AFA Autumn 2018

Autumn 96 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Gari Melchers (1860–1932), The Hunters, ca. 1925. Oil on canvas, 53⅜ x 59¼ inches. One of the most advanced painters and teachers working at the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century was Kentucky-born Frank Duveneck. After enrolling in the Royal Academy of Munich at age twenty-two, the artist progressed rapidly, and, on the heels of solo exhibitions in Munich and Boston that fueled his growing reputation, a host of talented American expatriates were drawn to him and his own fledgling Munich school. Future masters of American Impressionism, including William Merritt Chase and John H. Twachtman, joined the “Duveneck Boys,” as the group became known, traveling and painting with their mentor. By 1880, Duveneck was in Venice where he met John Singer Sargent and James A.M. Whistler. His early dark Germanic palette lightened, and his brushwork loosened. Painting on location en plein air, he pursued the alla prima ideal of completing a painting in a single sustained effort without retouching. Duveneck’s masterful Steps of the Riva depicts the watery highway of St. Mark’s Basin, the venerable stone facades and grand promenade of the Riva degli Schiavoni, and the meandering pedestrians, in tactile masses of color and flickering linear notations. Sargent described Duveneck as “the greatest talent of the brush of this generation.” Steps of the Riva supports this claim. Born in Detroit to German immigrants, Gari Melchers first received art instruction from his father, and at the age of seventeen continued his studies in Europe. In the 1880s he settled in Holland, becoming a key member of the expatriate artist community. Melchers left Europe ahead of World War I and established a studio in New York City. He was among the most internationally acclaimed American artists of the period, winning not only portrait commissions, including that of President Theodore Roosevelt, but also international competitions. The Grand Prize at the Paris Universal Exhibition was presented jointly to Melchers and John Singer Sargent, the first American painters honored with this prestigious award. Melchers married fellow art student Corinne Lawton Mackall in 1903, and in 1916 the couple purchased Belmont, a Georgian mansion on twenty-seven acres along the Rappahannock River near Falmouth, Virginia. Melchers staged The Hunters with his groundskeeper (and his father-in-law) on the grounds of the estate, with the viewer situated at the highest point overlooking the river. Frank Duveneck (1848–1919), Steps on the Riva , ca. 1880. Oil on canvas, 22⅝ x 37⅝ inches.