Henry Farny

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Henry Farny (right in the rocking chair) with Frank Duveneck , 1874

Henry François Farny , also Henry Francis Farny (born July 15, 1847 in Ribeauvillé , Alsace , † December 23, 1916 in Cincinnati , Ohio ), was a French-American painter and illustrator of the Düsseldorf and Munich schools , who focused on the representation of North American Indian specialized.

Life

Pork Packing in Cincinnati , Chromolithograph, 1873
Cover of the magazine Ye Giglampz , 1874
The Captive , gouache and watercolor, circa 1885, Cincinnati Art Museum
Hunting Camp on the Plains , 1890, Cincinnati Art Museum
Renegade Apaches (Renegade Apaches) , 1892, Cincinnati Art Museum
A Rest in the Desert , 1897
The Song of the Talking Wire , 1904, Taft Museum of Art

In 1853, Farny's parents, the Huguenot and carpenter Charles Farny (1811–1863) and his wife Jeannette (1810–1899), née Weyband (Weygand), emigrated to the United States with their children as religious and political refugees from the Second Empire . Via New York they moved to Tionesta , near Warren ( Pennsylvania ), not far from a reservation of the Seneca Indians , where Farny got to know their lives and made drawings of them as a child. The family moved to Cincinnati around 1859 . There he attended Woodward High School, which he left early, however, in order to contribute to the family's livelihood through work. Farny's father, who wanted to make him an employee, got him a job in an office. But after the office manager saw that Farny caricatured the customers who appeared in the books, he explained to the father that he should turn his son into an artist. Farny eventually began working as an illustrator of children's books and magazines. Until 1866 he stayed in Cincinnati, until 1867 he lived in New York City , where he worked for the book publisher Harper & Brothers . During this time, Harper's Weekly magazine published roughly a double-page view of Cincinnati that Farny had created.

In 1867 Farny traveled to Italy . In Rome he became a student of his compatriot Thomas Buchanan Read , whom he had probably already met in the United States. In 1868 he moved to Düsseldorf to take private lessons with the German-American painter Albert Bierstadt . There he met Hermann Ottomar Herzog . When Farny's great-aunt Marguerite died in Colmar , she bequeathed him a large amount of money. He then went to Vienna and Munich . In 1869 he stayed in Paris . After returning to Cincinnati for a short time, he stayed in Düsseldorf again in the early 1870s, where he again took private lessons with Oswald Achenbach (1871) and probably also with Mihály von Munkácsy .

In 1872 at the latest, he returned to Cincinnati. With his painting, which was trained in Düsseldorf, he had only moderate success in Cincinnati, so that he occupied himself as an illustrator of posters and with other works, from early 1873 to 1874 as a teacher at the Ohio Mechanics' Institute . However, this began to change when he received his first lucrative major order from the Chamber of Commerce, the representation of the industrial, assembly-line-supported pig slaughter of Cincinnati on panoramas . Under the title Pork Packing in Cincinnati , he created cardboard boxes over 27 meters long, which were shown at the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873 . There they were one of the few American contributions to receive a medal. The unusual industrial motif, which in Cincinnati was jokingly called “Farny's pig picture” and which Farny's friend John Robinson Tait described as “the odyssey of a pig, from the phase of slaughter to apotheosis as pork”, found wider use as chromolithography .

With Lafcadio Hearn , Farny founded the magazine Ye Giglampz in 1874 , which saw nine issues. In the same year he shared a studio with Frank Duveneck and Frank (Francis X.) Dengler (1853–1879) in Cincinnati. In 1875 Duveneck, Dengler and Farny traveled to Munich, where Farny had befriended Duveneck and Dengler as early as 1873. Even John Henry Twachtman was in this Munich friends. In November 1875, Farny enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts . There he was tutored by the illustrator and painter Wilhelm von Diez . In 1878 he returned to the United States. After illustrating for a time McGuffey Readers , American school textbooks of the 19th century, he was employed by Maria Longsworth Nichols' Rookwood Pottery Company in 1879 .

