Fernand Lungren

Painter and illustrator Fernand Lungren is best known for vibrantly colored images of the scenic wonders of the American Southwest. Lungren was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, but grew up in Toledo, Ohio. In 1876, he abandoned his studies in mining engineering at the University of Michigan and went to Cincinnati. There, painters Alfred Laurens Brennan (1853–1921) and Robert Blum (1857–1903) encouraged Lungren to pursue art training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia under renowned realist painter and teacher Thomas Eakins. Lungren remained at the academy only briefly, however, before moving to New York City with Blum to work as an illustrator. In 1882, Lungren traveled to Paris as a member of New York’s Tile Club, an informal artists’ club. During his two years in France, he painted scenes of leisure life in the metropolis and summered in the nearby village of Grez-sur-Loing, site of an important artists’ colony.

Lungren returned to America in 1884 and settled in Cincinnati to teach and work, exhibiting his oil and watercolor paintings widely. In 1892, under the patronage of the Santa Fe Railroad, he made the first of several annual visits to the Southwest, where he studied the rituals of the native inhabitants as well as the distinctive landscape of the region for paintings and illustrations. The year after his marriage in 1898, Lungren moved to London with his wife. During their three-year stay, Lungren became adept at the use of pastel, a chalk-like colored drawing medium, exhibiting the results with success. He also made a seven-month tour of Egypt, but many of the pastels and sketches that resulted were lost when his baggage was ransacked on the return journey.

The Lungrens arrived back in the United States in 1901. After living in New Jersey for one year, they moved permanently to California, taking up residence in Los Angeles and, beginning in 1906, in Santa Barbara. The artist made repeated tours of the Southwest, collecting material for paintings as well as illustrations for published stories and accounts of travels and Native American life. While continuing to exhibit his work in national venues, Lungren became a fixture of his adopted hometown’s local art scene, helping found and serving as the first president of the Santa Barbara School of the Arts and becoming a charter member of the Santa Barbara Art League. He also painted murals for displays at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, to which he donated his extensive collection of Indian artifacts.

Lungren visited Scotland and England in 1926, a hiatus in the nearly annual excursions he made throughout the American West until just before his death at the age of seventy-four. The artist bequeathed the contents of his studio to the Santa Barbara State Teachers’ College, now the University of California, Santa Barbara. Drawing on the bequest, in 2000 the University Art Museum mounted the first-ever retrospective exhibition of Lungren’s work, a manifestation of new appreciation for many such artists who made careers beyond America’s major east coast art centers.