By Francis Chapin
Located in Chicago, IL
A dynamic, colorful 1930s painting of a boxing match in Mexico by famed Chicago Modern artist Francis Chapin. Painted during one of the artist's early trips to Mexico, an exceptional painting showing Chapin's steadfast interest in sporting scenes, particularly boxing matches. Image size: 12 x 28 inches. Framed size: 15 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches. Estate stamped on reverse. Provenance: Estate of the artist.
Francis Chapin, affectionately called the “Dean of Chicago Painters” by his colleagues, was one of the city’s most popular and celebrated painters in his day. Born at the dawn of the 20th Century in Bristolville, Ohio, Chapin graduated from Washington and Jefferson College near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before enrolling at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922. He would set down deep roots at the Art Institute of Chicago, exhibiting there over 31 times between 1926 and 1951. In 1927 Chapin won the prestigious Bryan Lathrop Fellowship from the Art Institute – a prize that funded the artist’s yearlong study trip to Europe. Upon his return to the United States, Chapin decided to remain in Chicago, noting the freedom Chicago artists have in developing independently of the pressure to conform to pre-existing molds (as was experienced by artists in New York, for example). Chapin became a popular instructor at the Art Institute, teaching there from 1929 to 1947 and at the Art Institute’s summer art school in Saugatuck, Michigan (now called Oxbow) between 1934 – 1938 (he was the director of the school from 1941-1945). Chapin’s contemporaries among Chicago’s artists included such luminaries as Ivan Le Lorraine Albright...
Category
1930s American Modern Christian Duriaud Art
