Francis Chapin
(1899-1965)
Francis Chapin was an American artist who worked in both watercolor and oil. He was born in Bristolville, Ohio in 1899, and received his undergraduate degree at Washington and Jefferson College in 1921. A year later he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago where he won the Bryan Lathrop Fellowship. He remained in Chicago where he became known as the “Dean of Chicago Painters.” In 1929 he hosted his first pair of one-man shows. Chapin was an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1929 to 1947. In 1932 he was approached by Grant Wood and accepted a faculty position at the Stone City Art Colony, where he taught lithography for two summers. From 1934 to 1938, he taught at the summer school at the Art Institute of Chicago in Saugatuck, Michigan, and he served as director of the summer school from 1941 to 1945. He was also the Artist-in-Residence at the Old Sculpin Gallery on Marthas Vineyard for many years. He was a member of the National Academy of Design and exhibited there, as well as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. His works are in permanent collections at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Syracuse University, and other museums. Chapin died in 1965. His papers are held in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.