ILLINOIS HISTORICAL ART PROJECT
Frank Virgil Dudley (1868-1957)
By James R. Dabbert © Illinois Historical Art Project
CHAPTER 1
Frank Virgil Dudley was a master at using light in his landscapes, often flecked with surprising colors that give them life:
“The use of light in Dudley’s pictures suggests a permanent sacredness permeating the Dunes landscape. Each picture has the effect of capturing an eternal moment…. it is the sparkling quality of light, the atmosphere of radiant energy, the rays of sunlight concentrated upon the crown of the dune. There is no hint that the dunescape itself is frozen, that it is not alive and in the process of change.”[1]
The artist said of his own work:
“I believe in representative painting, not too literal, but understandable, with a wholesome respect for the fundamentals of drawing, color, values, and craftsmanship. I do not believe that beauty in nature is ‘sweet sentimentality.’ I think one of the greatest of God’s gifts to humanity is the beauty and the joy of nature. Yet the great majority of us go through life unmindful of it taking it as a matter of course, utterly blind to a source of a very great happiness. There is tragedy enough in life---why paint it?”[2]
On November 14, 1868 Frank was born in Delavan, Wisconsin. His parents were deaf. Frank’s father, James A. Dudley, was born in Ira, Cuyuga County, New York in 1838 and came west with his parents in 1845 to settle on a farm in Darien in southern Wisconsin.[3] In 1850, the young James Dudley began attending lessons with a neighboring deaf girl whose family had hired a tutor. This class of two students became the beginning of the Wisconsin State School for the Deaf founded in Delavan two miles east of Darien.[4] As a boy at the school, James Dudley studied the art of wood graining with daily drawings on the blackboard paying close attention to the various types of wood.[5] He graduated with the first class of five students in 1861.[6]
Flora Virgil was born in Bristol, in northern Indiana in 1843 and grew up across the state line in Niles, Michigan.[7] In 1852, soon after the death of her parents, she left with her uncle to attend the Indiana State School for the Deaf, as there was no school for her in Michigan. She graduated in 1860 and traveled back to Niles to learn the tailor’s trade.[8] While visiting friends in Lafayette, Indiana, she became acquainted with a Jewish family who had two deaf children and became their governess.[9] In 1861, when staff was needed at the Wisconsin school, the superintendent at Flora’s school in Indiana thought of her. She was soon on her way to Delavan to become assistant matron in 1861.[10]
On June 11, 1863, James Adelbert Dudley and Flora Celia Virgil were married.[11] The account of the first marriage for the school is found in the Principal’s report for that year.[12]
In 1865, the family sold its farm and moved to Delavan.[13] James Dudley had shown an early predilection for all forms of decorative art and formed his own company specializing in painting, decorating, faux wood-graining and engraving. The office of a prominent Delavan doctor praised his skills, commenting on how lifelike the wood graining was.[14]
James Dudley was also an enterprising businessman and invented a stump puller, ladder brackets, stencil holder and a composition for cleaning wallpaper.[15] He applied for a patent for his combined ladder and scaffold bracket.[16] However, limited financial means prevented him from taking full advantage of the inventions.[17]
Frank Virgil Dudley was the first born of three sons. Two years later, Clarence followed on September 4, 1870, and George on October 22, 1877. All three boys had normal hearing. Frank grew up knowing every fishing haunt and swimming hole in the gentle rolling countryside surrounding Delavan.[18] He attended public school and was “a bright, quiet, homely little boy, rather shy, who like his boon companion, and later Hoosier artist Adolph Robert Shulz (1869-1963), was always drawing.”[19] It was easier for Frank to illustrate his lessons than recite them, and “picture drawing” often interfered with his studies.[20] The two boys used to study and work together on art projects.[21] Frank finally left school before graduation to become an apprentice house painter and glazier in his father’s business.[22]
Frank, like his father, was quite enterprising. In the summer of 1885, at age 16, Frank opened an ice cream parlor in nearby Burlington, Wisconsin, selling Clark’s ice creams.[23] He and his younger brother Clarence also shared an interest in photography, and they, along with Shulz, were soon taking drawing and painting lessons from Albert L. McCoy (dates unavailable), a portrait and commercial artist who spent the winter of 1886 in Delavan.[24] Frank’s father and Albert McCoy both advertised in the Delavan Enterprise. Soon an exchange of services took place between the two businessmen. The Enterprise then reported that James Dudley had demonstrated “his master hand,” by providing services at Professor McCoy’s house.[25] Frank showed promise, and his talent in art was encouraged. He developed an interest in painting landscapes and wanted to break away from house painting.[26]
In 1886, Frank began studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with John Henry Vanderpoel (1857-1911), determined to build a career in art.[27] The following November 14, 1887, he turned nineteen and moved to Chicago.[28]
Frank had previously paid particular attention to wood engraving and made such progress as to find a promising job with a Chicago engraving house. When he arrived for work, the owner of the plant advised him against accepting the position. Woodcuts were on their way out, being replaced by zinc etching by photo process.[29] Heeding the advice, he found employment at Shepard and Company doing flash camera portrait work.[30] In June 1889 he left Chicago established a photography studio in Whitewater, Wisconsin with Frank H. Devendorf.[31] Back for a visit to Delavan in 1890, Frank announced in the Delavan Enterprise that he was in town to give lessons in crayon, ink, watercolor, and pastel drawing.[32] He maintained an art studio in Delavan at his parent’s home at 510 Wisconsin Street.[33] Frank was soon back in Chicago, this time as Vice-President of the Dudley Scaffold Bracket Company at 17 North Clinton Street in a attempt to advance the inventions of his father and the family business in Delavan. The Chicago business was listed only for the year 1890 in the City Directory.[34]
Clarence Dudley joined Frank in Chicago, and the two brothers, who boarded together, enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago in evening antique classes for 1891-1892.[35] Their classes met Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, each session lasting two and a half hours.[36] Students drew and modeled heads and figures from casts and painted still life in colors. Head teacher of this division, Louis Otto Jurgensen (1863-?), had been a pupil of Adolphe-William Bouguereau and Jules-Joseph LeFebvre in Paris.[37]
In 1892, two other faculty members at the Art Institute of Chicago, John Vanderpoel, and Charles Elmer Boutwood (c.1860-1970), moved their summer outdoor sketching party from Oregon, Illinois to Burlington, Wisconsin and then to Delavan.[38] The presence of the Art Institute summer classes in the hometown of the two aspiring painters, Shulz and Dudley, was an opportunity. Shulz met Ada Walter (1870-1928), another student in the summer sketching class, and they married in September 1894. Two weeks later, the couple left for Paris to study at the Académie Julian and Académie Vitti respectively.[39]
In 1892, Frank and Clarence opened their own business called “The Dudley Brothers” at 539 West Madison Street, Chicago. Their clerk was Miss Minnie Boxwell, and bookkeeper was Miss Mahala (Hale) Boxwell.[40] On July 18, 1893, Frank and Hale were married in Green Camp, Ohio, home of the Boxwell family.[41] Frank and Hale’s only son, Paul Boxwell Dudley, was born on January 11, 1898.[42] The entire extended Dudley and Boxwell family came to Chicago. By 1900, the youngest Dudley brother, George, was living in Chicago with Clarence. Minnie Boxwell Barber, Hale’s married sister, and her husband and daughter were living at the same address.[43] The following year, all three Dudley brothers were living at 1089 W. Jackson Boulevard, all three listed as artists.[44]
The year 1902 was seminal for Frank. At the suggestion of John Vanderpoel, he submitted two paintings to the sixth Annual Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists at the Art Institute of Chicago.[45] Both paintings were accepted and exhibited from February 4 to March 2.[46] One of the eight members of the selection jury for that year was William Wendt, a fellow classmate of Frank’s at the Art Institute for the 1891-1892 school year. As students, they always were seen together coming and going with their paint boxes.[47] Frank later referred to this exhibition as the beginning of his professional career as an artist.[48] Both Adolph Schulz and Frank were accepted by the jury for the 1902 fifteenth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists.[49] William Vernon, art citric for the Chicago American, acknowledged Frank’s professional status by naming him along with Shulz and Frank Phoenix (1858-1924) as native sons representing Delavan, “as far distant from Chicago as Fontainebleau is from Paris.”[50]
Early critical response to his work came from Lena M. McCauley, art critic at the Chicago Evening Post, and a fellow classmate from their student days at the Art Institute of Chicago.[51] Of his painting, Breaking of the Fog Off Chicago, she said, “a marine of more than passing merit.”[52] Both paintings included “Chicago” in their titles, and he was now a recognized member of the Chicago art community. Meanwhile, in Delavan, on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Wisconsin State School for the Deaf, father James A. Dudley “conveyed to the State School a painting executed by his son Frank V. Dudley.”[53]
Frank’s career soon received a prestigious boost when he exhibited with the Society of Western Artists in their 1903-1904 traveling show; he became an associate member, and then a full member.[54] Members included noted Chicago artists: Charles Francis Browne (1859-1920); his brother-in-law Lorado Taft (1860-1936); Ralph Elmer Clarkson (1861-1942); Oliver Dennett Grover (1861-1927); Alson Skinner Clark (1876-1949); William Wendt (1865-1946), and John H. Vanderpoel.
The first crowded decade of 1900 included personal tragedy. On July 31, 1904, his wife died of tuberculosis;[55] his only son Paul was just six years old. That year Frank did not exhibit at the Universal Exposition in St. Louis, as did nearly every member of the Chicago Society of Artists.[56] In his short life, Paul had been a part of the extended Boxwell family in Chicago.[57] He accompanied the Boxwells, who returned to their family in Green Camp, Ohio, where he would be raised by Aunt Coot and Aunt May.[58] Chicago remained a destination for visits for Paul, and he would reenter his father’s life later at an auspicious time in Frank’s career as a painter.
The following year in 1905, he immersed himself in the Chicago art world. In addition to exhibiting with both the Annual Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists and the Annual Exhibitions of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists at the Art Institute, and with the Society of Western Artists, he found a new venue. In January, he attended a lecture given by Charles Francis Browne at the Palette and Chisel Club, now almost a decade old.[59] The Club was formed by a group of evening students from the Art Institute who first met on Sundays in Lorado Taft’s studio in the Athenaeum Building on Van Buren Street. Members were men with day jobs, and they wanted to develop their talents and to expose their efforts to the public. By September, Frank was fully involved in club activities at its Fox Lake retreat. In the Club’s logbook, member Joseph Pierre Birren (1865-1933) reported in cartoons, photographs, and text, the experiences of “Nippersink Dudley” and a cow trying to step into his “hand painted meadow,” so realistic was the painted canvas.[60] Frank’s enthusiasm in his discovery of nearby Nippersink Creek had earned him the moniker. Fellow member Samuel James Kennedy (1877-after 1926) commented on Dudley’s discovery of the neighboring farmhouse and the young women who attended an impromptu dance one evening.[61]
In December, Frank exhibited three paintings at the Fourth Annual Palette and Chisel Exhibition including Along the Nippersink.[62] His activities with the Palette and Chisel Club foreshadowed a life-long career as an artist and crusader. In 1905, he exhibited at the Club’s annual exhibition on the seventh floor of the Athenaeum Building on Van Buren Street.[63] From 1906 to 1908, he continued to exhibit and began regularly attending functions at the Club including eleven more talks on art as well as a smoker and a Bohemian Night.[64] He returned to Fox Lake in the summer of 1907 for another outing with the Club.[65] One of the Club’s aims was to help beautify Chicago.[66] In March 1908, conscious of Daniel H. Burnham’s work on his Plan of Chicago of 1909, members of the Palette and Chisel contributed to the cause with a play, Chicago Beautiful, An All Hog Stag, aimed at bringing attention to the Illinois Central railroad tracks’ despoiling of the lakefront. Frank played the role of Officer Swan Swanson, a poke at the painter Svend Svenson (1864-1945) and Samuel J. Kennedy played Miss Chicago.[67] But the following month, after attending only the first of two Club lectures on color by Louis William Wilson (1872-1919), Frank would not sign another Palette and Chisel logbook for seven years.[68] He used those intervening seven years to establish a new business and find a social life with another club in another state, to fight for another cause, and to remarry.
Frank was elected Secretary of the Chicago Society of Artists in 1906, and began correspondence with William M. R. French, Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, recommending the discontinuation of prizes of less than $100.[69] His paintings were now accepted on a regular basis at both the Chicago and American annual exhibitions each year at the Art Institute. His name was included in the Addenda of The Artists Year Book for 1905-1906, published by the Art League Association in the Fine Arts Building.[70] When the Cliff Dwellers Club was formed in 1907, he became a charter member, one of 300 professional men working as artists, writers, musicians, and architects.[71] With its simple “bungalow” atop the new International Harvester’s building at Michigan and Harrison, the Cliff Dwellers became a meeting ground for artists, architects and writers. Architect members such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Dwight H. Perkins had taken the lead of Louis Sullivan by moving away from the neo-classical style of the Columbian Exposition toward a Midwest prairie school of architecture closer to nature.[72] A leading prairie landscape architect and fellow charter member was Jens Jensen. Dudley and Jensen would form a life-long civic association and a friendship that would have a direct influence on Frank’s life and his developing creed as an artist.
