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Up for sale "Muralist" Douglas Volk Hand Signed Check Dated 1928.
ES-7498E
Stephen Arnold Douglas Volk (February 23, 1856 – February 7, 1935) was an American portrait and figure painter, muralist,
and educator. He taught at the Cooper Union, the Art Students League
of New York, and was one of the founders of the Minneapolis School of Fine
Arts. He and his wife Marion established a summer artist colony in western
Maine. He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Emily Clarissa
King (Barlow) Volk and the sculptor Leonard Wells Volk. He was named for
his mother's maternal cousin, Stephen A. Douglas, nominee in 1860, who lost
to Republican presidential nominee Abraham Lincoln. Congressman
Lincoln posed for a bust by Leonard Volk in early 1860, and the sculptor made
plaster casts of his face and hands. Four-year-old Douglas entertained the
future president. Volk spent his childhood in Chicago, but his family moved to
Europe when he was fourteen. He began studying art in Rome, and attended
the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1873 to 1879), where he
was a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme. At age nineteen, he exhibited at
the Paris Salon of 1875. He returned to the United States, and was hired as an
instructor at the Cooper Union in New York City, where he taught from
1879 to 1884 and from 1906 to 1912. He helped to found the Minneapolis School of Fine
Arts in 1886, and served as its director until 1893. He taught at
the Art Students League of New York (1893 to 1898), the National
Academy of Design (1910 to 1917), and intermittently at the Society
for Ethical Culture. He was also a working artist, noted for his figure and
portrait paintings. He exhibited three works at the 1893 World's Columbian
Exposition in Chicago, where the group won a medal, his first major award.
One of the three, a "story picture" titled The Puritan Maiden,
featured a young woman huddled against a tree in a bleak winter landscape. The
footprints in the snow of her (unseen) lover lead away into the distance –
"The snows must melt, the trees bud and roses bloom, ere he will come
again." It had been painted twelve years earlier, but became
enormously popular at the Exposition and later through engraved copies. Family
members posed as models for a number of his most famous paintings. Puritan
Mother and Child (1897), featured his wife in historical costume
embracing their youngest son, and was part of the group that won a gold medal
at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. It is now in
the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The
Young Pioneer (1899), a full-length portrait of his son Gerome in
rustic costume holding a canoe paddle, won first prize at the 1899 Colonial
Exhibition in Boston. It was bought for the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in 1906, but later deaccessioned. The Boy with the Arrow (1903),
which featured his son seated on a rock with Kezar Lake in the distance, won
the 1903 Carnegie Prize from the Society of American Artists, a silver medal at
the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and the 1907
gold medal at the Carolina Art Association. It is now in the collection of
the Smithsonian American Art Museum.