American

Frank Duveneck

U.S. 1848-1919
Italian Boy 29.0571

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It is not known when Frank Duveneck painted this portrait. Duveneck moved his painting school from Munich to Italy in 1879, and spent much of the 1880s in Italy, so it is possible that he created The Italian Boy during that period. Like his contemporary, William Merritt Chase, Duveneck's confident, fluid, and expansive style was set in the late-nineteenth century and remained virtually unchanged through the turn of the twentieth, a style of painting exemplary of The Gilded Age and one that quickly became outmoded with the advent of European modernism and the Armory Show in 1913. Born in Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Duveneck showed an early interest in painting and persuaded his parents to send him to Munich to study at the Art Academy. Heavily influenced by Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and Diego Velázquez, Duveneck paints portraits set against dark bituminous backgrounds, with the sitter's faces shaped by thick and heavy brushstrokes. There is no attempt in Duveneck's work to idealize his sitters. Instead, he lets the individuality and sometimes the coarseness of his subjects emerge, slinging the paint onto the canvas and scraping it down, all the while keeping the freshness of his original idea.

 

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