FLORIDA PORTRAITURE
1840-1960
By Alfred R. Frankel
From the beginnings of
the Enlightenment artists
ranked the importance the work they produced.First came the high art
of religious or history
painting, then landscape,then genre, and finally
portrait art. An artist
could aspire to be Leonardo or Botticelli
painting universal truths;but to be successful
professionally, he or she had to be
not only highly competent, but able
to earn a living; and long before
photography, that meant doing
the lowly but necessary work of
portraiture.
That judgement about portraiture
changed with the artist’s, and the art
loving public’s, recognition that the
portrait, while specific and personal,
could also be sublime. Rembrandt
and Van Gogh are remembered
for their penetrating self-portraits.
Some of the world’s most famous
paintings, The Mona Lisa, The Girl
with a Pearl Earring, Whistler’s
Mother, are all portraits that only
achieved great fame years after they
were painted.
My interest in Florida art inevitably
led me to find Florida portraiture.
The first was perhaps the best.
One day, about twenty years ago, I
wandered into a West Palm Beach
antiques shop to find Frederick von
Hausen’s, The Lady with Red Hair.
Wow! Here, I thought, was Florida’s
Mona Lisa! Well…. not quite La
Gioconda, but I loved her smile.
Later I learned that von Hausen
had trained in Vienna at the Royal
Academy of Art, and in 1914, just
before the onset of World War I,
left his home for the United States,
and Damariscotta, Maine. A friend
suggested that Palm Beach, with its
wealth and culture, would be a good
winter place to work. He arrived
in 1922 in a Lincoln touring car,
opened a studio on Worth Avenue
and stayed for more than fifty years.
Henry Flagler and architect and
founder of Boca Raton, Addison
Mizner, were among his patrons.
Continued on Page 15
s
of
d.
rt
y
e,
y
st
a
li
s;
ul
F.C. von Hausen, The Lady with Red Hair, Palm
Beach, 1950. Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 inches.
13