Book Description

Joseph Rodefer DeCamp was one of America's finest painters. Throughout his career he experimented with, and mastered, many techniques, constantly thirsting for new ways to express his artistic skills. DeCamp's first leanings were towards landscape painting, yet it is a tragic irony that so few of his landscapes survive, as a significant proportion of his early work, some several hundred paintings, was destroyed by fire when he was 46. This tragedy was compounded in later years by ill health, which reduced his output. Joseph Rodefer DeCamp was born in 1858 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he studied at the McMicken School of Design. He left America in 1878 to study in Munich and then lived in Florence and Italy, before returning to the USA in 1883. The following year he settled in Boston. He was a founding member of the Ten American painters in 1897 and visited North Africa, Spain and England in 1909. DeCamp died in 1923 in Boca Grande, Florida. This book examines the artist's life in terms of seven well-defined periods. The book traces how, as a boy in Cincinnati, he showed astonishing early dedication to his talent. It describes how he trained in Europe for five years, studying first at the Royal Academy in Munich and then training under Frank Duveneck while living in Venice and Florence. Author Laurene Buckley examines DeCamp's blossoming career on his return to America in three stages: Cincinnati and teaching in Cleveland; his early years in Boston; and his emergence as a national figure when, in the 1890s, he turned his consummate skills to Impressionism. Experimenting with bright colours, he earned himself an accolade from the New York Times as a painter "in the Monet advance." During the period that Laurene Buckley describes as DeCamp's "maturity", 1900-1917, the artist became well known for his portraiture. Many of his most famous surviving paintings are portraits. This book not only retells the story of DeCamp's varied life, but also examines his seemingly limitless experimentation throughout his career, and discusses his meticulous skills as a draftsman. It is illustrated throughout with many of DeCamp's finest works, including several images of the paintings lost as a result of the fire in his Boston Harcourt Street studio in 1904.