Among the three Dudley brothers, Frank and Clarence were the closest. The two brothers formed a propinquity that extended to their professional lives as artists. They boarded together and attended the same art classes. Clarence remained a lifelong bachelor. Like Frank, Clarence was interested in cameras and had begun a career in the new field of fine art photography by exhibiting two photographs at the Fifth Chicago Photographic Salon in March of 1905. The exhibition had a prestigious jury of John La Farge (1835-1910), Childe Hassam (1859-1935), William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) and Robert Henri (1865-1929).[73] One photograph is entitled Sand Dunes in Winter, referring to the picturesque landscape along the southern shore of Lake Michigan. The other photograph, also of the dunes, was entitled Approach of a Winter’s Evening, a winter scene showing a rustic building with a foreground of fence posts, footsteps, and shadows in the snow. Frank later based two of his paintings on his brother’s photograph.[74]
Early in his career, Frank characterized himself as a winter painter as well as painter of moonlight.[75] He exhibited Moonrise, Mouth of Chicago River as one of his first two paintings at the Art Institute’s 1902 Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists. Twenty years later, reporter Arietta Wilmer Towne wrote of his method of painting a moonlight canvas:
“…Mr. Dudley carried his easel to the shore of the lake at night, placing it where the moonlight would have the best effect, and studied the scene carefully. Then before dawn the next morning, he would place the easel in the same spot and paint from memory the impressions of the moonlight scene. This was repeated many times until the artist felt assured that he had become imbued with the spirit of the moonlight night.”[76]
His Moonlight Sail, one of his four paintings at the Art Institute’s 1903 Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists, was a study in blues.[77] At this show, he won the Woman's Aid Purchase Prize for his painting The Golden Harvest.[78]
After his wife’s death, snow became a favorite subject of early paintings. He exhibited at the Art Institute in 1904, Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists, a painting entitled Snowstorm, his first winter painting. Lena McCauley wrote, “The snow-laden atmosphere and wintry tone…have placed it among the first winter canvases in the exhibition.”[79] Winter paintings were popular with other Chicago artists including Albert Krehbiel (1875-1945), Alfred Jansson (1863-1931), and Alson Skinner Clark. From 1904 to 1909 Frank’s Winter paintings proliferated: Snowstorm; Winter’s Retreat; Winter Morning; Facing the Blizzard; A November Blizzard; Woods in Winter; Winter Quarter; The Blizzard; When All Is Still; Winter, and Cornfield in Winter. These eleven titles represent almost half of the twenty-three paintings exhibited at the Art Institute during this period.
At four by six feet, Winter Retreat is most likely the largest canvas he ever painted. First exhibited at the 1905 Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists, it was exhibited again in 1909 at the Society of Western Artists. One critic called the painting symphonious.[80] His The Blizzard was sold at that show.[81] Isabel McDougall called it “capital” in veiling the bridges and warehouses of the Chicago River.[82] McCauley wrote that with “driving snow and sleet… there is tender feeling in his quiet landscape.”[83]
Although Frank, at this time, was unable to make a living as an artist, he connected with the art-buying public. He sold his painting Autumn at the Society of Western Artists exhibition in December of 1905.[84] He exhibited Moonlight, one of two “freely painted landscapes,”[85] at the Art Institute’s 1906 Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists. In December, the Palette and Chisel Club established a permanent sales gallery on the seventh floor of the Athenaeum Building.[86] The December 1906 exhibition, which included his Winter Morning and Afterglow, virtually sold out.[87]
In 1907, he won a prize for Night and Silence Reign, one of his three paintings exhibited at the Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists at the Art Institute. The $25 prize was offered by the Fortnightly Club of Englewood through the Exhibition Committee of the Municipal Art League.[88]
The prize encouraged him to “carry on,” but Frank needed a more regular source of income.[89] Both Dudley brothers were approaching their fortieth birthdays and no doubt wanted to establish more financially secure careers. Frank decided to move to the Woodlawn community on the south side of Chicago and open a business. Subsequently, in November of 1908, an announcement appeared his hometown newspaper, The Delavan Republican, that he had recently opened a new shop on 63rd Street in Chicago where he sold cameras, pottery, and artists’ supplies.[90]
Yet success continued to follow him in the press. Of Music in Moonlight from the Art Institute’s 1908 Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists, art critic Henry Charles Payne wrote of its “elusiveness of night.”[91] On Franks’s style, Payne added: “Whether it is fog, winter, storm, or night that he paints, he seems to have forgotten any prepossessions or temperamental likings for particular tints and to have surrendered himself completely to the requirements of his theme.”[92] From the same exhibition, Maude I. G. Oliver wrote: “…one strolls with a shiver to the frosty suggestion of… ‘When All Is Still’. A beautiful play of early evening colors in winter discloses an interesting foreground, through which a glassy stream is flowing, a few leafless trees, and a deep turquoise sky containing a bright shining moon.”[93]Both paintings in the Art Institute’s 1909 Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists were winter landscapes. Oliver wrote that Winter represented “the gentler mood of the season,” and Cornfield in Winter depicted “a grim phase in which a light snow but half softens the bleak landscape.”[94]
Payne reviewed In the Softness of Night from the Art Institute’s 1911 Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists: “Mr. Frank Dudley, in a bit of moonlit-water and tree-fringed shore, has found those indefinable tints that make of this phase a haunting teasing mystery. There is no moon in the picture, only its pale light enveloping and diffused, hinting at, but not telling what things really are, and bringing all under the spell that moonlight weaves for us on such a summer night.”[95]
Winter Retreat was exhibited yet again, at the Art Institute’s 1912 Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists, reportedly the prominent, if not chief attraction.[96] Critic Lena McCauley said it showed a marshy clearing on the edge of the prairie, and that “the truth of it intensifies its attractions.”[97] Art Institute teacher, lecturer and critic James William Pattison (1844-1915) wrote that it was full of atmosphere and agreeable gray color, “the best by him we have ever seen.”[98]
Evelyn Marie Stuart, in the Fine Arts Journal, reviewed The Willows from the 1915 Art Institute’s Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists: “Among the chief charms of this painting is the red light of the sunset on the willow trunks and their broken and crinkled reflection in the coldly flowing stream.”[99]
The brother’s “The Dudley Shop,” was located at 521 East 63rd Street, the principal thoroughfare of Woodlawn.[100] By 1910, the shop had moved to 1130 East 63rd Street.[101] The 1910 Census lists Frank as living alone at this address.[102] Photographs of the shop show a plate glass window with “Kodak” painted in large letters across the top of the window. Below is “The Dudley Shop, Pictures and Things.” At one time, a rooftop sign, “The Dudley Shop” could be seen from the elevated train tracks at 63rd Street. The shop windows displayed cameras, pottery, paintings, and photographs, among other things.[103] From 1911 to 1913, Frank lived at 6158 Lexington.[104] Meanwhile, Frank maintained contacts with the art world downtown. He was regularly exhibited with the Artists’ Guild, (organized in 1910 to sell art) in The Fine Arts Shop on the sixth floor of the Fine Arts Building.[105]
After the business was established, both Dudley brothers had time to pursue interests beyond earning a living. The two men loved the outdoors. For years, Frank painting winter scenes and was out in all seasons tramping the environs of Chicago from Wisconsin to Indiana. Clarence, an outdoor enthusiast as well, enjoyed hiking with his camera. Clarence had discovered the Indiana
Dunes for himself in the early 1900s and had successfully interested brother Frank to include the dunes in his paintings.[106]
Beginning in 1908, conservation groups became interested in the Indiana Dunes. The national
park movement had precipitated conservation efforts around the country. In the spring of 1908, the Appalachian Mountain Club invited members of fifteen organizations to a meeting, among which was the National Playground Association, with President Roosevelt as honorary president.[107] On the local level, the Chicago Playground Association was formed to make a survey of walks in the Chicago area to identify land to be included in a forest preserve.[108]
A committee was formed with architect Dwight Perkins as chairman and Jens Jensen as its most ardent conservationist. The Association included Chicago cultural institutions and groups, women’s clubs, and art organizations including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Municipal Art League, the Outdoor Art League, the Palette and Chisel Club, the Cliff Dwellers Club, and The Little Room, a group of intellectual elites.[109] A circular captioned “Saturday Afternoon Walking Trips” was issued, and the popularity of the walks soon expanded the scope of activities. The first all-day outing, led by Jens Jensen, was to Millers in the Indiana Dunes on Memorial Day 1908.[110] After the first Memorial Day hike in 1908, other all-day outings to the Dunes continued. Clarence Dudley led his first walk on January 30, 1909,[111] and at least by June he became a member of Dwight Perkins’ Playground Association committee.[112] The walking club incorporated in 1911 as “The Prairie Club of Illinois,” named by Jens Jensen.[113]
By 1912, Frank began to hike and paint in the Dunes more regularly.[114] Though not a member of the Prairie Club, he was drawn increasingly into the simple life, close to nature, offered by the Club. In previous years, Frank “had always looked upon this spot as a land of promise, but the mistake of seeking it most often in summer had prevented a full realization of its charms.”[115]
Rail transportation from Chicago to the southern shoreline of Lake Michigan began early in the century.[116] On June 2, 1912, direct service to Chicago began with the cooperation of the Illinois Central Railroad and the Chicago Lake Shore & South Bend Railway,[117] and that year the Prairie Club’s established camp at Link House in Tremont, with its own rail station, sixteen miles east of Gary. The camp lasted into the winter with some forty people visiting on weekends.[118] In May 1913 a permanent camp was established, and the Dunes were scouted for a site to build the Beach House, to serve the membership of about four hundred.[119] Most Prairie Club members lived and worked in Chicago and found the Dunes to be a source of refuge from the bustling city. Club activities were well organized through its Chicago office, and printed directions for the walks were published as well as detailed accounts of all activities in the form of monthly bulletins, including bonfires with songs and stories, holiday programs, holiday events, Indian pow-wows, circuses and plays.[120]
Sometime during this period, Frank met his second wife, Maida Lewis, but where and when Frank and Maida met is unknown. Viola Maidalene Lewis was the third child of Viola Mooney and Erastus Lewis, born on March 5, 1882 in Canandaigua, New York.[121] Lewis family members were listed in the Chicago City Directory beginning in 1900 with Fredrick C. Lewis, a cashier.[122] Maida was a lyric soprano and could have likely met Frank through one of the many social activities of Woodlawn, or on Prairie Club excursions to the Indiana Dunes.[123] As a singer, Maida was interested in the performing arts and the popular masques and outdoor dramas would have drawn her notice if not participation.
[1]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.104.
[2]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 3/28/1936, Sec. 3, p.4. Commenting on his technique of painting moonlight he said: “…as the shadows darkened I made a pencil sketch on the back of an envelope. I worked it through four stages—returning to the vantage point from which I painted at about the same hour that I might get the mysticism I sought and felt—that my shadows might be correct and that the scene would be an almost exact replica of the original glimpse I had of a beautiful night study.” “Duneland Artist Lauds Gary Salon,” Gary Post-Tribune, 12/12/1929, Section 2, p.13.
[3]“End of a Long Life of Silence, The Delavan Republican, 7/1/1915, p.6. Two exhibition catalogs have been written about the artist. James R. Dabbert, The Indiana Dunes Revisited: Frank V. Dudley and the 1917 Dunes Pageant, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), and James R. Dabbert, ed., The Indiana Dunes Revisited, (Valparaiso, IN: Brauer Museum of Art,
[4]Warren Robinson, “Death of Member of First Graduating Class,” The Wisconsin Times, 9/25/1915, Vol. XXXVIII, No.1, p.1.
[5]Delavan Enterprise, 4/9/1886, p.3.
[6]Warren Robinson and J. E. Wachute, Souvenir of the Wisconsin School for the Deaf, (Delavan, Wisconsin, 1900), pp.31-33.
[7]“Mrs. Flora Celia Dudley,” The Delavan Enterprise, 5/31/1928, p.1.
[8]Warren Robinson, “Flora Virgil,” The Silent Hoosier, 2/22/1912, Vol. 25, No. 8, p.1.
[9]Op. cit., Robinson, The Silent Hoosier, 2/22/1912, p.1.
[10]Op. cit., Robinson, The Silent Hoosier, 2/22/1912, p.1.
[11]“Married,” The Christian Times, 7/1/1863, Vol. X, No. 46, p.4. See also: “Married,” Delavan Patriot, 7/4/1863, Vol. 2, No. 27, p.3.
[12]Op. cit., Robinson, The Silent Hoosier, 2/22/1912, p.1.
[13]Op. cit., The Wisconsin Times, 9/25/1915, p.1.
[14]The office belonged to Dr. Martin. Op. cit., The Wisconsin Times, 9/25/1915, p.2.
[15]Op. cit., The Wisconsin Times, 9/25/1915, p.2.
[16]The Delavan Enterprise, 2/24/1886, col. 3, p.3.
[17]Op. cit., The Delavan Republican, 7/1/1915, p.6.
[18]“Famous Painter Feels Strange In Old Home Town,” The Delavan Republican, 3/19/1925, p.1.
[19]“Dudley Pictures Portray Spirit of Indiana Dunes,” The Delavan Republican, 4/2/1925, p.1.
[20]Arietta Wimer Towne, “Walks Among the Chicago Artists,” The Club Messenger, (Published Monthly in the Interest of the Club Women of Chicago, 3216 Carroll Avenue, Chicago), Spring 1922, p.5. Archives, Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. “Art Exhibit of Dudley Pictures,” The Delavan Enterprise, 4/2/1925, p.1.
