Joseph Frank Currier
Joseph Frank Currier
1843 - 1909
American painter. Currier first studied art in the late 1860s after working briefly as a stone-cutter (his father’s profession) and as a banking apprentice. In 1869, after a short stay in England, he arrived in Antwerp, where he studied at the Koninklijke Academie and benefited especially from the example of ANTOINE WIERTZ. Currier visited Paris in the spring of 1870, perhaps intending to undertake a lengthy period of study. With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in August 1870, however, he moved to Munich, where he studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste until 1872. He became part of the American contingency of Munich painters, which included Frank Duveneck, Walter Shirlaw and William Merritt Chase. Like them, he became a notable practitioner of Munich realism as taught by Wilhelm Leibl and others. To this style, based on the chiaroscuro and dramatic brushwork of Frans Hals, Currier brought an expressionistic, individual manner, bolder in technique and more emotional and visionary in character. The Head of a Boy (1873; New York, Brooklyn Mus. A.) and Peasant Girl (c. 1878; Waterford, CT, Mr & Mrs Henry C. White priv. col., see Neuhaus, p. 126, fig.) are representative of his Munich style at its best. In 1877 Currier moved to the Bavarian town of Polling. There, as in Dachau and Schleissheim (located a few kilometres west of Dachau) in the early 1880s, he assumed leadership of the American art colony after the departures of Duveneck and Chase. Currier returned to Boston in 1898 and subsequently gave up painting entirely. In 1909 he took his own life.
[James C. Cooke. "Currier, J. Frank." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T020703.]
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