Lizzie was
(23:13):
busy working on her own painting career, and during their
breakups she would travel for that. She had her first
exhibit in Boston at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery in
eighteen eighty three alongside Annie Dixwell. Lizzie also traveled to
the United States Southern States in eighteen eighty three and
painted several pieces depicting farm and plantation life there. The
(23:36):
relationship between Boot and Duvenek was kind of on again
and off again as they would travel away from each other.
They loved each other. They would be engaged and then
break off their engagement, try to end things, only to
realize again that they wanted to be together. All of
that happened multiple times, but after several years of being
engaged on and on, I think it's like over five years,
(23:58):
during which Lizzie often saw other society women basically throwing
themselves at Frank, the pair finally decided they wanted to
be together forever, and they got married. Lizzie wrote to
a friend, quote, this has been a long affair, lasting
for years. The thing was given up entirely at one time,
but on meeting again, we find the old feeling is
(24:19):
not dead and we are going to make up life
together as we did not like it very well apart.
Their ceremony was performed by a civil servant at Lizzie's
apartment in Paris on March twenty fifth, eighteen eighty six. Frank,
still kind of a mess financially, had to borrow money
from one of his students to pay for that service.
Lizzie was thirty nine at the time and Frank was
(24:41):
thirty eight. This is also allegedly when it became a
parent due to some needed paperwork that although Frank had
been using the name Duvenik since he was a tiny child,
his name had never legally been changed from Decker. Henry
James wrote of this marriage, quote for him, it is
all gain. For her, it is very brave. But the
thing is Francis Boot, her father, had actually intervened to
(25:04):
make sure Lizzie was financially protected before the marriage. Allegedly,
just the day before, he had required Frank to sign
a document that gave up all rights to Lizzie's estate.
Frank had moved to Paris the year prior with the
hope of exhibiting at the salon there. Lizzie followed, and
they announced their plan to get married not long after,
(25:26):
although Francis might not have been a fan of the union.
When the newlyweds finished their celebratory travels, they moved in
with him at Villa Castillani in Florence. They set up
a studio space. They both worked there. Frank's work changed,
which we will talk more about in just a minute,
and more and more he was capturing the sunny scenes
(25:48):
that were unfolding before them in Tuscany. This was also
a time of anticipation because Frank and Lizzie were expecting
a baby at the end of eighteen eighty six. Baby
Frank was born on December eighteenth and Lizzie wrote in
a letter to a friend, quote, it seemed so strange,
after so many years of spinsterhood to get so much
(26:08):
domestic life in so short a time. With the whole
family living together, Francis Boot had softened on his opinion
of Frank Duvenek. He withdrew the legal papers that had
kept Lizzie from combining her estate with Frank's. Yeah, it
seems like because Frank really did seem to be a
very good husband and he was very devoted to the baby.
(26:31):
Francis kind of realized, like, oh, he's actually in love
and not trying to just steal from my family. Uh.
The Duvenec and Boot household traveled to Paris in eighteen
eighty eight, and while they were there, they saw a
lot of their old friends and they kept a very
busy social schedule. But though she was painting a large
watercolor for the Paris Salon, Lizzie was not entirely happy.
(26:53):
They had a nurse for the baby, but they had
trouble finding a doctor for the baby. Lizzie was still
really tired from child care and trying to make art
and keeping up with all of their social engagements. The
late winter in Paris that year was especially cold, and
Lizzie caught a chill which quickly developed into pneumonia, and
she declined very rapidly, and just over the course of
(27:15):
a few days, things got very bad, and she died
on March twenty second, eighteen eighty eight. Francis wanted baby
frank to be raised by the Boot family with relatives
of Lizzie's who lived in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Duvenac agreed
to that. Frank moved back to Cincinnati, but spent summers
at the Rocky Neck Art Colony in Gloucester, which was
(27:38):
close enough that he could see his son. Yeah. Sometimes
he would bring baby Frankie over to the art colony
and spend time with him there, and sometimes he would
go into to Waltham and spend time there. Frank was
unsurprisingly devastated by the loss of Lizzie, and his reaction
to her death was art. He sculpted a funeral effigy
(27:58):
monument to her that completed in eighteen ninety one. I
have also seen later years, but that is the most
common one that I see, and it was placed on
her tomb in the Cemeterio Evangelico dely Alori in Florence.
This monument depicts Lizzie lying down peacefully, and her face
was created using her funeral mask. She's draped in folds
(28:19):
of fabric and there is a palm covering most of
her body. This is a spectacularly beautiful piece of sculpture
and her father was so moved by it that he
asked Frank to make a copy of it in marble
that could be displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts
in Boston so that the Boot family could always see it.
It would be the first of many copies of that.
(28:39):
The bronze and gold leaf cast of it that was
made in nineteen twenty seven that is on display at
the MET in New York was what inspired this episode.
It is so pretty. If you're at the Met, it's
in that big sculpture garden that's right by the little cafe.
Highly recommend going to see it. Frank's longtime critic when
it came to matters involving Lizzie, Henry James, wrote that
(29:00):
the sculpture exemplified quote the jolly great truth that it
is art alone that triumphs over fate. The impact of
Lizzie on Frank's work in both her life and her
death has been something that art historians have analyzed and
theorized about for a long time. His work shifted pretty
markedly in tone. From the darkness that he had become
(29:25):
famous for. This moved to a much lighter style associated
with the French school of the time. This change is
really obvious when you look at his body of work.