[21]Op. cit., The Delavan Enterprise, 4/2/1925, p.1.
[22]W. Gordon Yadon, “Delavan Artist Attracted Midwest Attention,” The Delavan Enterprise, 3/11/1986, Vol. XII, No.10, p.4.
[23]The Delavan Republican, 7/31/1885, col. 2, p.3.
[24]Op. cit., The Delavan Republican, 4/2/1925, p.1. See also: C. J. Bulliet, “Art and Artists of Chicago, Past and Present,” Chicago Daily News, 3/28/1936, Sec. 3, p.4.
[25]Delavan Enterprise, 4/9/1886, p.3.
[26]Op. cit., The Delavan Republican, 4/2/1925, p.1.
[27]The Delavan Enterprise, 6/19/1889, col. 3, p.3. See also: Letter to Mrs. Schoemaker from Frank V. Dudley, 3/30/1945, Greater Lafayette Museum of Art archives, Lafayette, Indiana. School of the Art Institute of Chicago records.
[28]“Dudley Pictures To Be Shown,” The Delavan Enterprise, 3/26/1925, p.1. McCoy had recognized Frank’s talent and advised him to enroll at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Op. cit., Yadon, The Delavan Enterprise, 3/11/1986, p.4.
[29]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 3/28/1936, Sec. 3, p.4.
[30]The Delavan Republican, 6/19/1889, col. 2, p.3. See also: Op. cit., Yadon, The Delavan Enterprise, 3/11/1986, p.4.
[31]Op. cit., The Delavan Enterprise, 6/19/1889, p.3.
[32]The Delavan Enterprise, 1/1/1890, col. 2, p.3.
[33]Op. cit., Yadon, The Delavan Enterprise, 3/11/1986, p.4.
[34]Rueben H. Donnelley, The Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago, (The Chicago Directory Company, 1890), p.655. [hereinafter Chicago City Directory].
[35]Chicago City Directory, 1891, p.697. Frank and Clarence lived at 30 Ogden Avenue. The Art Institute of Chicago, Circular of Instruction of the School of Drawing, Painting, Modeling, Decorative Designing and Architecture, 1892-3, with A Catalogue of Students for 1891-2, (Chicago: Knight, Leonard & Co., 1892), p.39.
[36] Op. cit., Circular of Instruction…1892-3, with a Catalogue of Students for 1891-2, p 39.
[37] Letter to Faith F. Halley from Mary McIsaac, archivist, The School of Art Institute of Chicago, Thomas Library archives, Chesterton, Indiana, 3/3/1981.
[38]Activities in Oregon are found in: “Art Notes,” The Graphic, 6/13/1891, p.383; on Burlington in: “About The Studios,” Sunday Inter Ocean, Vol. XXIII, No. 85, 6/17/1894, Part 3, p.27, and discussion on classes at Delavan are found in: L. V. N., “Echoes From the Studios,” Sunday Inter Ocean, 4/19/1896, p.31. All sources courtesy of the Illinois Historical Art Project www.illinoisart.org. (Hereinafter “IHAP”).
[39]Rachel Perry, “Children of Sunlight, The Life and Work of Ada Walter Shulz,” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Vol. 10, No. 1, Winter 1998, p.17. See also: Judith Vale Newton, “Sustaining a Creative Spirit, Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Vol. 11, No. 2, Spring 1999, pp.12-21. In 1896, Adolph began exhibiting regularly at the Art Institute, as did Ada in 1898, early success for the young couple, now both established as artists. Peter Hastings Falk, The Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1888-1950, (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1990), p. 821.
[40]Chicago City Directory, 1892, p.444.
[41]Marion County, Ohio, Marriage Records, Vol.10, http://www.heritagepursuit.com/marr10ab.htm, accessed 12/7/2010. The following year, Frank and Hale were living in Chicago at 17 Sheldon St. Chicago City Directory, 1894, p.503.
[42]Chicago City Directory, 1898, p.538. See also: State of Illinois, Cook County, Vital Statistics Department, County Clerk’s Office, Return of a Birth, No. 3527, dated January 17, 1898.
[43]Twelfth Census of the United States, Schedule No. 1.--Population, Enumeration District No. 320, Sheet No. 2, Lines 40-48. See Reel T623, 256, 1900 Census, Chicago Public Library.
[44]Chicago City Directory, 1901, p.584.
[45]Op. cit., Yadon, The Delavan Enterprise, 3/11/1986, p.4.
[46]The Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of An Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists, February 4 To March 2, 1902, p.16. The two paintings were Indian Summer, no. 71, and Spring, no. 72.
[47]Op cit., Circular of Instruction…1892-3, with a Catalogue of Students for 1891-2, p 39. See also: The Book & Catalogue of the Second Retrospective Exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago Alumni Association, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago Alumni Association, 1922), p.12. For more on Wendt see: Constance W. Glenn, In Praise of Nature: The Landscapes of William Wendt, (Long Beach: University Art Museum, California State University, 1989), and Jean Stern, In Nature's Temple, the Life and Art of William Wendt, ISBN 978-0-9821201-0-1.
[48]Op. cit., Gary Post-Tribune, 12/12/1929, Section 2, p.13.
[49]The two paintings were Breaking of the Fog Off Chicago, No. 97, and Moonrise, mouth of the Chicago River, No. 98. See Catalogue of the Fifteenth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 10/28/1902), p.23.
[50]William Vernon, “Picture Hangs in the Principal Gallery at the Chicago Artists’ Exhibition in the Art Institute,” Chicago American, 2/13/1903. Also found in Art Institute of Chicago scrapbooks, Vol. 18, p.23.
[51]Lena M. McCauley was a day student in the Intermediate Class at the Art Institute of Chicago for the same school year 1891-92. See Op. cit., Circular of Instruction…1892-3, with a Catalogue of Students for 1891-2, p.31.
[52]Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artist,” Chicago Evening Post, 11/1/1902, Part 2, p.14.
[53]“A Picture of a Long-time Event,” The Delavan Republican, 4/3/1902, p.1. For an image of the painting see, “Fifty Years Ago—1879,” The Wisconsin Times, Vol. 52, No. 1, October 1929, p.16. For an image of the photograph used for the painting see, Warren Robinson and J. E. Wachute, Souvenir of the Wisconsin School for the Deaf, (Delavan, Wisconsin, 1900), p.24. Delavan Vertical File, Aram Public Library, Delavan, Wisconsin.
[54]Dudley exhibited one painting, Landscape, No. 47. Society of Western Artists. Tenth [Eighth] Annual Exhibition, (Cincinnati: Society of Western Artists, 2/25/1904), pp.5, 10. Lena McCauley as having “attractive autumn colors.” Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 1/16/1904, p.7. His 1905 entry, Autumn, was widely reviewed. Critic Lena McCauley said it was “a striking view of a hillside, with oaks clad in russet foliage,” in “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 12/2/1905, p.11. Maud I. G. Oliver was the most effusive: “Frank V. Dudley has also chosen to overthrow our traditions concerning red, and he accomplishes this feat through a mass of rich red trees.” “What Western Artists Show in This Years Exhibit,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, 12/11/1905, Magazine Section, p.5. “Active Membership,” Society of Western Artists. Catalogue of the Tenth Annual Exhibition, (St. Louis: Society of Western Artists, 1/5/1906), n.p. The Society was organized in 1896 to promote regional art and had chapters in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis as well as in Chicago. After his first 1903-1904 exhibition, Dudley exhibited four more times in 1905, 1906, 1907 and 1909 before the Society held its last exhibition in 1914. The IHAP has considerable information on the history of the organization and its exhibitions. www.illinoisart.org.
[55]Department of Health: City of Chicago, “Undertaker’s Report of Death,” No. 16162, 7/31/1904.
[56]Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 6/25/1904, p.5.
[57]Miss Minnie C. Boxwell is listed in the Chicago City Directory for 1892 and 1895, pp.227 and 273. Miss Anna Boxwell is listed for 1896, p.294. Miss Maria Boxwell is listed for 1898, p.283.
[58]Telephone interview with Paul O. Dudley, great-grandson of the painter, from Green Camp, Ohio, 4/12/1999. Just more than a month after his mother’s death, Paul entered Green Camp Elementary School in September 1904. Alumni Pictorial Review of Green Camp Elementary and High School, 1888-1955, pp.52, 54.
[59]Scrapbook No. 1, 1895-1906, Palette and Chisel Club Archives, Special Collections, Newberry Library, Chicago, pp.90-91.
[60]Op. cit., Scrapbook No. 1, Palette and Chisel Club Archives, p.100.
[61]Op. cit., Scrapbook No. 1, Palette and Chisel Club Archives, pp.102-104.
[62]Op. cit., Scrapbook No. 1, Palette and Chisel Club Archives, p.110.
[63]Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 12/9/1905, p.10.
[64]Lena M. McCauley, “Exhibitions Next Week,” Chicago Evening Post, 12/1/1906, p.11. An image of Winter Morning is included. Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 4/25/1908, p.4. For numerous examples of talks and social events and their topics and guests see also: Scrapbook 2, 1906-1915, Palette and Chisel Club Archives, Special Collections, Newberry Library, Chicago, pp. 8, 12, 15, 19, 22-24, 30, 34, 35, 37, 114.
[65]Op. cit., Scrapbook No. 2, 1906-1915, Palette and Chisel Club Archives, p.27.
[66]Catalogue: Twenty-First Annual Exhibition of the Palette & Chisel Club, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 4/25-5/8/1916), p.2.
[67]Op. cit., Scrapbook No. 2, 1906-1915, Palette and Chisel Club Archives, p.36.
[68]Scrapbook No. 3, 1916-1930, Palette and Chisel Club Archives, Special Collections, Newberry Library, Chicago, Box 1, p.13.
[69]Letters to Frank [V.] Dudley from William R. French, 6/5/1906 and 10/26/1906, William M. R. French Papers, Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago, Microfilm Roll 8:11, pp.110 and 754.
[70]Arthur Nicholas Hosking, editor, The Artists Yearbook. A handy reference book wherein may be found interesting data pertaining to Artists, and their studio, home and summer addresses, for 1905-1906, (Chicago: Art League Publishing Association, 1905), p.229.
[71]“Cliff Dwellers in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune 11/7/1907, p.8. IHAP.
[72]Robert E. Grese, Jens Jensen, Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens, (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p.44.
[73]The Fifth Chicago Photographic Salon, (Chicago: Chicago Camera Club and Art Institute of Chicago, 3/2 – 3/22/1905). Ryerson Library Archives. Clarence G. Dudley exhibited two photographs: Sand Dunes in Winter, No. 92, and Approach of a Winter’s Evening, (with an image) No. 93.
[74]Op. cit., The Fifth Chicago Photographic Salon, No. 93.
[75]Op. cit., letter to Mrs. Schoemaker, 3/30/1945. Despite his own characterization, he showed other seasons and bright colors in his canvases early in his career as well. Looking back in 1922, Dudley said he confined his earlier work to territory surrounding Chicago, and that he painted “some few pictures of the Dunes.” Op. cit., Towne, The Club Messenger, Spring 1922, pp.5-6. When the Shadows Lengthen was his first exhibited Dunes painting, shown at the Art Institute’s 1903 Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists. See: James William Pattison, “Pattison’s Art Talk,” Chicago Journal, 10/31/1903, p.4.
[76]Op. cit., Towne, The Club Messenger, Spring 1922, pp.5-6.
[77]Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 2/7/1903, p.8.
[78] Edward G. Holden, “In the Field of Art,” Chicago Tribune, 2/8/1903, p.17. IHAP.
[79]“Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 2/6/1904, p.10. The year before, at the 1903 Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists, he exhibited Spring, full of light and color. Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 2/7/1903, p.8.
[80]Society of Western Artists. Thirteenth Annual Exhibition, (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1/5/1909), No. 35. “At the Art Institute,” The Chicago Illustrated Review, 1/12/1909, p.8.
[81]Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 4/10/1909, p.4.
[82]Isabel McDougall, Chicago Record Herald, 2/9/1908, in Art Institute of Chicago scrapbooks, Vol. 23, p.136.
[83]Lena M. McCauley, “Fine Work Is Shown By Chicago Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 2/8/1908, p.8.
[84]Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 12/16/1905, p.11.
[85]Lena M. McCauley, “Painting Exhibit Stirs Enthusiasm,” Chicago Evening Post, 10/20/1906, p.7.
[86]Op. cit., McCauley, Chicago Evening Post, 12/1/1906, p.11.
[87]Op. cit., McCauley, Chicago Evening Post, 12/1/1906, p.11.
[88]“Artists Of Indiana Given Great Credit,” Chicago Evening Post, 3/9/1907, p.5.
[89]Maude I. G. Oliver, “Advertising with a Purpose,” The Poster, Vol. 17, No. 6, June 1926, p.14.
[90]The Delavan Republican, 11/5/1908, p.5.
[91]Henry Charles Payne, “Art Exhibit Is Most Worthy,” Chicago Journal, 2/4/1908, p.4.
[92]Op. cit., Payne, Chicago Journal, 2/4/1908, p.4.
[93]Maude I. G. Oliver, “What Chicago Artists Have Done in the Last Year,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, 2/16/1908, Magazine Section, p.5.