Stimulated by the growing market of "Indian painting", Farny undertook several study trips to the Indian regions of the Midwest between 1881 and 1894. In 1881 he took a trip along the Missouri River , on which he also met Chief Sitting Bull . On his travels he was able to capture the life of the Indians in numerous sketches and photos. He also collected many Indian utensils that enabled him to paint all imaginable Indian motifs in his studio. In depicting the Indians, he found the subject that from then on brought him great success. His painting Danger , created in 1888, was awarded a bronze medal at the Paris World Exhibition in 1889 . In the 1890s he was considered the most famous visual artist in Cincinnati. Farny's work, which is now represented in many collections, remained popular throughout. In 1890 Farny was a founding member of the Cincinnati Art Club . From 1892 to 1894 he served as chairman of this artists' association, whose trademark, the dragonfly , he created.

Farny's sister Leonie (1842–1931) married the musical instrument maker Rudolph Wurlitzer in 1868 , the founder of the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company . In the mid-1880s Farny moved to his sister Marguerite and his brother-in-law Adolph Charles Strobel (1854-1906), a cashier for the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, to Norwood, Ohio , where Farny's mother Jeannette lived. At that time he had his studio in Cincinnati Downtown. Around 1887 he married Lilly (* 1866), the mother of the adoptive son Thomas Ray, born in 1885. About 1890 they moved to Covington, Kentucky . When Farny died in 1916, he lived in Cincinnati-Clifton and was married a second time, to Ann Ray Farny (1885-1941), the mother of Daniel Farny (1908-1980).

literature

  • Emmanuel Bénézit : Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays . Gründ, Paris 1976, ISBN 2-7000-0149-4 , Volume IV, p. 276.
  • Joachim Busse: International handbook of all painters and sculptors of the 19th century . Wiesbaden 1977, ISBN 3-9800062-0-4 , p. 395.
  • Charles Baltzer: Henry F. Farny . Indian Hill Historical Museum Association, Cincinnati 1978.
  • Matthew Baigell: Dictionary of American art . Harper & Row, New York City 1979, ISBN 0-06-430078-1 , p. 119.
  • Denny Carter Young: Henry Farny . Exhibition catalog, Ira Spanierman Inc., New York 1981.
  • Peter Hastings Falk: Who was Who in American Art . Sound View, Madison 1985, ISBN 0-932087-00-0 , p. 195.
  • Farny, Henry François . In: David Karel (with Lise Plamondon-Karel, N. Ruth Farr Thompson Carville, Bernard Mulaire): Dictionaire des artistes de langue française en Amérique du Nord . Musée du Québec, Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 1992, ISBN 2-7637-7235-8 , p. 292.
  • Farny, Henry Francis . In: Mary Sayre Haverstock, Jeannette Mahoney Vance, Brian L. Meggitt (eds.): Artists in Ohio, 1787–1900. A Biographical Dictionary . The Kent State University Press, Kent / OH 2000, ISBN 0-87338-616-7 , p. 280 ( Google Books )
  • Edmund von Mach : Farny, Henry F. In: Ulrich Thieme (Hrsg.): General encyclopedia of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 11 : Erman-Fiorenzo . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1915, p. 276 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).

Web links

Commons : Henry F. Farny  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Charles Frederic Goss: Cincinnati. The Queen City . SJ Clarke Publishing, Chicago / Cincinnati 1912, p. 449 ( digitized version )
  2. ↑ Bettina Baumgärtel , Sabine Schroyen, Lydia Immerheiser, Sabine Teichgröb: Directory of foreign artists. Nationality, residence and studies in Düsseldorf . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 430
  3. ↑ L. Hearn: Ye Giglampz ( PDF )
  4. ↑ Ye Giglampz: a weekly illustrated journal devoted to art, literature and satire . Vol. I, no.1 June 21, 1874 . Cincinnati. [Reprint: Cincinnati, 1963] ( digitized ).
  5. ↑ 03244 Heinrich Farny , matriculation database of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich
  6. ^ The Artist Henry Farny . In: Mark Palkovic: Wurlitzer of Cincinnati: The Name That Means Music To Millions . The History Press, Charleston / SC 2015, ISBN 978-1-62619-446-5 , p. 46 ff. ( Google Books )
personal data
SURNAME Farny, Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Farny, Henry François (full name); Farny, Henry Francis (anglicized form)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French-American painter and illustrator of the Düsseldorf and Munich schools
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1847
PLACE OF BIRTH Ribeauvillé , Alsace
DATE OF DEATH December 23, 1916
Place of death Cincinnati , Ohio