Augustus Dunbier

Not long ago I saw a video of the cleaning of a portrait of a young woman by a painter named Augustus Dunbier (1888-1977). Although the portrait was unbelievably dirty--dark brown--when cleaned it was revealed as a wonderful image of a beautiful young woman. The colors were in a high key, clearly in line with the impressionist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Intrigued by the work, I went searching for more of his output.

Self Portrait, ca 1940

Augustus Dunbier was a painter who lived and worked in Omaha, Nebraska during the majority of the 20th century. In truth he may have been the first oil painter in Nebraska who actually made his living from his art. Although not well-known today, he was a widely respected landscape painter and portraitist. He was born in central Nebraska to pioneer German immigrants but as sometimes happened, pioneering didn't work out and the family returned to Germany in 1903 when he was fifteen. Mr. Dunbier was admitted to the Royal Academy of art at Dusseldorf in 1907, where he studied in a rigorous manner similar to other European schools. When World War I broke out, caught between his American birth (and citizenship) or being drafted into the German Army, he returned to the United States in 1914. He entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that winter and studied there until 1916, then returned to Nebraska. Until his death in 1977 Omaha was his home base. During the 1920s he was selected as a non-resident artist into the Salmagundi Club in New York. Besides his active painting career he was a respected teacher in Omaha at the Joslyn Museum as well as elsewhere.

Not long after establishing himself in Nebraska Mr. Dunbier began a lifelong habit of traveling to various locales to paint outdoors. A devoted plein air painter, he painted annually in Taos and often in locations like Alaska, California and Arizona but never moved from Omaha. He is said to have painted nearly all of his landscapes outdoors and taught many to work en plein air. 

Over his six decades of painting he made thousands of paintings, most of which are in private collections. The few collected here were scanned from a biography Augustus W. Dunbier Paint for the Love of Color which was written by his daughter-in-law and is widely available. 

"Sunday Afternoon Taos," 1925

"Spring Flood on the Platte River," 1958

Mr. Dunbier was more than a bit unconventional for Omaha, especially in his youth. He wore spats and a beret around town, was something of a rake as a bachelor, and seemed too freethinking for Omaha. Nonetheless, he was very popular both as a landscapist and portrait artist. Perhaps his most notable work is "Edith," a portrait of a vivacious black woman that he painted in the 1920s and exhibited in Philadelphia. The title is a swipe at Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, whose given name was Edith. President Wilson was a well-known anti-black and anti-semitic racist, which enraged Mr. Dunbier.

"Edith," 1921

Although he seems to have disliked being called an impressionist, his sense of color and use of complements certainly suggests that movement to me. His brushwork, sense of design, brilliant color and insistence on confronting the subject directly are the essence of his work, for me.