[94]Maude I. G. Oliver, “Crowds Throng the Chicago Art Show,” Chicago Record Herald, 2/14/1909, Part 6, p.6. Included is an image of Cornfield in Winter.
[95]Henry C. Payne, “Continuous Exhibit of Chicago Art,” Fine Arts Journal, Vol. XXI, No. 1, July 1911, p.37.
[96]Unidentified newspaper clipping, no date, [probably from the Woodlawn Businessmen’s Association], Frank V. Dudley Pamphlet File P-02277, Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson Library Archives. [hereinafter Pamphlet File AIC]
[97]Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 2/10/1912, p.6.
[98]James William Pattison, “Exhibitions in Chicago,” Fine Arts Journal, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, February 1912, p.171.
[99]Evelyn Marie Stuart, “Annual Exhibition of Local Artists,” Fine Arts Journal, Vol. XXXII, No. 4 April 1915, p.169.
[100]For more information on Woodlawn see: Earl H. Reed, “Woodlawn,” Forty-Four Cities in the City of Chicago, (Chicago: The Chicago Plan Commission, 1941), pp.39-40, and John Drury, “Old Chicago Neighborhoods,” Landlords Guide, Vol. 40, No. 4, April 1949, pp.114-115.
[101]Chicago City Directory, 1909, p.701.
[102]Thirteen Census of the United States: 1910 Population, Enumeration District No. 416, Sheet No. 1, Line No. 37. See Reel T624, 247, 1910 Census, Chicago Public Library. Also see 1910 Census, Soundex Reel 101, Chicago Public Library.
[103]Frank V. Dudley File, Archives, Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana.
[104]Chicago City Directory, 1911, p.396. For 1912, see p.406. For 1913, see p.395.
[105]Florence N. Levy, American Art Annual, Vol. 11, (New York: American Art Annual, Inc., 1914), pp.92-93. See also: Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 10/4/1913, p.10.; Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, 10/14/1915, p.8; Edward M. Ericson, A National Association of Artists and Craft Workers, (Chicago: The Artists’ Guild, 1917), pp.7, 20. IHAP. Images of two Dudley painting appear on page 20: Thorn Creek in Winter and Across the Ravine.
[106]Op. cit., Towne, The Club Messenger, Spring 1922, p.5. “Clarence G. Dudley,” The Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 268, September 1937, p.8. Prairie Club Archives. Dune historian George A. Brennan wrote that the Dunes were originally covered with giant pine, some nearly a hundred feet high with trunks over two feet in diameter, and that these pines disappeared mainly from lumbering in the first half of the 1800s. Op. cit., Brennan, The Wonders of the Dunes, 1923, pp.154, 185. The Indiana Dunes attracted the attention of many others who had specific interests including Henry Chandler Cowles, whose work on plant succession at University of Chicago between 1898 and 1911 established the Indiana Dunes as a birthplace of ecology. J. Ronald Engel, Sacred Sands, The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), pp.142-143. The United States Steel Corporation also had interests in the area. In 1905, a decision was made to locate a steel plant along seven miles of Lake Michigan shoreline in the Indiana Dunes. James B. Lane, “City of the Century” A History of Gary, Indiana, (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978), p.28. Another Chicago artist attracted early to the Dunes, around 1906 or 1907 was Earl Howell Reed (1863-1931). John Drury, “Artist-Author Discovered the Dunes,” 4/22/1956, Earl H. Reed File, Westchester Public Library, Chesterton, Indiana. He later eight etchings including The Voices of the Dunes in the Paris Salons of 1912 and 1913. “The Fine Arts,” Chicago Herald, 12/10/1914, p.10. See also: Tom Vickerman, “News and Notes of Chicago Exhibits” Chicago Evening Post, 11/24/1931, p.8. Reed published a popular text on etching and six books on the Dunes. Earl H. Reed, “The Sand Dunes,” Art, A Monthly Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4, January 1913, p.1.
[107]Emma Doeserich, Mary Sherburne, Anna B. Wey, Outdoors With the Prairie Club, (Chicago: Paquin Publishers, 1941), pp.24-25.
[108]Op. cit., Grese, Jens Jensen, Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens, 1992, p.43.
[109]The Prairie Club Year Book, 1922, p.1, The Prairie Club Archives, Series 11, Westchester Public Library, Chesterton Indiana. [hereinafter Prairie Club Archives].
[110]Op. cit., Doeserich, Sherburne, and Wey, Outdoors With the Prairie Club, 1941, p.27. Millers was just east of Gary, the new town that had been laid out in 1906, just as the United States Steel Corporation began leveling lakefront dunes to build its plant.
[111]Sixth Series of Saturday Afternoon Walking Trips, (Chicago: Playground Association of Chicago), January 1909, p.2. Prairie Club Archives.
[112]Ninth Series of Saturday Afternoon Walking Trips, (Chicago: ????, 1909). Prairie Club Archives.
[113]Op. cit., Doeserich, Sherburne, and Wey, Outdoors With the Prairie Club, 1941, p.8. Saturday Afternoon Walks, 22nd Series, (Chicago: Prairie Club, 5/4/1911), p.1. Prairie Club Archives.
[114]Op. cit., Letter to Mrs. Schoemaker, 3/30/1945.
[115]A. G. Richards, “Lake Michigan’s Wonderful Dunes,” Fine Arts Journal, Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1918, pp.23-24.
[116]How the Medal Was Won, Central Electric Railfan’s Association, Bulletin 124, 1985, p.10.
[117]Op. cit., How the Medal Was Won, 1985, p.14.
[118]Op. cit., Doeserich, Sherburne, and Wey, Outdoors With the Prairie Club, 1941, pp.81-82.
[119]Op. cit., Doeserich, Sherburne, and Wey, Outdoors With the Prairie Club, 1941, p.85. There were two classes of members, “Active,” and “Associate.”
[120]Op. cit., Doeserich, Sherburne, and Wey, Outdoors With the Prairie Club, 1941, pp.92-93. Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.31.
[121]State of New York, Department of Health, Certification of Birth, District No. 3429, Registered No. 7.
[122]Chicago City Directory, 1900, p.1152. Fredrick C. Lewis is listed as a cashier at 224 Wabash Avenue, with a home address at 5427 Jefferson Avenue. The following year he is listed as part of a family business, William Lewis and Son at 268 Wabash Avenue. Mrs. Frederic C. Lewis was a music teacher with a business address at 243 Wabash Avenue. The Lewis family home was at 5311 Washington Boulevard in Hyde Park. Chicago City Directory, 1901, p.1193.
[123]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.82.
CHAPTER 2
On Wednesday, May 21, 1913, Frank Maida were married in Chicago.[1] For their honeymoon they traveled to St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans.[2] They arrived back in Chicago in time to travel to Delavan to help celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Frank’s parents.[3] Frank and Maida began a closely shared life together, yet each had their own interests. Maida was busy with her singing, and Frank, his paintings. Their marriage became an inextricable part of a way of life now increasingly spent in the Indiana Dunes. Frank remained in close contact with his son Paul as he finished school in Green Camp, Ohio. Paul finished his last year of high school and graduated in 1915,[4] then returned to Chicago to live with his father and stepmother Maida.
If the Prairie Club was the domain of Clarence, the Friends of Our Native Landscape was the realm of Frank. Founded in the spring of 1913 by Jens Jensen, Friends of Our Native Landscape had the clear purpose of preserving native landscapes for the enjoyment of people and as sanctuaries for wildlife.[5] The first four names on the short list of those invited to discuss conservation policy, at their first luncheon in April, were the writer Hamlin Garland, Chicago poet and cultural critic Harriet Monroe, botanist Henry Chandler Cowles and Dwight Perkins.[6] Although the first meeting resolved to incorporate under the laws of Illinois, chapters were formed in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. Membership soon also included Jane Addams of Hull House, other civic leaders and artists Earl Howell Reed (1863-1931).[7] Kenneth Sawyer Goodman’s “A Masque” (later called The Beauty of the Wild), was performed for the first time on June 14, 1913 at the first annual meeting of the Friends near Oregon, Illinois as part of the movement to establish White Pines State Park.[8] For twenty years, Frank and Maida dressed in Indian costumes and participated in Goodman’s The Beauty of the Wild, given annually by the Friends.[9] He was elected Vice-President and delegate to the Municipal Art League for a two-year term in 1913.[10]
In 1914, a painting based on an earlier photograph by his brother, entitled, One Winter’s Afternoon, won the Municipal Art League Purchase Prize, one of the highest honors given to a Chicago artist.[11] The painting, valued at $1,000, was sent to exhibitions at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and to the City Art Museum of St. Louis before being placed in the Municipal Art League’s collection.[12] In 1915 he was honored twice. His painting Across the Hills was chosen for the Illinois State Building at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.[13] He also received the Edward B. Butler Purchase Prize of $200 for The Willows, another winter painting later presented to a Chicago Public School.[14] That year he served his first term on the jury for the Annual Exhibitions of Works by Chicago Artists.[15]
This jury, and the awarding of prizes was controlled by the membership of the Municipal Art League, mostly laywomen representing the many women’s clubs in and around Chicago. Several artist members of the Chicago Society of Artists were dissatisfied with this arrangement, and in November 1914, a group led by Lawton Parker (1868-1954), sent a letter to Art Institute trustees protesting this method of awarding prizes as “undignified, unjust, and indeed farcical.”[16] Frank’s reaction was measured, and as Vice-President of the Chicago Society of Artists, he helped resolve the issue. On March 19, 1915, the Chicago Society of Artists was host to the Municipal Art League and the Affiliated Clubs at Fullerton Hall in the Art Institute. He spoke as Vice-President but as chairman of the entertainment committee:
“This entertainment [“The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde] should convince the public that the Chicago Society of Artists does not approve the sensational manner in which several members broke into print several days ago. The society as a whole has no ill feelings toward the Municipal Art League. In fact, I am confident that the action of several of our members will be officially deplored at our meeting April 6.”[17]
The Board of Directors of the Art Institute voted unanimously to allow the Chicago Society of Artists the privilege of selecting all juries of awards.[18] A resolution to this effect was introduced at the April 6 meeting of the Municipal Art League. The resolution was tabled, but later adopted and the jury size was expanded in 1916.[19]
On June 24, 1915 Frank’s father James Dudley died in Delavan.[20]
In 1916, Frank began to paint the Dunes in earnest to the exclusion of almost all other landscapes.[21] He had set his course. In February, the Chicago painter and teacher Charles Francis Browne (1859-1920) toured the Indiana Dunes with Stephen Mather.[22] Notices under the caption “Save the Dunes!” were sent out by the Prairie Club to the various organizations for a meeting in the Dunes on July 16.[23] Early that morning, the American flag was raised on Mt. Tom. An estimated three to five thousand people visited the Dunes throughout the day. At 2:30 in the afternoon, several hundred enthusiastic supporters met to launch a campaign which became the National Dunes Park Association.[24] Jens Jensen read a letter from Stephen T. Mather, who had become director of the National Park Service, supporting the idea of a National Park.[25] Mather conducted a hearing in Chicago that October, for the Department of the Interior, on Indiana Senator Thomas Taggart’s proposal for a Sand Dunes National Park.[26] Frank’s friend Jens Jensen testified at the hearing:
“There is a soul in each of us and it only needs awakening; and when it is awakened then there will burst upon us the first realization of the wonderful beauty of the dune country.”[27]
Congress ignored the Mather findings (who had left the National Park Service with a nervous breakdown).[28] after Taggart lost the Senate election in December 1916.[29]
Despite this setback, the Prairie Club and other social organizations continued their push with a publicity campaign for federal protection of the Indiana Dunes.[30] Plans for a Memorial Day pageant in the Dunes were widely publicized. As Spring dawned, Theodore Roosevelt sent his support.[31] Famed sculptor, brother-in-law to Charles Francis Browne, and head of the department of sculpture at the School of the Art Institute, Lorado Taft, spoke in support of the dunes on April 6 in Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute.[32] That same day, Congress declared war on Germany. Memorial Day arrived, and in the dunes an elaborate pageant began only to be rained out.[33] The following Sunday, June 3 the “Historical Pageant of the Dunes” took place on Memorial Day.[34] Attendance estimates were twenty-five to forty thousand.[35] The Prairie Club had rallied as much support as it could have expected. However, with the world at war, the momentum for a national park soon would dissipate.