His painting The Whistling Boy, which he completed in eighteen
seventy two, is right in line with the detailed description
of his work that we gave earlier. He clearly used
(29:47):
a deeply dark background to create a bed against which
he painted this figure of a boy. It's really dramatic
in its contrast. But then when you look at the
painting The Water Carrier, which he painted in Venice in
eighteen eighty four, it almost looks like the work of
a different artist. The brushstrokes have some commonality, with some
(30:10):
sections sort of having the suggestion of a shape rather
than a realistic rendering, but overall it's a lot more
detailed and realistic than The Whistling Boy. Most obvious is
the fact that it is set against a light gray
background the painting. That's perhaps the most obvious moment of
(30:31):
Transition is a portrait of Lizzie that he was working
on when she died. It is light in its background,
although she's depicted in a dark brown gown with a
muff that was actually her wedding dress. Yeah, it's an
interesting reversal because his early work was dark background, lighter
(30:51):
figure than he had done some of those light background,
more detailed figures, and this one is light background with
a darker figure. It's quite drmant and beautiful. Frank continued
to teach after Lizzie's death in Cincinnati, in New York,
and in Chicago, and he also traveled to Europe frequently,
so though he was in mourning, he was still Frank.
(31:13):
After teaching with the Art Academy of Cincinnati for a decade,
he was made a member of the faculty in nineteen hundred.
Prior to that, he had kind of been a contractor.
He actually became head of the school in nineteen oh five,
and that was a position he held for the rest
of his life. Without Elizabeth, it seems that Frank really
poured all of his love into his work and his students.
(31:34):
He also became a member of the Cincinnati Art Club
and was really influential in the city as both a
painter and a supporter of other artists. He kept working
in his studio in Covington, Kentucky, and also managed to
ruffle some feathers still. His nineteen oh two painting Siesta
depicts a naked woman asleep on a bed and her
(31:55):
body is twisted in this unself conscious way. That was
bought for a saloon but turned out to be too
salacious even for that venue. Yeah, there's kind of a
joke that the person that owned the saloon was like,
this is actually too much. Maybe this would be better
in a high society place, even though it was, you know,
(32:16):
Lascivius allegedly for the time, it's quite beautiful. In nineteen fifteen,
he traveled to the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco
with his sister Molly and some friends of theirs, and
while there he received the Medal of Honor for his
contributions to art as an artist and a teacher. Duveneck
died on January third, nineteen nineteen. One of the things
(32:40):
that Duvenac believed was most important for young artists was
to have access to art, so he bequeathed his entire
art collection, both his works and those of many other
important artists, to the Cincinnati Art Museum. You can still
see a lot of them there now. They did a
big exhibit two years ago, but I think it is
down now or it started in twenty twenty. Art historian
(33:04):
Mahonri Sharp Youung wrote of Duvenik when he died in
nineteen nineteen, he was worshiped locally and completely forgotten everywhere else.
Doesn't seem entirely true, since he had just gotten that metal,
but he did kind of fade out for a while,
and there's been a lot of effort in recent years
to recognize his work, which is really quite lovely. That
(33:25):
is Frank Duvnik. I have so many things to say
about Frank on Friday, you just get ready. I love him.
I have listener mail from Aaron about Lucy Stone, which
points out a thing that I don't think we expressly
said about Lucy Stone, but becomes kind of important to me. Okay,
(33:48):
So Aaron writes, dear Holly and Tracy, happy summer. I've
been listening to the podcast for about five years now,
and I love anything to do with history, especially stuff
that I have maybe heard about. But never really known
anything in detail. Something new by listening to your podcast
makes me happy. I recently caught up with the podcast.
By listening to your episode on Lucy Stone, I was
inspired to hear about her life growing up. Listening to
(34:10):
how her father paid for her brother's schooling but wouldn't
support her educational aspirations until later on reminded me of
my middle and high school years. I attended a challenging
all girls high school where I lived. When I complained
about the hard and difficult work out loud one day
to some close family members, they just told me I
should quit. This was sad and tough to hear when
(34:31):
many of my male family members attended the adjoining brother
school and no expense was spared for their tuition when
I attended my school on scholarship and the generosity in
my grandparents paying my way. However, this did not stop me,
and I later attended an all female college and graduated
with honors from grad school. All of these experiences made
me who I am today. Even though I have become
(34:53):
a wife and mom, it hasn't stopped me from running
two small businesses. Thank you for continuing to share inspiring
true store about women in our history who have overcome
challenges like this. To close out my email, I have
included a photo of my mom's two cats, Annie and Baxter.
My husband is allergic, so me and my kids spend
time with her pets. Looking forward to hearing more amazing episodes.
(35:14):
Thank you both for what you do. Aaron. I love this,
and here's why. I mean one congratulations, Aaron, because it
sounds like you made it happen and that's amazing. But
I think what's really interesting about Lucy Stone is that
she was so ahead of her time that that struggle
is something that is more common to hear a little
bit closer to our own point in the timeline, because
(35:38):
she was one of the first women who was like, no,
I would like to get an education please, yeah, which
just is one of those things where you know, history
is forever reverberating and we are not over those hurdles
for everybody, so it's important. That's why it's important to
tell those stories. Anyway, Lucy Stone, these cats are so
cute and they are spooned up together the way that
(36:00):
I love to see kiddies and I want to kiss
their faces. They may not like that, so thank you Aaron,
because now you have resulted in my poor cats getting
the kisses I would like to bestow on others. If
you would like to write to us, you could do
so at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
find us on social media as Missed in History, and
(36:21):
if you haven't subscribed yet, you can do so on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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