August R. Franzen

Born in Sweden in 1863, August Reinhold Franzen, A.N.A., portrait painter, a pupil of Dagnan-Bouveret, came to the United States long enough ago to be employed as an artist in the making of the panorama “The Battle of Gettysburg,” which thrilled old and young at the southwest corner of Fourth Avenue and Twentieth Street, when the Century club-house was near that once proud business center, Union Square. Visits to France kept him in touch with his artistic fatherland, and enabled him to add a Continental ingredient to the flavor of the Century, which he frequented regularly. Examples of Franzen’s portraiture are in various American museums; and Yale Centurions are familiar with his vigorous portrait at New Haven of the Kent Professor of Constitutional Law—in his ample gown as a Doctor of Laws—Centurion William Howard Taft.

Geoffrey Parsons
1938 Century Memorials