In January 1917 Clarence Dudley and other Prairie Club members exhibited photographs of the Dunes at the Chicago Public Library, significantly raising public interest.[36] Frank’s son Paul, now living with his father, had just turned nineteen on and had also become involved in Prairie Club activities. Clarence was chairman of the Guides and Information committee with his nephew Paul listed as a committee member.[37] Meanwhile, Frank was near the southern dunes rim painting The Dunes Pageant.[38] The painting depicts the “Dance of the Indians,” with Lake Michigan in the background, and a circle of Indians dancing, ringed by the audience on the sides of the dunes blowout, consecrating and protecting their home in the Dunes.[39] After the Pageant, Frank’s devotion to the Dunes pervaded his life, against advice of artist friends not to focus exclusively on one subject.[40]
On November 11, 1917 World War I ended and two days later, Frank turned fifty. Painting still could not afford him a living though—he could barely pay for framing costs for his one-man show at the Art Institute.[41] In December, Chicago’s Commission for the Encouragement of Local Art purchased one of Frank’s dune paintings, Along the Trail.[42]
As the new year dawned Frank’s dune focus was evident in his paintings. In January, he showed two paintings at the first Art Institute Alumni Association.[43] In February, The Dunes Pageant and six other dune paintings were exhibited in the Art Institute’s Annual Exhibition of Works by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity.[44] These seven paintings were formed a port of his one-man show that spring in the east wing of the Art Institute. That exhibition, entitled The Sand Dunes of Indiana and Vicinity, was under the auspices of the Friends of Our Native Landscape and the twelve organizations of the Conservation Council including the Prairie Club.[45] During the show, people were invited to guess where the pictures were painted, so new were the landscapes to their imaginations. Guesses were usually the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific coast; hardly anyone thought so close to home.[46]
Publicity for the Dunes and acclaim for Frank began immediately. In June, an article by A. G. Richards appeared in the Fine Arts Journal along with images of seven paintings. Richards made the point that his paintings appealed to many different classes of people. He found the art evocative with “a sense of sweet isolation, aloof from the workaday world and alone with one’s own soul…” After quoting Jens Jensen extensively, Richards provided his assessment of Frank’s art:
“He has been known as an interpreter of moods and phases of light. In his Dunes exhibition, however, one felt that he had employed their faculty to the best end possible uniting mood with theme and producing pictures that are both descriptive and emotional. A peculiarity of Mr. Dudley’s work is that one appreciates it better the more one sees of it. Not unusual in the monotonous feeling experienced on viewing a one-man show; in fact, such an exhibition is a test of any man’s versatility, a gauge of how many tunes he can pipe, and how much he really has to say. With Mr. Dudley we experience just the reverse, for in his Dunes exhibit his muse seemed as variable as nature herself and, like nature, always charming.”[47]
The Chicago Examiner said the Dunes Pageant was “brilliant by the cleverly suggested crowds painted with no attempt at realism, yet nevertheless effective in movement and color. [Also]…worth noting in Mr. Dudley’s colors is the transparency of his shadows. Never muddy, they sing with clean lavenders and blues.”[48] Lena McCauley writing in the Chicago Evening Post echoed Richards: “…at first sight it is not realized that one man has painted them all.”[49]
By 1919 Frank was widely recognized as a leader in the Dunes movement. More than seventy artists, many from the Chicago Society of Artists, followed his lead in January and submitted works for the Art Institute’s exhibition Pictures of Our Country Assembled by The Friends of Our Native Landscape.[50] In February he showed landscapes at the Art Institute’s Annual Exhibition of Works by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity; judging from the titles, most of them of the dunes.[51] His From Mt Tom was then juried into the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York.[52] In May, The National Geographic Magazine published an article on the opportunity for a national dunes park including four photographs by Clarence, all showing an Artic-like landscape of Lake Michigan in winter.[53] In September and October, From Mt Tom and The Land of Sky and Song had expanded titles to include the word Dunes at the City Art Museum of St. Louis.[54] In November, at the Art Institute’s Annual Exhibition of American Oil Paintings and Sculpture, one of two dune landscapes, The Silent Sentinels, received the Martin B. Cahn prize of $100, awarded to the best painting by a Chicago artist.[55] In December, From Mt. Tom was at the Corcoran in Washington D. C.[56] The painting then moved to the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York in May 1920.[57]
The first-floor rented apartment at 6356 Greenwood Avenue in Woodlawn was the center of life for the Dudley and Lewis families. Paul lived here since his return from Ohio. Maida’s mother, Viola M. Lewis, lived here and would sometimes accompany Maida on the piano when she sang. Maida’s brother, Captain William E. Lewis, also lived with his mother and sister when he was in Chicago.[58] Known as “Bud,” Captain Lewis was a veteran of World War I, and a pilot in the airmail service. (He died in an unfortunate airplane accident in February 1921). Significantly, the Greenwood Avenue address was close by the Indiana Dunes. The Chicago, Lake Shore & South Bend Railroad’s station at 63rd Street was just 38 miles from Tremont Station, within a short walk to Waverly Beach.
At the Art Institute’s 1921 Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, Duneland won the prestigious Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan medal and prize of $500.[59] Eleanor Jewett called the prize “exceedingly just.”[60] The painting was privately purchased for $700 from Frank and presented to the Art Institute.[61] Art critic Lena McCauley reported that Frank had painted the canvas the year before at his “hut” in the Dunes.[62] He exhibited Night, Indiana Dunes at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D. C. in December;[63] in 1922, the painting was at the City Art Museum of St. Louis.[64] The same year he exhibited Sunlight and Shadow at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.[65] Back in Chicago, the “Dean” of Chicago, art Ralph Elmer Clarkson authored a survey of Chicago painters, which included Frank, linking him with the Dunes.[66]
The 1920s were busy years for Frank and Maida. Throughout most of the decade, Frank was painting about 30 pictures a year.[67] Together they promoted the Dunes in public lectures. On February 10, 1920 they presented an evening program on the Dunes in Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago, to open the season for the Prairie Club. While Frank painted a canvas, Maida sang.[68] The Dudleys gave similar programs throughout the decade promoting Franks artwork and the beauty of the dunes.[69]
The Dudley Shop moved to its final address of 650 E. 63rd Street in 1920.[70] Also in 1920, Frank’s son Paul was working as a salesman in the shop.[71] Frank was now preparing for retirement from business. He had left the board of Directors of Friends of Our Native Landscape along with others of his generation. By1921 he sold enough paintings and had enough savings that he could give his business to his son.[72] However, by 1923 the Dudley Shop no longer was listed in the Chicago directories. Paul had wanted to live out West and moved in 1924.[73] Frank was now free to commit his time exclusively to painting.[74]
In 1923, the Frank and Maida celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary. With hope for a Dunes Park, the Prairie Club also celebrated a tenth anniversary with the rededication of the Beach House on October 21. Clarence was on the Walk Committee. In the second part of the program, after the masque by Mrs. Jacob Abt, Frank and Maida preformed the roles of Chief Paint-in-the-Face and his songbird squaw, along with members of his tribe in “The Indian Lament” written by Ralph E. Blount. A procession made its way down to the campfire. Chief Dudley told the story of the Indian’s loss of his happy hunting ground in the dunes, “and the sweet plaintive notes of song by his squaw touched the hearts of all.”[75]
The 1920s were busy times for the Dunes Movement as well. Posters and pamphlets advertised the Dunes as twenty-five miles of promising beaches from Gary to Michigan City.[76] Hope for a Dunes Park was now with the state of Indiana and its newly established Department of Conservation headed by Richard Lieber, a friend and supporter of Stephen Mather. Mather had become the first president of the newly formed National Conference on State Parks.[77] The Prairie Club’s Conservation Committee was at the center of the efforts in lobbying for a state park.[78] As a member, Frank was one of several speakers on June 23, 1922, at a Beach House meeting for Indiana legislators who had pledged their support to purchase of land for the state park.[79] The Indiana Dunes State Park became a reality when, in 1925, the first land was purchased.[80] Mount Green, one of the three highest dunes at Tremont (literally ‘three mountains’ from the French), was renamed Mount Jackson, to honor Indiana Governor Edward Jackson, who had allocated the funds for the park.[81]
With the Chicago winter season of exhibitions and functions generally lasting through April, Frank and Maida would go to their cabin on the Lake Michigan shoreline from the late Spring until Thanksgiving. Frank and Maida’s cabin was at the west end of more than a hundred Prairie Club cabins lined up along the shoreline. Clarence’s cabin sat at the far east end. In between and anchoring the community was the Beach House. Fire was a continual problem in the dunes, and it was reported that “The two Dudley shacks were destroyed by fire on April 7th. One shack was a landmark, and the other was famed for the hospitality extended by its host to all who wished to ‘trip the light fantastic.’”[82] Frank planned to rebuild a cabin, using the Logan prize money.[83] The large front room was filled with light from the six windows in the gabled front facade facing north on Lake Michigan.[84] Opposite the entrance, the fireplace stood with its chimney reaching into the open vault of the ceiling.
Frank named his cabin “Duneland Studio” simply known as the “Studio” to the many visitors to the Dunes, who came especially on Sundays, in the summers, when an open house was an established tradition.[85]
In 1923 he began an eleven-year service on the Commission for the Encouragement of Local Art.[86] A Chicago city ordinance established the Commission in 1914 with the authority to buy works of art by Chicago artists for civic buildings.[87]
There came a split between the Modernists and conservative artists of the Chicago Society of Artists. The two groups decided to split, with the latter forming, in 1923, the Association of Chicago Painters and Sculptors. Critic Eleanor Jewett later recalled that the two groups mixed like oil and water.[88] Frank was elected the third President in 1926.[89] That year he won the Arché Club prize for at the Art Institute.[90] He was to win only one more prize at the annual Art Institute exhibits, as the juries and awards had, by this time, turned to decidedly more Modernist works.[91]
In May 1924, Samuel A. Harper, a lawyer, writer, and fellow member of the Cliff Dwellers and the Prairie Clubs, visited Frank and Maida at their Duneland Studio.[92] On a long hike to his mother’s house in northern Indiana, Harper made his way from Tremont, to Prairie Club Beach House, and to Frank’s studio. He found the 55-year-old painter at peace with the world:
“He is one of the fortunate few to whom it is given to live as nature intended man to live. The happy results of his communion with Nature and his devotion to his art are noticeable in his face, form and manner of dress as one meets him on the dune trails or along the beach. While he is obviously the stuff that dreams are made of, his slender figure clad in khaki breeches and flannel shirt, and his heavy masculine features and thick hair speak loudly of strength and virility—born of the emancipating spaces in which he lives. And so it is that in all his paintings there is found the charming admixture of dream stuff and virility which is the man himself.”[93]
Stepping into Frank’s cottage, Harper found that:
“The glow in the large open fireplace in the studio softened the chill in the evening air from the Lake, and with the flickering light from a few rustic candlesticks decoratively placed around the walls filled the room with a twilight atmosphere of golden tranquility which brought rest and peace for every weariness.”[94]
In March 1925, the Hoosier Salon opened a gallery in Marshal Field’s State Street store. Founded by the he Daughters of Indiana, a Chicago civic organization, they held annual exhibitions promoting midwestern artists. Frank’s good friend Adolph Shulz, who was instrumental in founding Brown County art colony in Southern Indiana, was a frequent exhibitor, as were many Chicago artists who found picturesque subjects in rural Indiana.[95] Each of them exhibited three paintings the first year and Frank served on the first jury.[96] It wasn’t long before prize money at the Hoosier Salon, which tended to showcase more conservative, American Impressionist works, surpassed that of the Art Institute.[97] Frank went on to win several prizes at the annual exhibitions.[98]
The Chicago Galleries Association, a co-operative of artists and lay members organized in 1925 by the Municipal Art League, proved his most successful venue in reaching the art buying public. Lay members subscribed to finance the Galleries. They then selected works of art according to the size of prize given; sometimes five or six prizes were on offer at each exhibition.[99] The Association proved very successful by the end of its first three-year period. A continuous series of exhibitions developed throughout the years at 220 North Michigan Avenue.[100] Frank exhibited from the very first show in the spring of 1926. His paintings were popular with lay members, and he won six purchase prizes from 1927 to 1938 in the semi-annual shows.[101] His work was in such demand that he was given fifteen one-man shows between 1927 and 1956, hanging between twenty-eight and forty-five paintings at each.[102] Critic Eleanor Jewett claimed his paintings of dunes were known from Maine to California, and shows would regularly sell out.[103] At one exhibition, it was reported five hundred people attended the opening.[104]
The State of Indiana was now in the process of assembling land to expand the new state park. The Prairie Club sold their land, at costs, to the state in 1926, with a seven-year tenure to extend the Prairie Club’s way of life in the Dunes.[105] The Indiana Department of Conservation requested that the Dudleys to stay on and continue to use their cabin for a summer base.[106] In this way, the Dudleys became the only residents permitted within the restricted area of the Dunes State Park.[107]
[1]State of Illinois, Cook County, Marriage License, No. 628533. Also see, “Local News of the City,” The Delavan Republican, 5/29/1913, p.5.
[2]Op. cit., The Delavan Republican, 5/29/1913, p.5. See also: Brauer Museum of Art archives, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. Upon their return they resided at 6156 University Avenue in Woodlawn. Chicago City Directory, 1914, p.452.
[3]“Celebrated Golden Wedding Anniversary,” The Delavan Republican, 6/12/1913, p.1.
[4]Alumni Pictorial Review of Green Camp Elementary and High School, 1888-1955, no publisher listed, p.16.
[5]Friends of Our Native Landscape, Art Institute of Chicago, Burnham Library of Architecture, Pamphlet P-04918.
[6]Friends of Our Native Landscape, Yearbook for the Year MCMXIV, p.3. See Friends of Our Natural Landscape, Miscellaneous Pamphlet file, Chicago Historical Society Library.
[7]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, pp. 80-81.
[8]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.33.
[9]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.33.
[10]Florence N. Levy, American Art Annual, Vol. 11, (New York: American Art Annual, Inc., 1913), p.95.
[11]The Municipal Art League collection became part of the Union League Club of Chicago, where the painting now hangs. Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, Vol. VII, No. IV, April 1914, p.55. See also the following provided by IHAP: Harriet Monroe, “Karl Anderson Takes High Place Among Figure Painters,” Chicago Tribune, 2/15/1914, p.E6. The painting is reproduced on the cover of Men and Events, The Bulletin of the Union League Club of Chicago, Vol. XVII, No. 12, January 1941, and in William H. Gerdts, Art Across America, (NY: Abbeville Press, 1990), p.279.
