John Palmer Wicker    (1860-1931)

A noted instructor trained in the academic tradition, John Palmer Wicker was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on February 23, 1860, the son of William and Charlotte Adelaide (Palmer) Wicker.  Seeking the best in artistic training, Wicker traveled to Paris where he spent the next seven years in study at the Julian Academy where his instructors were William Bouguereau, Tony Robert-Fluery and Fernand Corman.  Returning to the United States, he taught classes for a short time in Saginaw, Michigan before returning to Detroit in 1902.  He soon joined the faculty of the Detroit Art Academy then under the direction of Joseph Gies who had founded the school.   Upon Gies retirement in 1910, Wicker became director of the soon to be renamed Wicker School of Fine Arts.  According to his biography in “Artists in Michigan, 1900-1976,”  “For the next twenty years, Wicker was acknowledged as Detroit’s foremost art teacher.  His school was the first in Detroit to encourage the study of ‘modernist’ art, including the work of Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin, and the Fauves.” 

Wicker exhibited in 1903 and 1904 at the Paris Salon and in 1904 at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.  He also exhibited locally in Detroit and with the Scarab Club, winning a Gold Medal there in 1925.

Sources:
Barrie, Dennis, Artists in Michigan, 1900-1976, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1989;  Gibson, Arthur Hopkin,  Artists of Early Michigan, 1975.

Submitted by Edward Bentley, researcher of Lansing, Michigan