CHARLES SCHREYVOGEL
Monograph Number Three in The Mentor Reading Course
“Famous overnight.” In those words Charles Schreyvogel was hailed in 1900. The sound of the words was good and cheery; but Charles Schreyvogel knew well enough that his fame had been much longer than “overnight” in coming. It was only after many vicissitudes and disheartening struggles that he came into the recognition of his colleagues and the general public. When he did win out, however, his victory was so complete and so enduring that he will remain always one of the most distinguished painters of American frontier life.
Charles Schreyvogel was a New York City boy, born in 1861, and was educated in the public schools. He began life apprenticed to a gold-beater, and later on was apprenticed in turn to a die-sinker and lithographer. His pronounced artistic talents could not be denied, and his private studies finally led up to an opportunity to go to Munich, where at the age of twenty-five he studied for three years under Frank Kirschbach and Carl Marr. On his return to America he went west, and there lived for awhile the life of the plains, the mountains, the Indian agencies, and the army barracks. He was fascinated with the wild life of the frontier, and devoted himself eagerly to the study of horses, Indians, and troopers in full action.
Then began the story of “My Bunkie.” While engaged in painting Schreyvogel was in the habit of making sketches for lithographers as a matter of bread winning. Being sadly in need of funds, he offered one of his paintings to a lithographer who needed a subject for a calendar. The painting was “My Bunkie,” and Schreyvogel set great store by it. The lithographer rejected it because it would not cut down well to the dimensions of his calendar. Then the artist tried it out in one place and another, and failing to get it published, he sought permission to hang it in an East Side restaurant in New York, in the hope that someone might become interested in it and buy it for at least a moderate sum. To his utter discouragement he found a short time after that his picture was not even hung in the restaurant.
He was about to take it home and lay it away when a friend induced him to send it to the exhibition of the National Academy of Design which was then approaching. He did this very reluctantly; for he had no hope in it. On the day after the exhibition Schreyvogel rubbed his eyes and read what seemed to him a fairy tale. His picture “My Bunkie” had not only been accepted, but was hung in the place of honor and received the Thomas B. Clarke prize, the most important one that the National Academy has to bestow. And so Schreyvogel became “famous overnight.”
Schreyvogel made his home at Hoboken, New Jersey, and during the years from 1900 until his death he painted and published many vigorous pictures of Indian and army life on the frontier, all of them fine in action and full of sentiment. He made an arrangement with a photographer near his home by which his paintings were issued in fine platinum prints. In this form, as displayed in art-store windows, they have become familiar to the public all over the world.
Schreyvogel died at his home in Hoboken on January 27, 1912, and in the spring exhibition of that year the National Academy of Design, New York, hung once again his celebrated painting of “My Bunkie” in a place of honor as an affectionate memorial to the artist.
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR. VOL. 3. No. 9. SERIAL No. 85
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.
IN THE NATIONAL ARTS CLUB. NEW YORK CITY
THE CALL OF THE FLUTE. By E. Irving Couse
“THE CALL OF THE FLUTE,” by E. Irving Couse, an idyl of Indian life, is the subject of one of the intaglio-gravure pictures illustrating “Painters of Western Life.”