[12]Eighteenth Annual Exhibition At The Carnegie Institute, (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute, 4/13/1914), No.103; The Ninth Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists, (St. Louis: City Art Museum, 1914), Special Exhibition Catalogue, Series of 1914; No. 13, Number 63, p.35. It was shown with the collection a few years later. Eleanor Jewett, “Art League Opens Exhibition Today at The Institute,” Chicago Tribune, 12/5/1918, Sec. 2, p.14.
[13]Illinois at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, (San Francisco, 1915), p.48. Image of Across the Hills, No. 6, follows page 51.
[14]Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, Vol. IX, No. 4, April 1, 1915, p.51. See also: Evelyn Marie Stuart, “Annual Exhibition Of Local Artists,” Fine Arts Journal, Vol. 32, April 1915, p.169, and “Prizes are Awarded in Chicago Artists’ Exhibit,” Chicago Record, 3/2/1915 in Art Institute of Chicago scrapbooks, Vol. 32, p.145.
[15]Except for 1917, Dudley served on Art Institute juries from 1915 to 1923. Op. cit., Falk, The Annual Exhibition Record…, p.36. He had served in 1906 on the jury at the Art Institute for the more prestigious Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists.
[16]“Painters Term Award System ‘Pink-Tea Fete’,” Chicago Daily Journal, 3/15/1915, p.4. IHAP. See also: “Art Tempest Grows; Blast Follows Blast,” Chicago Herald, 3/16/1915, p.4. IHAP.
[17]“Artists Bury Hatchet,” Chicago Herald, 3/20/1915, p.6. IHAP.
[18]“Artists Will Pick Own Juries,” Chicago Examiner, April 9, 1915, in Art Institute of Chicago scrapbooks, Vol. 33, p.8. IHAP.
[19]“Artists Marking Time in Ruling on Award Juries,” Chicago Examiner, 4/11/1915, in Art Institute of Chicago scrapbooks, Vol. 33, p.12. IHAP. For an account of the juries in size and participants see: op. cit., Falk, editor, Art Institute of Chicago, The Annual Exhibition Record, 1990, pp.22-44.
[20]Op. cit., The Delavan Republican, 7/1/1915, p.6.
[21]Op. cit., Letter to Mrs. Shoemaker, 3/30/1945. By this time the Dudley Shop moved next door from 1130 to 1128 E. 63rd Street and Dudley had established a studio at 6224 Greenwood Avenue and residence at 6356 Greenwood Avenue, an address that was not to change until 1952. Albert Nelson Marquis, The Book of Chicagoans, (Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Company, 1917), p.198. Letter to K. R. Cougill, Director of the Indiana Department of Conservation, from Frank V. Dudley, 12/19/1952, Frank V. Dudley Materials, Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana. [hereinafter Dudley materials ISM].
[22]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.63. For an extensive essay on brown see www.illinoisart.org.
[23]“Conservation,” The Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 57, August 1916, p.6. Prairie Club Archives.
[24]“Movement For National Park Now Underway,” Gary Tribune, 7/17/1916, pp.1, 5.
[25]“Conservation,” The Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 57, August 1916, p.6.
[26]Stephen T. Mather, Report on the Proposed Sand Dunes National Park, Indiana, (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), p.26.
[27]Op. cit., Mather, Report on The Proposed Sand Dunes National Park, Indiana, 1917, p.25.
[28]Kay Franklin and Norma Schaeffer, “Dunes Pageant of 1917,” Dunes Country Magazine, Spring 1982, p.11.
[29]James Philip Fadely, Thomas Taggart, Public Servant, Political Boss, 1856-1929, (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1997), p.152.
[30]The Prairie Club Year Book, 1922, p.1. Prairie Club Archives.
[31]“Save the Dunes,” Indiana Dunes Pamphlet File, Chicago Historical Society.
[32]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.30.
[33]For an account of the 1917 Dunes Pageant, see Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, pp.10-42.
[34]Op. cit., Franklin and Schaeffer, Dunes Country Magazine, Spring 1982, p.14.
[35]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.15.
[36]Chicago Public Library , Book Bulletin, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 1917, p.2.
[37]Thomas Wood Stevens, Book of the Historical Pageant of the Dunes, (Chicago: The Dunes Pageant Association, 1917), p.4.
[38]A black and white image appears in op. cit., Richards, Fine Arts Journal, June 1918, p.19.
[39]Op. cit., Stevens, Book of the Historical Pageant of the Dunes, 1917, p.35. For an interpretation of the Indian Dance see op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, pp.37-38.
[40]“Frank Dudley To Exhibit Collection of Dune Scenes,” The Delavan Republican, 3/26/1925, p.1. See also: Op. cit., Oliver, The Poster, June 1926, p.14.
[41]Op. cit., Oliver, The Poster, June 1926, p.14.
[42]Eleanor Jewett, “Local Art Boomed; Commission Makes Annual Purchases,” Chicago Tribune, 12/30/1918, Sec. 2, p.12. The Commission, whose mission was to hang art purchases in Chicago public schools, would buy three more works by Dudley including in 1925 A Winter Trail, Eleanor Jewett, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Tribune, 5/31/1925, p.E4, 1933 High Noon, and 1943 Geronimo’s Blanket. Information courtesy of IHAP.
[43]One Winter’s Afternoon, No. 155, and The Silent Hillside, No. 155 ½. Catalogue of the First Exhibition of Work By the Alumni of the Art Institute of Chicago, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago Alumni Association, 1/8/1918), p.29.
[44]A Catalogue of the Twenty-second Annual Exhibition of Works by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2/14/1918), p.37. An image of The Land of Sky and Song No. 84 appears on page 19.
[45]Exhibition by Frank V. Dudley, The Sand Dunes of Indiana and Vicinity, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 5/9/1918). “Art and Artists,” Chicago Journal, 5/21/1918, p.7.
[46]Op. cit., Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, 3/28/1936, Sec. 3, p.4.
[47]Op. cit., Richards, Fine Arts Journal, June 1918, pp.24-25.
[48]“New Paintings by Frank V. Dudley,” Chicago Examiner, 5/11/1918, in Art Institute of Chicago scrapbooks, pp.43-44 (after the first index of Roll 9).
[49]Lena M. McCauley, “News of the Art World,” Chicago Evening Post, 5/14/1918, p.11.
[50]Pictures of Our Country Assembled by The Friends of Our Native Landscape, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1/7/1919). Dudley is listed on the Art Committee with Mary Eileen Ahern, Lena M. McCauley, Bertha E. Jacques, and Eames Mac Veagh.
[51]Op. cit., Falk, The Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago, p.287.
[52]Peter Hastings Falk, editor, The Annual Exhibition Record of the National Academy of Design, 1901-1950, (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1990), p.178.
[53]Orpheus Moyer Schantz, “Indiana’s Unrivaled Sand-Dunes—A National Park Opportunity,” National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XXXV, No.5, May 1919, p.440.
[54]Special Exhibition Catalogue, Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by American Artists, (St. Louis: City Art Museum, 9/14/1919), Series 1919, No. 8, Numbers 39 and 40.
[55]Catalogue of the Thirty-second Annual Exhibition of American Oil Paintings and Sculpture, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 11/6/1919), Number 67, p.41. The prize-winning work was illustrated in Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, Vol. 13, No. 9, December 1919, pp.132, 138, and “Prize Winners At Annual Art Institute Show,” in Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks, 11/7/1919, vol. 39, p.93. IHAP. Eleanor Jewett, “Art,” Chicago Tribune, 11/9/1919, part 8, p.6. IHAP.
[56]The Seventh Exhibition: Oil Paintings by Contemporary American Artists, (Washington: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 12/21/1919), No. 61.
[57]Catalogue of the Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists and a Group of Small Selected Bronzes by American Sculptors, (Buffalo: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, 5/29/1920), No. 39, p.14.
[58]“Dies for Progress,” Chicago Tribune, 2/24/1921, p.2.
[59]Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, Vol. 15, No. 3, 3/19/1921, p.132, p.133 illustration. The piece is also illustrated in The Catalogue of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1/25/1921). It was illustrated again in American Magazine of Art, Vol. 12, April 1921, p.134. See also, Eleanor Jewett, “Exhibition Opens Today,” Chicago Tribune, 1/25/1921, p.5, the work is illustrated with the article. IHAP.
[60]Eleanor Jewett, “Art,” Chicago Tribune, 1/30/1921, part 8, p.9.
[61]Duneland, oil on canvas, 38 7/8 by 50 ½ inches. Gift of Gracia M. F. Barnhart in memory of Elizabeth French Barnhart, 1921.75. In 1994, Duneland was given to the Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso, Indiana, through an active program of the Art Institute of Chicago to deaccession paintings by Chicago artists, which for years had typically been held in storage.
[62]Lena M. McCauley, “Miss McCauley’s Column,” Chicago Evening Post, 2/1/1921, p.8. The work traveled to Pittsburgh for exhibition in the Carnegie Institute annual. Peter Hastings Falk, editor, Record of the Carnegie Institute’s International Exhibition, 1896-1996, (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1998), p.100.
[63]The Eighth Exhibition: Oil Paintings by Contemporary American Artists, (Washington: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 12/18/1921), No. 209.
[64]Seventeenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings By American Artists, (St. Louis: City Art Museum, 9/15/1922), No. 34.
[65]Catalogue of the 117th Annual Exhibition, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fines Arts, 2/5/1922), p.20.
[66]Ralph Clarkson, “Chicago Painters, Past and Present,” Art and Archaeology, Vol. XII, Numbers 3-4, September-October 1921, p.143.
[67]Op. cit., Gary Post-Tribune, 12/12/1929, p.13.
[68]Ethel M. Durfee, “Open Meeting For February,” The Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 93, February 1920, p.2. Prairie Club Archives.
[69]Postcard, Pamphlet File AIC. [69]“Art in Painting and Song Pleases Audience,” The Delavan Republican, 5/12/1921, p.1. Prairie Club Year Book, 1923. Prairie Club Archives. See the listing for September 19, p.15. Marvin Cone, ‘Art and Painting in Music’ By Mr. and Mrs. Frank V. Dudley Last Evening at the Art Gallery,” The Cedar Rapids Republican, 4/30/1925, p.2.
[70]By this time, Clarence had established his own photography business at 6232 Kenwood Avenue. Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920—Population, Enumeration District No. 416, Sheet No. 6., Line No. 90. See Reel 315, 1920 Census, Chicago Public Library. Clarence would later move his business to 6123 Dorchester Avenue. The Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 185, April 1929, p.18. Prairie Club Archives.
[71] Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920—Population, Enumeration District No. 416, Sheet No. 6., Line No. 90. See Reel 315, 1920 Census, Chicago Public Library.
[72]Op. cit., Gary Post-Tribune, 12/12/1929, p.13.
[73]Paul married and raised three children and worked as a senior drafting engineer at the Atomic Energy Commission’s Hanford Site in Richland, Washington. On May 2, 1924 Frank V. Dudley signed a will witnessed by three neighbors bequeathing his estate to his wife Maida including full power as executrix. City of Chicago, Clerk of the Probate Court, filed 3/26/1957.
[74] Op. cit., Harper, A Hoosier Tramp, p.42.
[75] The Prairie Club, Celebration of the Tenth Anniversary of the Dedication of the Beach House in the Dunes, (Tremont, Indiana), October 21, 1923. Prairie Club Archives, Series 3-6-12. See also: “Celebration of the Tenth Anniversary of the Dedication of the Beach House,” The Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 130, November 1923, p.9. Prairie Club Archives. Frank had joined the club and served as a director from 1923-1925.
[76]H. N. Mudge, “Indiana Dunes Reached by Express Train Service,” Illinois Central Railroad and Chicago, Lake Shore & South Bend Railroad, [pamphlet], 5/15/1922, p.3. Prairie Club Archives, Series 8.
[77]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.249.
[78]Prairie Club Yearbook, 1923, p.16. Prairie Club Archives.
[79]T. W. Allinson, “Dunes Conservation,” The Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 118, September 1922, p.5. Prairie Club Archives. Frank was a delegate to the National Conference on State Parks at Turkey Run Park in west central Indiana from May 7 to 9, 1923. Prairie Club Yearbook, 1924, p.17. Prairie Club Archives.
[80]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, pp.250-252.
[81]Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.252. For an image of From Mt. Jackson see “Conservatism Ruled Hoosier Salon of 1932,” The Art Digest, Vol. VI, No. 10, 2/15/1932, p.15. By 1932, the park grew to include a little more than three miles of shoreline and 2,182 acres. Frank documented these events by painting From Mount Jackson. Dudley’s Mt. Jackson won the 1926 Thomas Meek Butler prize of $200 at the Hoosier Salon. “Hoosier Salon Prizes,” Chicago Evening Post, 1/26/1932, Art Section, p.8.
[82]“Off The Trail,” The Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 106, May 1921, pp.10-11. Prairie Club Archives. This is in reference to Frank’s two cabins, one older and one newer.
[83]Op. cit., The Prairie Club Bulletin, May 1921, p.11. “Plan Indiana Memorial to Honor Dunes Painter,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, 9/3/1967, Sec. 10, p.3.
