Frank Duveneck (1848-1919), painter, was born Frank Decker in Covington, Kentucky, the son of Bernard Decker, a cobbler, and Katherine Siemers; they were both German immigrants. Bernard Decker died of cholera in 1849 before Frank was a year old, and his seventeen-year-old widow married Joseph Duveneck, a grocer from Cincinnati, Ohio, and also a German immigrant, within a few months. Frank did not discover until he was an adult that Joseph Duveneck was not his biological father.
By the age of fifteen Frank had begun the study of art under the tutelage of a local painter, Johann Schmitt and had been apprenticed to a German firm of church decorators In 1870 he enrolled in Munich's Bavarian Royal Academy. There he won prizes and acclaim for his painting and was drawn into the circle of German Realist painter Wilhelm Leibl. His Whistling Boy (1871, Cincinnati Museum of Art) is characteristic of the broadly brushed, dark-toned works that dominated his painting style into the mid-1880s.
A charismatic teacher, Duveneck in early 1878 began instructing a group of young American art students who had come to Munich to acquire European art training. Known as the "Duveneck Boys," the students were drawn to Duveneck's bravura and compelling teaching methods.
In 1879 Elizabeth Boott, an artist and an expatriate from Boston, encouraged Duveneck to relocate his "school" to Italy. For the next two years he divided his time between Florence and Venice. In 1886 Duveneck married Elizabeth Boott; they had one son. His wife died suddenly of pneumonia in Paris in the spring of 1888; Duveneck was inconsolable. After returning from Italy to America, he gave some attention to sculpture, and modelled a fine monument to his wife, now in the English cemetery in Florence. He lived in Covington until his death in 1919 and taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, His last large-scale production, completed in 1910, was a series of murals for the new Catholic cathedral in Covington, Kentucky.
His work can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Richmond Art Museum and the Kenton County Library in Covington, Ky.
Duveneck is buried at Mother of God Cemetery, Madison Avenue and 26th Street, Covington, Kenton County. The memorial is by artist Clement Barnhorn. Rendered in pink granite, the crypt stands above-ground, flanked at each of its four corners by a bronze angel with outstretched wings. Each Memorial Day since 1923, members of the Cincinnati Art Club meet at the artist's grave for a brief service to remember him and all of their deceased members.
Duveneck statue in Covington KY
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Duveneck
www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa572.htm
www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=7199468
www.ulib.iupui.edu/kade/springer/Ch2/ch2_p4.html
www.bellamorte.net/MOG_Covington_KY.html 
