Duveneck Statue
Image by elycefeliz
Duveneck Statue in Covington, Kentucky – dedicated in 2006
The monument, commissioned by Covington philanthropists Oakley and Eva Farris, was created by sculptor Matt Langford, who was born in Mariemont and lives in Union. Its red-granite base is the same color as Duveneck’s gravestone at Mother of God Cemetery in Latonia. The artwork in a small triangular-shaped garden between Seventh, Washington and Pike streets depicts the painter holding a portrait he made of his wife, Elizabeth. She died shortly after giving birth in her early 40s, two years after the couple’s 1886 marriage.
Langford’s wife, Allison, discovered Duveneck’s portrait of Elizabeth while doing research at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The sculptor has said he wanted to depict the robust artist almost waltzing with the portrait of his beloved. When they unveiled the statue, they rang the bells at Mother of God Church (the parish where he was baptized).
"I think Duveneck is very important to the community because this is a person who was born here in Covington, and he was very influential and well-known in the art world, not only in the United States, but internationally," said Rena Gibeau, executive director of the Frank Duveneck Arts & Cultural Center.
Acclaimed portrait painter John Singer Sargent, one of Duveneck’s contemporaries, called him "the greatest talent of the brush of this generation."
www.kctcs.edu/todaysnews/index.cfm?tn_date=2006-11-21#7627
www.covingtonky.gov/index.asp?fn=news&id=1031
Here is an incomplete list of other Northern Kentucky contributions Oakley Farris has made, frequently with the idea that something be named in honor of his Cuban-born wife, Eva G. Farris: The couple in 2002 donated million to create NKU’s Eva G. Farris Business Scholarship Endowment Fund, which was equally matched by state funds. They paid 5,000 to refurbish an auditorium at NKU’s Business/Education/Psychology Center, now called the Eva G. Farris Auditorium. . At the Carnegie Center, the Eva G. Farris Education Center’s "anonymous donor" was Oakley Farris, Chadwick confirmed. They donated money to help connect Carnegie’s main building to the theater, which also made the building wheelchair-accessible.The new sculpture of a young Abraham Lincoln in front of the Kenton County Public Library’s Covington branch also was a gift from the husband to the city and library, in honor of his wife.
Oakley Farris has made a mint as a landlord and rehabber in Covington and as an investor and salesman. He prefers to give money anonymously, although on occasion he’s let his name be mentioned to try to persuade others to give as well. Farris also has sponsored two panels of the murals being painted on the Ohio River floodwall near the Suspension Bridge. He is helping Holy Cross District High School in Covington build a sports complex. He funds scholarships so Holmes High School graduates can attend college, he buys school uniforms for students who can’t afford them, he buys tickets to cultural events for elementary students, and he established a grant program to promote innovative teaching.
Frank Duveneck (1848-1919), painter, was born Frank Decker in Covington, Kentucky, the son of Bernard Decker, a cobbler, and Katherine Siemers; they were both German immigrants. Bernard Decker died of cholera in 1849 before Frank was a year old, and his seventeen-year-old widow married Joseph Duveneck, a grocer from Cincinnati, Ohio, and also a German immigrant, within a few months. Frank did not discover until he was an adult that Joseph Duveneck was not his biological father.
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. In 1870 he enrolled in Munich’s Bavarian Royal Academy. There he won prizes and acclaim for his painting and was drawn into the circle of German Realist painter Wilhelm Leibl. His Whistling Boy (1871, Cincinnati Museum of Art) is characteristic of the broadly brushed, dark-toned works that dominated his painting style into the mid-1880s.
A charismatic teacher, Duveneck in early 1878 began instructing a group of young American art students who had come to Munich to acquire European art training. Known as the "Duveneck Boys," the students were drawn to Duveneck’s bravura and compelling teaching methods.
In 1879 Elizabeth Boott, an artist and an expatriate from Boston, encouraged Duveneck to relocate his "school" to Italy. For the next two years he divided his time between Florence and Venice. In 1886 Duveneck married Elizabeth Boott; they had one son. His wife died suddenly of pneumonia in Paris in the spring of 1888; Duveneck was inconsolable. After returning from Italy to America, he gave some attention to sculpture, and modeled a fine monument to his wife, now in the English cemetery in Florence. He lived in Covington until his death in 1919 and taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, His last large-scale production, completed in 1910, was a series of murals for the new Catholic cathedral in Covington, Kentucky.
His work can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Richmond Art Museum and the Kenton County Library in Covington, Ky.
Duveneck is buried at Mother of God Cemetery, Madison Avenue and 26th Street, Covington, Kenton County. Duveneck gravesite The memorial is by artist Clement Barnhorn. Rendered in pink granite, the crypt stands above-ground, flanked at each of its four corners by a bronze angel with outstretched wings.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Duveneck