[84]Letter to Richard Brauer from Ruby and George Kriviskey, 7/20/1981, Brauer Museum of Art archives.
[85]The crow insignia was important to Frank. Earl Reed found the crow one of the “most psychological of creatures.” “The Fine Arts,” Chicago Herald, 12/10/1914, p.10. In 1916, See also: Earl H. Reed, “The Crows,” The Dune Country, (New York: John Lane Company, 1916), p.55.
[86] Op. cit., Levy, American Art Annual, Vol. 20, 1923, p.126; Vol. 21, 1924, p.140; Vol. 22, 1925, p.147; Vol. 23, 1926, p.91; Vol. 24, 1927, p.93; Vol. 25, 1928, p.98; Vol. 26, 1929, p.101; Vol. 27, 1930, p.104; Vol. 28, 1931, p.113; Vol. 29, 1932, p.121; Vol. 30, 1933, p.105; Vol. 31, 1934, p.132.
[87] Op. cit., Levy, American Art Annual, Vol. 13, 1916, p.97.
[88] Eleanor Jewett, “February Vivid Month in Local Art Galleries,” Chicago Tribune, 2/9/1936, Part 8, p.3.
[89] Op. cit., Levy, American Art Annual, Vol. 23, 1926 p.93. He served as vice-president from 1934-1937. C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Picture Galleries: Elect Leaders,” Chicago Daily News, 6/30/1934, Art Section, p.24. “Heads Painters-Sculptors,” Chicago Daily News, 8/29/1936, Art, Antiques and The Artists section, p.4R. IHAP.
[90]The prize was awarded his Dunes From the Water’s Edge. “Notes on Current Art,” International Studio, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 347, April 1926, pp.90-92. The work was illustrated in illustrated in the Chicago Herald-Examiner, 2/5/1926, in the Art Institute of Chicago scrapbooks, vol. 51, p.22. IHAP
[91]Art Digest, Vol. 5, 3/1/1931, p.11. IHAP. The $300 award was given his Under Clouded Skies. Eleanor Jewett, “Exhibition in Retrospect: Observer Looks Back Over the Sculpture and Paintings of the Chicago Artists’ Show,” Chicago Tribune, 3/1/1931, p.G4. IHAP.
[92]Albert Nelson Marquis, Who’s Who in Chicago and Vicinity, (Chicago: The A. N. Marquis Company, 1936), p.429. In 1910, Harper drafted the original Illinois Workmen’s Compensation Law.
[93]Samuel A. Harper, A Hoosier Tramp, (Chicago: The Prairie Club, 1928), p.42-43.
[94]Op. cit., Harper, A Hoosier Tramp, p.45. The enjoyable evening ended with a moonlight walk along the lakeshore into the dunes.
[95]Op. cit., Perry, Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Winter 1998, p.21.
[96]For details on exhibitions, juries, prizes and history, see Judith Vale Newton and Carol Weiss, A Grand Tradition: The Arts and Artists of the Hoosier Salon, 1925-1990, (Indianapolis: Hoosier Salon Patrons Association, 1993).
[97]“Bulliet’s Artless Comment: Aping the Hustling Hoosiers?” Chicago Daily News, 2/9/1935, Art, Antiques, and the Artists section, p.6.
[98]Op. cit., Newton, A Grand Tradition. These included: Clement Studebaker, Jr. prize, 1926; Beaumont Parks Landscape prize, 1927; Thomas Meek Butler Memorial Landscape Prize four times in 1928, and 1930 for his From Hanover Campus, illustrated in The Chicago Evening Post Magazine of the Art World, 2/4/1930, p.4., and 1932 for his From Mount Jackson, mentioned in “Hoosier Salon Prizes,” Chicago Evening Post, 1/26/1932, Art Section, p.8., and 1941; Indiana Society Purchase Prize, 1931; Tri Kappa Sorority of Indiana, Purchase Prize, 1937, and the Daughters of Indiana of Chicago Purchase Prize 1938, for his Where Dunes and Waters Meet, which was then donated to the Oak Park, IL public school system, where it remained until May 2000, when it was deaccessioned to benefit a school scholarship fund; Edward Rector Memorial Indiana Landscape by Native or Resident Prize, 1939. All information courtesy of IHAP.
[99]The Chicago Galleries Association: Prospectus for the Second 3-year Period, (Chicago: Chicago Galleries Association, 1929). IHAP. See also: Catalogue of the Sixth Semi-Annual Exhibition by the Artist Members of the Chicago Galleries Association, (Chicago: Chicago Galleries Association, November, 1928). IHAP.
[100]Lena M. McCauley, “Chicago Galleries Round Out 3 Years,” in Magazine of the Art World, Chicago Evening Post, 11/6/1928, p.9.
[101]The reader should contact the Illinois Historical Art Project for history on the group’s exhibitions, and multiple citations to Dudley’s paintings from various Chicago Galleries Association shows that were illustrated in the press, as well as his many one-man exhibitions there. The Gallery acted as his dealer and was a regular source of sales for the artist.
[102]Chicago Galleries Association, checklists of Frank V. Dudley paintings, Pamphlet File, AIC. Exhibition years are: 1927, 1928-29, 1931, 1934, 1936, 1938, 1940, 1942, 1944, 1946, 1948, 1950, 1952, 1954, 1956.
[103]Eleanor Jewett, “London Artists Show Paintings of Fire Blitz,” Chicago Tribune, 3/8/1942, Part 7, p.5. Eleanor Jewett, “Annual Show of All-Illinois Opens May 15,” Chicago Tribune, 4/19/1936, Part 8, p.6. See also: Eleanor Jewett, “Dudley Art Exhibition is Popular,” Chicago Tribune, 3/28/1954, Part 7, p.7, and, Eleanor Jewett, “March Has Flurry of Art Shows,” Chicago Tribune, 3/4/1956, Part 7, p.4.
[104]Eleanor Jewett, “Frank Dudley’s Dune Paintings Are Masterful,” Chicago Tribune, 3/17/1950, Part 2, p.11.
[105]Op. cit., Doeserich, Sherburne, and Wey, Outdoors With the Prairie Club, 1941, p.98.
[106]Op. cit., Oliver, The Poster, June 1926, p.15.
[107]Maude I. G. Oliver, “Chicago,” The Studio, An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, Vol. 92, July 1926, p.70. In 1931, he presented the painting Waverly Beach to Mr. Hjorth, the Custodian for the new Indiana Dunes State Park at Tremont, Indiana. “Dedication of the Dunes Memorial Fountain by The Prairie Club, Monday, May 30th, 1932, pamphlet, Prairie Club Archives, 3-6-2a, Thomas Library, Chesterton, Indiana. See also: Op. cit., Doeserich, Sherburne, and Wey, Outdoors With the Prairie Club, 1941, p.101. Waverly Beach was Frank’s acknowledgement of the birth of the new park that he had long supported, his life as a painter not nearly full spent.
CHAPTER 3
In December 1927, Frank’s mother Flora suffered a light stroke of paralysis. She suffered another stroke on the following May 12 and died at age 85 on May 23, 1928 and was buried next to her husband in Spring Grove Cemetery.[1]
In 1932, the Prairie Club’s tenure on the land ended. To celebrate their long history with the dunes, club members erected a “Dunes Memorial Fountain” designed by Jens Jensen at the trail entrance to the Beach House.[2] The club then agreed to pay an annual rent for the Beach House, now the property of the State of Indiana. While some of the 103 club members who had cottages relocated them nearby, outside the boundaries of the state park, 20 cottagers made similar rental agreements with the State.[3] The state reached an unusual agreement with Frank, accepting an annual license fee payment, for Cottage 108, “one large original oil painting by the Licensee suitably framed and selected by the State Park Director and the Licensee.”[4]
Life in the Dunes had been good for Frank and Maida, and for Frank’s brother Clarence as well. Still active on committees and in the social life of the Prairie Club, Clarence would sometimes place a small advertisement in The Prairie Club Bulletin for his photo shop in Chicago. Club members knew him as “Dud,” a quiet man with an unobtrusive manner.[5] Always scouting for new territory, his skills as an organizer made the annual overnight Gypsy walks popular. The second Gypsy Walk from Otis to La Porte, Indiana took place on the weekend of September 17, 1932. All gathered around the campfire Saturday night on the Wozniak farm to hear “Dud” tell of local geological history. Frank spoke of his meeting with the Wozniak family and their hospitality as hosts to the campers. That night, a hardy few slept beside the fire and others in the fragrant recently mowed hay.
As Chicago was making ready for its second world’s fair in forty years, Frank was commissioned to design and build a working model of a moving dune, for the Century of Progress International Exposition, held in 1933-1934.[6] As part of an exhibit in the Geology section of the Hall of Science, the model included a fan demonstrating how wind moved sand. He also exhibited four paintings with dune formation as their subject: The Conquest, Vanquished, The Beachhouse Blow, and Sunlight and Shadow. In the Horticultural Building, he exhibited two more paintings as part of a dune land scene arranged by the Gary Yard and Garden Club. To the left of the scene hung Butterfly Weed, and to the right, Spiderwort and Puccoon.[7] But no Dudley painting was included in the Century of Progress Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago.[8]
At the bottom of the economic depression in 1933, Frank’s works filled a separate gallery at the annual Hoosier Salon, with thirty-nine landscapes of the Indiana Dunes. Opening night attracted the largest crowd ever of nearly eight hundred guests.[9] He sold eight paintings, with a ninth held in reserve for the bank situation to stabilize.[10] So popular were his paintings that Marshall Field & Company asked to keep his work past the February 11 closing until March 1.[11]
In 1935, Frank visited his friend Jens Jensen, shortly after Jensen made his permanent move from Chicago to Ellison Bay (Door County), Wisconsin. Jensen’s wife had died a year earlier, and he had wanted to return to “The Clearing,” his school of horticulture, forestry, and landscape design at the northern tip of the peninsula. Frank commemorated his visit by painting two canvases, which he later included in a 1936 Chicago Galleries Association: From The Clearing, and Door County Ellison Bay, Wisconsin.[12] Jensen had once considered establishing his school in the Indiana Dunes.[13]
As the battle between the radicals and conservatives continued during the 1930s, Frank tried to bring the two camps together. He proposed a two-jury system that would attempt to perpetuate balance by allowing new blood in each succeeding year. Clarence J. Bulliet, the Chicago Daily News art critic who often supported radical modernist artists, thought the Dudley proposal had merit.[14] In the years following, Bulliet attempted kindness with phrases like “flashes of unwonted strength,”[15] and “accurate and sympathetic.”[16] But as a supporter of Chicago modernists, Bulliet offered other positive criticism sometimes begrudgingly: “Dudley’s painting hand is as accurate as his camera eye. I’ll not deny him even a touch of poetry---a very minor touch.”[17]
In June 1937, Clarence Dudley visited the bluff region of the Mississippi River near Galena, Illinois, where he took some stereoscopic pictures. After returning to Chicago, following a short illness, he died of a perforated ulcer on July 1, 1937. His camera was purchased by his “old friend” and Prairie Club member, Fred M. Davis, who later developed the partially exposed film and printed five photographs, one which appeared on the cover of the September 1937 Prairie Club Bulletin.[18] Frank, Maida, and her mother attended funeral services on July 4 in Delavan. Interment was in the mausoleum at Spring Grove cemetery.[19] Clarence would have turned 67 years old on September 4.
Frank’s work was included in the first exhibition of the Society for Sanity in Art in 1937. He wrote to founder Josephine Hancock Logan: “It would do your heart good to hear, as we do, the praise of so many real folks in approval of your efforts toward a return of sane art... in the interest of real art.”[20] His fiercest adherent was Tribune critic Eleanor Jewett. Her reviews were always favorable and contained superlatives like “most authentic historian…of the dunes,”[21] and “most beautiful exhibition…”[22] He responded to her review of the 1939 Hoosier Salon with a gift of a small painting and an appreciative letter, mentioning he was depressed at the preponderance modernist paintings that had overtaken the Art Institute.[23] Speaking for Paul Schulze, President of the Municipal Art League, and L. L. Valentine, President of the Chicago Galleries Association, Frank wrote:
“We found that the Museum directors are running true to form. To us it was extremely distressing. ---Probably less than a dozen of our Chicago galleries groups are represented. We left with the decided feeling that ‘the Devil’s in his Hell, all’s wrong with the world.’”[24]
As a new decade dawned in 1940, Frank was seventy-two years old. He had served as an officer in many of Chicago’s art organizations and was active in several groups that concerned themselves with art and beautifying Chicago, especially the Municipal Art League. But he limited his exhibitions to the Hoosier Salon (until 1944 when they moved to Indianapolis), and the Chicago Galleries Association, who offered bi-annual exhibitions of his works throughout the decade.
