Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Frank-Myers Boggs was born in Springfield, Ohio on December 6, 1855. He began his career at seventeen when he took his first job as a wood engraver at Harper’s. After he turned twenty-one, he went to Paris to study scene painting. Finding no one in Paris to instruct him in his newly chosen profession, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts where he studied painting under Jean-Léon Gérôme.

When Boggs returned to America after two years abroad, he encountered a somewhat hostile atmosphere. Older members of the National Academy of Design were unwilling to accept the advanced styles embraced by many young American artists returning from studies in Europe. Consequently, many of these young artists, including Boggs, returned to Europe to pursue their careers
In 1880 Boggs began to exhibit at the Paris Salon: while his paintings were well received it was two years before he truly attracted the attention of critics. ‘Place de la Bastille,’ 1882, was the turning point. To the French, this painting seemed to capture the subtle atmospheric quality of their capital city on an overcast day – a totally intangible yet stirring effect. So strong were reactions to the painting that, although it was the work of an artist only twenty-seven years old and a foreigner, the government bought it for the Luxembourg Museum in Paris.

While centering his career in Europe, Boggs continued to seek recognition at home. In the early 1880s, he sent paintings to Boston, Pennsylvania, New York and Chicago. In 1881 he received a bronze medal in Boston for A Fishing Boat (Dieppe) and in 1884 a cash prize from the American Art Gallery in New York for A Rough Day, Harbor of Honfleur.

Boggs’s love of France can be witnessed through his atmospheric paintings of its streets, ports, and monuments. His paintings and watercolors placed the viewer on the banks of the Seine on a windy, stormy rain soaked day or on a cloudy spring day at the Marche de Puse. He also regularly focussed on small villages just out side of Paris and often used Notre-Dame as a backdrop, as viewed looking up the Seine from quai de Bercy or down the Seine from Pont Royal. Boggs’s spontaneous paintings lead the viewer on a journey through Paris, down the grand boulevards and past the tour Eiffel. Boggs exposed his romance with Paris and France through the eyes of an artist having an affair.

He was a master of cloudy skies in landscape paintings, but was more strongly attracted to the soft light of misty mornings and rainy afternoons than the brilliant sunlight of his Impressionist peers. With lush and broad brush strokes, Boggs created rich and spacious paintings, orchestrating a subtle and restrained palette of grays, deep and dusty blues, and earthy tans. Contemporary American critics tended to view Boggs as an Impressionist, but although his brush became loose and free and his palette lightened as he matured, he never completely adopted Impressionistic methods.

Having lived the last thirty years of his life in Paris, Boggs became a French citizen in 1923. Three years later, preparations were underway to award him the Legion of Honor, but sadly he died the day before the award was made public.

Eglise en Normandie

Oil on canvas

92.5 x 74.0 cm

£ 15,000.00 GBP

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