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Frank Alfred Bicknell

Frank Bicknell remains mysterious. He is frequently described as tall, handsome, and outgoing, but no photograph of him has been located. He lived in Old Lyme for nearly forty years, yet little can be said about his life there, nor, indeed, about his life before that.

Bicknell was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1866, and later moved to Malden, Massachusetts, where he studied art with Albion H. Bicknell, presumably a relative. In 1887 he exhibited at the National Academy of Design. The following year he moved from Malden to New York City, and by 1893 he was in Paris studying at the Academie Julian under Bouguereau and Robert Fleury. His entry in New York's National Academy exhibition that year depicted an old washhouse along the River Eure-Chartres, suggesting a Barbizon approach not unlike that of his first teacher and namesake.

In 1894 his address was the Salmagundi Club in New York, possibly indicating his recent return to this country, and his entry in the National Academy annual that year was An Old Apple-Orchard, France (which he priced at $500, an amount roughly four times that he had put on his earlier paintings).

Curiously, Bicknell's address for the next few years was "The Tower," Madison Square Garden, one of the newest, most celebrated buildings in the city. The Spanish tower that architect Stanford White designed to crown what was essentially an amusement center that included a theater, restaurant, concert hall and roof garden (where White would be killed in 1906, victim of a jealous husband) was the second tallest structure in the city, lit up at night, and topped by a controversial nude Diana sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Stanford White had a sumptuous apartment in "The Tower." Rents there must have been steep. Was Bicknell a wealthy man?

He had money enough to travel to Japan during this period, for paintings he exhibited at the National Academy in the late 1890s are of Japanese subjects, and some artists' dictionaries of the early 1900s note his trip to Japan.

Bicknell came to Old Lyme early, about 1902, and after that seemed to limit his travels to the eastern United States, often Maine or Cape Cod. A bachelor, Bicknell often referred to the other colonists as "the family." Arthur Heming, whose reminiscences of Old Lyme were published posthumously in 1971, described a typical evening in the Griswold House living room after a hard day's work. The group around the fireplace: Metcalf, Woodrow Wilson, Hassam, "Uncle" Howe, DuMond, Robinson, and Rook. "Mrs. Wilson, Mrs. DuMond, Miss Pope and Bicknell were having a rubber of bridge, and Miss Florence was playing the piano while Hoffman was accompanying her upon his flute." Mrs. Wilson bought some of Bicknell's paintings.

Inexplicably, in about 1919, Bicknell began to teach. He became Associate Professor at the College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute of Technology, for six years, and apparently he taught no more after that.

Bicknell was a member of many organizations, among them the Lotos Club, the Salmagundi Club, the Mac Dowell Club, the National Arts Club, the Academy of National Art, the American Art Association of Paris, the Pittsburgh Art Association, and the Chicago Water Color Society. He was elected to associate membership in the National Academy of Design in 1913.

After 1916, Bicknell's home in Old Lyme was one that had belonged to fellow artist Lewis Cohen, a Barbizon painter who bequeathed the place to him. Until failing health forced Bicknell to give it up, he was a prominent member of the Old Lyme group, who specialized in painting the local landscape at different times of day and in different seasons of the year. He died in 1943 in a nursing home in Essex. If there had been relatives, certainly his history would be better remembered. Neither his personality nor his accomplishments as an artist are yet well enough known.

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton

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