Frederic M. Grant
American (1886-1939)
Born in Sibley, Iowa, in 1886, Frederic Milton Grant studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, with additional training at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Grant traveled to Italy in 1907 to study with the American impressionist painter William Merritt Chase, followed by training at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. He then studied under Henry Snell in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and spent a season with Chase in Carmel, California. By 1915, Grant was back in Chicago. That year, he won first prize for a group of paintings in the annual show of the Art Students League of Chicago and debuted in the Art Institute’s exhibitions for American artists and for artists of Chicago. His paintings were influenced by the jewel-like surfaces of the pre-impressionist French painter Adolphe Monticelli, the heightened color of Claude Monet and the geometrically structured compositions of Paul Cézanne. In the early 1920s, Grant returned to Europe, spending most of his time in Italy, and in 1928 he went around the world, sketching in the Pacific Islands, East and Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
Grant taught and exhibited in Chicago. Beginning in 1919 he was a resident of the Tree Studios building on the Near North Side, where he joined a community of artists. Grant won several prizes in the Art Institute’s annual shows. Lauded by the Chicago Tribune’s critic Eleanor Jewett as an artist “undisturbed by the muddy tumult of modernism,” he also won the respect of Clarence J. Bulliet, a champion of modernism, who profiled Grant in 1936 in his series “Artists of Chicago” in the Chicago Daily News.
