 Frank Taylor Bowers is primarily known as Franck Taylor Bowers
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Binghamton, New York, Franck Bowers spent most of his career as an illustrator but the last years of his life, he devoted much time to oil painting and watercolors. His subjects included landscapes, especially trees, figures, genre, still lifes and botanical drawings. He usually signed his paintings F. Taylor. He was a founder and strong promoter of the Binghamton Society of Artists and a teacher at The Binghamton Art School. Early in his career participated in the Binghamton Sketch Club.
His parents lived on the Main Street of Binghamton and had two sons, Franck and Clement. The father, LaMont Bowers, was an associate of John D. Rockefeller and a successful entrepreneurial businessman who was President of Cleveland Steel Company, manager of Besemer Steamship Company and owner of a large farming operation. He had a creative mind, and among his inventions were the design of tankers sturdy enough to carry iron ore and the design and manufacture of an anchor that could handle that amount of weight on a ship.
Because of the strong business orientation in the family, young Franck Bowers was discouraged by his father from pursuing his creative art talents, but he was not dissuaded. However, making money was necessary, and in 1892, the year after he graduated from high school, he started a calling-card printing business in the home of his parents. In 1894, he advertised as an "artistic photographer. Animals, children and architectural subjects finely photographed"...(4). He also worked for his father in a family roofing business.
In 1898, he attended the Chase School of Art in New York and studied with its founder, William Merritt Chase. His roommate was Charles Shepard Chapman from New Jersey, and they remained close friends from that time. Two years later, he received scholarship to the New York School of Art on a scholarship and won its Saltus Prize for "brilliant work". That same year he took a trip to Duluth, Minnesota, which resulted in many shipboard drawings.
In 1904, he married Frances Nichol from Washington DC, and the couple settled in Binghamton where he earned a living with his illustration. Five years later, they sailed to Europe for a year. Bowers attended several schools for short periods including The Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, The Academie Colorossi, The Academie Vitti and The Academie Julian.
Returning to the United States, the couple had their only child in 1907, a daughter named Frances. Bowers became a major influence in the cultural climate of Binghamton and gave lectures on art, taught drawing classes for The Binghamton Society of Fine Arts, and wrote art reviews for the local newspaper.
He did some landscape painting but, likely needing money, from 1908 to 1928, did primarily book and magazine illustrations, including for "Century". He also was involved in the family businesses of anchor manufacturing and farm managing.
In the late 1920s, Bowers began to experiment with oil paint. Instead of mixing colors on a palette before application, he "dragged one color partially over another" (5) to achieve effects that were quite original for that time. He usually began by covering his canvases with a mahogany tone, which then showed through after the other paint applications. In his later oil paintings, he used both brush and palette knife and placed the paint with a brush and then flattened it with a knife.
A point of pride for Bowers was the acceptance of one of his paintings, "Vanquished" by the National Academy of Design for their Winter Exhibition of 1928.
Two years later, at the height of his fine-art career, Bowers was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia from which he died, a year later, on June 7, 1932. The last year of his life, he completed a series of watercolors for a book, "Rhododendrons and Azaleas" written by his brother, Dr. Clement Gray Bowers, a highly-respected botanist. Because he was in the hospital, Franck Bowers did many of these drawings from specimens that were mailed to him from his brother.
Several months after his death, the Binghamton Museum of Fine Arts held a Memorial exhibition for Franck Bowers. It was an especially fitting venue because the previous year, Bowers had made the motion in a Binghamton Fine Arts Society meeting to establish a permanent museum in Binghamton.
Source:
Robert Vose Jr., "Franck Taylor Bowers 1875-1932", Vose Galleries of Boston
Courtesy, David Mapes, Mapes Auctioneers & Appraisers of New York
Bowers died from a year-long illness at age 57 on June 7, 1932, which meant that he had a short career an a fine-art painter. |
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