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About John F. Stacey
Among the many American students who studied at the Académie Julian in Paris under Boulanger and Lefebvre was John Franklin Stacey. After the Paris experience (1883-85), Stacey went to Kansas City where in late 1888 he became the third director of the Kansas City Art Association and School of Design, which had opened that January. In 1891, John married Anna Lee Day (see previous entry) and by the fall, the couple arrived in Chicago. Like the prolific Anna, John exhibited faithfully at the Art Institute of Chicago (1894-1933). Both were familiar faces at the Tree Studio Building. Mr. Stacey spent some summers painting in New England. He served as juror for the Art Institute’s exhibition in 1898 and taught at the R. T. Crane Manual Training School. In 1903, he was vice-president of the Chicago Society of Artists, which had been organized in 1887. There were actually two separate organizations named the Chicago Society of Artists. One, founded in 1887, appointed Henry Fenton Spread as president and established their headquarters at the Athenaeum Building in 1891. After 1913, the CSA broke into two groups, one conservative and the other modernist-oriented. The Society took a definite modernist turn at that time. The Union League Club, Chicago has three of Stacey’s landscapes.
Stacey served on the jury of the Art Institute and Municipal Art League’s Twelfth Annual Exhibition of "Works by Chicago Artists" in February of 1908. He won medals at the St. Louis Universal Exposition in 1904, at the Buenos Aires Exposition in 1910 and in 1924 he was presented with the Art Institute’s Logan Prize. He moved with his wife to Pasadena, where he died in 1941. Anna outlived him only by two years. The Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles established the John F. and Anna Lee Stacey Scholarship Fund "to help serious students of conservative art (drawing and painting) to study for a year. . . ." |
Paintings by John F. Stacey
| French Landscape |
| oil on canvas: 25 x 30 inches |
| signed: lower right |
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| Boulder Strewn Forest, Marblehead, MA |
| oil on canvas: 36 x 48 inches |
| signed: lower right |
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