The Friends of Our Native Landscape offered a sketch of Frank’s life in 1947 as part of its editorial policy to honor those whose awards of merit “too often arrive after the undertaker.” The article said that he gave his “heart and soul” to the fight for the dunes, and how it was difficult to gather first-hand information about his personal life, as his “achievements are submerged with his personality in the oils on his canvas.”[25] He once had stated, “No painting can be greater than the artist who painted it.”[26]
By 1950 he was eighty-two years old, and still painting scenes of the dunes, never varying his technique or subject matter:
“…I put up a stick to mark the spot and study the scene carefully for 15 or 20 minutes… After I have studied the scene I come home and dream about it. By the next day I have it already painted in my mind. I arrive with my outfit about two or three hours early, so I won’t have to hurry with the shadows. I put them in as I remember them. Then as they come, I see them as they are.”[27]
A 1950 Chicago Galleries Association one-man exhibition sold out. Art critic C. J. Bulliet commented that Frank had a following, which was “akin to a cult.”[28] The next year, his long-long friend, Jens Jensen, died at age 91.[29]
After thirty-seven years at 6356 Greenwood Avenue, the Dudleys moved in the summer of 1952.[30] Their new home, a co-operative building, at 6108 Kimbark Avenue, was close to the University of Chicago, in Hyde Park. They decided not to go to the dunes that year because vandals had broken into their cottage, and Frank had difficulty finding help for the hard work necessary to open it for the season.[31] There were occasional visits to the dunes after that, but he spent most of his time in the summer promoting “good-will for both the park and myself.”[32]
Their cottage rent was converted to a cash basis with the State of Indiana, at $125 per year, the same rate paid by the other remaining cottagers.[33]
The Friends of Our Native Landscape Bulletin again honored Frank by picturing the artist on the cover of its Spring 1956 bulletin.[34] At this time, he was a director of the Illinois chapter and served as honorary vice-president.[35] Frank’s commitment to the conservation of the Dunes remained steadfast to the end.[36]
Frank died of pulmonary edema after a three-day illness, on the evening of March 5, 1957. He was surrounded by his wife Maida, son Paul, and Paul’s wife Velma. Funeral services were held in Delavan on March 8.[37] Fellow artist and member of Friends of Our Native Landscape, Jacob Howard Euston (1892-1965), eulogized Frank, writing that, “His passing must be remembered as a beginning rather that as an ending because of the momentum of his long and creative life.”[38]
A lifetime of exhibiting invites a tally. The number of his painting titles listed for the Art Institute’s American annual exhibitions is twenty-six and for the Chicago and Vicinity shows is 107. The Society of Western Artists catalogues list seven titles. The Hoosier Salon total is ninety-one. Chicago Galleries Association titles are approximately 550. In addition, he regularly exhibited with the Palette and Chisel Academy, All-Illinois Society of Fine Arts, Artists’ Guild, Association of Chicago Painters and Sculptures, Chicago Society of Artists, South Side Art Association, and Lieber Galleries in Indianapolis. He exhibited wherever he had opportunity to put the Dunes before the public.
Maida continued to open their studio home in the summers. In 1967, the State of Indiana made plans to use Cottage 108 as a state memorial exhibiting his paintings, but the idea proved unfeasible.[39] Maida, then 85 years old, reminisced about the Dunes that brought fame to her husband and “a strange quiet peace to all our lives. The dunes were irresistible, fascinating to him. They were wild and majestic and fresh. He painted them in all seasons and communicated his emotion in them to others.”[40] The following year, the State of Indiana acquired fifty-three additional paintings through monies drawn from the Governor Branigin Contingency Fund, and from cigarette tax revenue. In 1969, the state organized a memorial exhibit.[41] The seventy-two exhibited paintings are in the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis.
Maida moved west to the state of Washington to be with Frank’s son Paul and his family. Frank’s younger brother George lived to the age of 91 and died in 1969. A week before his death, he was still living next door to the house on Wisconsin Street in Delavan where he, Frank, and Clarence had been raised.[42] Maida died in 1973 and was interred with her husband in the Spring Grove mausoleum in Delavan.
In 1981, the Indiana State Museum included thirty-nine paintings in another exhibition entitled The Rent for Cottage 108.[43] Again, in 1994, the museum exhibited fifty-three paintings in Cottage 108, Revisited: The Paintings of Frank V. Dudley.[44] The exhibition focused on the historical attempts to save the unique and fragile Lake Michigan ecosystem. The exhibition traveled to Muncie, South Bend and, in the summer of 1997, to the Brauer Museum at Valparaiso University, in Porter County, home of the Dunes State Park, now surrounded by the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.[45] In 1994, his 1921 Logan Prize painting, Duneland, a gift from the Art Institute of Chicago, became a part of the Brauer’s eight other of his paintings, including Shadows and Sunlit Silence, a gift from Friends of Our Native Landscape, given in 1960, in memory of their friend. In 2006 and 2017, the Brauer Museum had Dudley exhibitions, both of which yielded publications on the artist.[46]
Richard Brauer of Valparaiso University most aptly summarized Frank’s painting:
“Frank Dudley portrayed duneland beauty mainly through decorative simplifications that convey the freshness and force of the scene’s total impact. In a post-impressionist manner, Dudley sought out clearly recognizable, characterizing views, which he then tightly composed into relatively simplified planes, and painted with varying drawn brush strokes. Some views became favorites to which he returned again and again in all seasons and in many kinds of light, almost as though his real subjects were moments of light and shadow, dancing brush strokes, and surprising colors. Somewhat idealized beauty, not the sentimentally picturesque, or the awesomely sublime was his tone.”[47]
[1]She had been a member of the First Baptist Church of Delavan since 1865, two years after her marriage to James Dudley in 1863. “Pioneer Resident is Laid to Rest Here,” The Delavan Republican, 5/31/1928, p.1. See also: “Mrs. Flora Celia Dudley,” The Delavan Enterprise, 5/31/1928, p.1.
[2]Op. cit., “Dedication of the Dunes…,” 5/30/1932, Prairie Club Archives, 3-6-2a. See also: Op. cit., Doeserich, Sherburne, and Wey, Outdoors With the Prairie Club, 1941, p.101.
[3]Op. cit., Doeserich, Sherburne, and Wey, Outdoors With the Prairie Club, 1941, pp.103-105. See also: The Prairie Club Year Book, 1933-34, pp.18-19. Prairie Club Archives.
[4]License Agreement For The Use and Occupancy Of A Cottage At Indiana Dunes State Park, Dudley Materials ISM.
[5] “Clarence G. Dudley,” The Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 268, September 1937, p.8. Prairie Club Archives.
[6]Official Guide Book, World’s Fair 1934, (Chicago: A Century of Progress International Exposition, 1934), pp.31, 107, 186.
[7]“Local Artist Exhibits Paintings at the Fair,” Chesterton Tribune, 9/28/1933, Sec.1, p.1. The exhibit was part of flower paintings provided by the Chicago Galleries Association.
[8]A Century of Progress Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1933 and 1934).
[9]Judith Vale Newton and Carol Weiss, A Grand Tradition: The Arts and Artists of the Hoosier Salon, 1925-1990, (Indianapolis: Hoosier Salon Patrons Association, 1993), p.12.
[10]Op. cit., Newton and Weiss, A Grand Tradition…, 1993, p.12.
[11]At the 1941 Hoosier Salon, Dudley’s painting Under Changing Skies set a record high price of $600 and won the Thomas B. Butler prize of $200. The following year, the Hoosier Salon moved to Indianapolis. The 1944 Hoosier Salon in Indianapolis was the last one for Dudley.
[12]Exhibition of Paintings by Frank V. Dudley, (Chicago: Chicago Galleries Association, 1936), Nos. 20 and 21. Pamphlet File AIC.
[13]Op. cit., Grese, Jens Jensen, Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens, 1992, p.140. In 1938 and again in 1939, Jensen visited Dune Acres, a lake front community just west of the Dunes State Park, to offer a week-long program under the auspices of the Friends of Our Native Landscape. Op. cit., Engel, Sacred Sands…, 1983, p.84, and The Friends of Our Native Landscape, “The School in the Dunes for Nature Study, Second Year, June 25-July 1, 1939, Dune Acres, Indiana,” Pamphlet. Prairie Club Archives. Frank gave a lecture on painting technique. Grace Davis, “Mr. Frank Dudley’s Technique, Lecture—School of the Dunes—1939.” Prairie Club Archives.
[14]C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries,” Chicago Daily News, 2/24/1934, p.24. See also: The Art Digest, Vol. VIII, No. 13, 4/1/1934, p.13.
[15]C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries,” Chicago Daily News, 3/21/1936, p.4R.
[16]C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries,” Chicago Daily News, 3/19/1938, p.25.
[17]C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries,” Chicago Daily News, 3/11/1944, p.8.
[18]“The Story of the Front-Page Picture,” Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 268, September 1937, p.16. Prairie Club Archives. The image was titled Palisade Park on the Mississippi.
[19]See, “Funeral Services for C. G. Dudley Held on Sunday,” The Delavan Republican, 7/8/1937, p.1.
[20]Josephine Hancock Logan, Sanity in Art, (Chicago: A. Kroch, 1937), p.45. IHAP. See www.illinoisart.org for more information on this organization. Dudley’s work had been noticed in 1936 by the founder, Mrs. Frank G. Logan, at his Chicago Galleries Association one-man show, where she awarded his painting Along the Sandy Way, a prize. Eleanor Jewett, “Impromptu Art Awards Made by Mrs. Logan,” Chicago Tribune, 3/19/1936, p.19.
[21]Eleanor Jewett, “Washington’s Portrait is Art Star of Month,” Chicago Tribune, 2/25/1940, Part 8, p.4.
[22]Eleanor Jewett, “Pleasing Work in Exhibit by Chicago Artists,” Chicago Tribune, 3/15/1942, Part 7, p.5.
[23]Letter to Eleanor Jewett from Frank V. Dudley, 2/12/1939. Eleanor Jewett Papers, Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago. See also: Eleanor Jewett, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Tribune, 2/12/1939, Part 8, p.4.
[24]Letter to Eleanor Jewett from Frank V. Dudley, 2/12/1939, Eleanor Jewett Papers, Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago.
[25]“Frank V. Dudley,” Friends of Our Native Landscape, Vol. 4, No. 14, Autumn 1947, p.5.
[26]Op. cit., Cone, The Cedar Rapids Republican, 4/30/1925, p.2.
[27]Carl Lewis, “Painter of the Dunes,” The Indianapolis Star, Magazine Section, 9/18/1949, p.6.
[28]C. J. Bulliet, “Art in Chicago,” Art Digest, Vol. 24, 5/1/1950, p.14. Eleanor Jewett, “Frank Dudley’s Dune Paintings Are Masterful,” Chicago Tribune, 3/17/1950, p.A11, and Jewett, “F. V. Dudley’s Dune Paintings ‘Must’ Exhibit,” 3/28/1950, part 7, p.2.
[29]“Jens Jensen Dies; Landscape Expert,” New York Times, 10/2/1951, p.27.
[30]Letter to K. R. Cougill, Director of the Indiana Department of Conservation, from Frank V. Dudley, 12/19/1952, Dudley Materials ISM.
[31]Op. cit., Letter to K. R. Cougill, 12/19/1952.
[32]Op. cit., Letter to K. R. Cougill, 12/19/1952.
[33]Letter to Frank V. Dudley from Robert E. Starrett, 12/21/1951. See also: Letter to K. R. Cougill from Frank V. Dudley, 12/19/1952, Dudley Materials ISM.
[34]“Artist of the Dunes,” Friends of Our Native Landscape, Vol. 14, No. 48, Spring 1956, p.1.
[35]Anna G. McDonald, “Report of Annual Meeting,” Friends of Our Native Landscape, Vol. 14, No. 48, Spring 1956, p.15.
[36]He joined the Advisory Board of the newly formed Save the Dunes Council in 1954 just as it began to battle encroachment of heavy industry that he first warned against in 1922. Frank V. Dudley, “The Dunes From an Artist’s Point of View,” The Prairie Club Bulletin, No. 113, February 1922, p.6. Prairie Club Archives.
[37]“Funeral Rites Held in Delavan Friday For Frank V. Dudley,” Delavan Enterprise, 3/13/1957, p.2. He was interred next to his brother Clarence, in the mausoleum, at Spring Grove Cemetery.
[38]J. Howard Euston, “Frank V. Dudley, November 14, 1868—March 5, 1957,” 3/10/1957. p.1, Pamphlet File AIC.
[39]Marion Garmel, “Dunes Were Dudley’s Lifelong Love Affair,” Indianapolis Star, 3/14/1981, Art Section, p.6.
[40]“Plan Indiana Memorial to Honor Dunes Painter,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, 9/3/1967, Sec.10, p.3.
[41]Op. cit., Garmel, Indianapolis Star, 3/14/1981, p.6.
[42]“George Dudley, Senior Citizen, Dies in Delavan,” Delavan Enterprise, 8/21/1969, p.2-A.
[43]The Rent for Cottage 108, (Indianapolis: Indiana State Museum, 3/15/1981).
[44]Cottage 108 Revisited: The Paintings of Frank V. Dudley, (Indianapolis: Indiana State Museum, 2/25/1994).
[45]Cottage 108 Revisited: The Indiana Dunes Paintings of Frank V. Dudley, (Valparaiso: Brauer Museum of Art, 6/1/1997).
[46]The Indiana Dunes Revealed: The Art of Frank V. Dudley, (Valparaiso, IN: Brauer Museum of Art, 2006). The Indiana Dunes Revisited: Frank V. Dudley and the 1917 Dunes Pageant, (Valparaiso, IN: Brauer Museum of Art, 2017).
[47]Richard Brauer, Frank V. Dudley, Seer of the Dunes, 140 slides and sound cassette produced for the 5th Annual Duneland Folk Festival, Westchester Public Library, 1981.