Kenneth Frazier

Kenneth Frazier. [Born] 1867. Artist.

A member of the Century for forty-six years, he pulled his weight in all our boats—as exhibitor in our Gallery, as a denizen of our lower regions, the Pool Room, as a member of the Board of Management, as a member of the Committee on Admissions and of the Committee on Art. Kenneth Frazier exemplified what Harry Baldwin wrote in our Centennial Book that our artists, materially no less than spiritually, have contributed more to the Century than any other group.

He was graduated from Lehigh University and at twenty-two—the year was 1889—began studying painting at Julian’s Academy, in the Paris where he had been born. Many artists who later became his fellow Centurions already were there: Gari Melchers, [nonmember] Frederick MacMonnies, Albert Herter, Paul Bartlett, John W. Alexander, and Sargeant Kendall. Their contemporary gods were Puvis de Chavannes and Monet and Whistler. Their companions were Bonnard and Zuloaga; Pissaro and Forain, Toulouse-Lautrec and Fantin-Latour. As part of their lives were Henry James and Oscar Wilde and Alfonse Daudet. Great days!, whose mark always thereafter was upon all the eager young men who painted at the closely-packed easels and tabourets of Julian’s, the walls thick with palette scrapings, noisy and rowdy—whose gastronomic exaltation quite equalled their aesthetic enthusiasm. They were young, and Paris was Paris; and they talked and walked and argued and admired; and they painted always as well as they could, for their gods also were dwellers there.

Small wonder then that when Kenneth Frazier came back home, a recognized portrait painter—“a gifted American painter” in the Paris verdict—he painted every day of his life and was painting the day he died—absorbed, full of talk, full of knowledge and enthusiasm.

Quiet of manner, gentle of voice, he was also, always, a convivial spirit in the Century.

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen MoeMember profile currently not available; contact Archivist for information on this Centurion
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1949 Memorials