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1866 - 1957
The making: Homer Gordon Davisson was born in Blountsville, in Henry County, Indiana, in 1866, found landscape painting at DePauw, and left before graduation to do what ambitious American painters of his generation did: the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Students League in New York, the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, and years of painting in Europe. He came home to Indiana around 1910 with an impressionist's equipment complete, and he made the choice that defines this section's first company. He made Fort Wayne his home.
The tenure: From 1911 to 1947 Davisson was the drawing and painting instructor of the Fort Wayne Art School, and by the school catalog of 1931-32 he was more than that: "Dean, and Head of the Department of Drawing and Painting." Thirty-six years is longer than most art schools keep a building. He lived at 331 W. Pontiac Street, kept a second home and studio for twenty-five years at Somerset on the Mississinewa River, where Pearson's Mill was a favorite subject, and spent summers in the Brown County colony at Nashville, whose art gallery association counted him a charter member. His pastoral Indiana landscapes were exhibited at the Hoosier Salon and with the Indiana Artists Club, and were nationally known in his lifetime.
The shelf: The Fort Wayne Museum of Art holds over forty of his paintings, drawings, and prints, the largest single argument this record can make for what a resident artist is worth to the city that houses him: the work stayed because the man stayed. He died in Fort Wayne in 1957, at 90, with the nickname the state had given him, the "Dean of Indiana Artists," and with the honest footnote the museum itself prints, that the acclaim of the original Hoosier Group founders never quite reached him. The deanship was the local verdict, and it has held.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, Katy Thompson, "Treasures from the Vault: Homer Gordon Davisson" (18 April 2022) (born Blountsville 1866; instructor 1911-1947; his training; the museum's forty-plus holdings; 331 W. Pontiac Street; the "Dean of Indiana Artists").
- Allen County Genealogical Society, INGenWeb people page, Homer G. Davisson (Henry County birth; DePauw; the return of about 1910; the Somerset studio's twenty-five years; charter member of the Brown County Art Gallery Association; died Fort Wayne 1957).
- The Fort Wayne Art School and Museum catalog, 1931-1932 (Davisson as Dean and head of Drawing and Painting).