Frank Knox Rehn

Frank Knox Rehn
American
(1848-1914)

Harbor at Sunset, oil on canvas, signed lower right 15.5" x 27.5" (image), 23" x 35" (with frame)

One of America’s most successful marine painters at the end of the nineteenth century, Frank Knox Rehn was born in Philadelphia in 1848 and took his early training at the Pennsylvania Academy. Unlike most aspiring artists at the time, Rehn eschewed study in Europe and determined to remain thoroughly American in style and subject. Though he began as a portraitist, he turned to marine subjects, possibly at the suggestion of fellow artist Russell Smith. Rehn moved his studio to New York City in 1881, but he summered in Magnolia Massachusetts, where he worked on occasion with Impressionist painters Childe Hassam, John Twachtmann, and William Merritt Chase. Though he is often considered an early American Impressionist, Rehn’s paintings exhibit, for the most part, an obvious debt to the indigenous traditions of American Luminism and American Tonalism. Rehn exhibited extensively in his lifetime, winning a First Prize at the St. Louis Exhibition in 1881 and a Bronze Medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. The painter was elected an Associate of the National Academy in 1898 and a full Academician in 1909. He died in Massachusetts in 1914.

Rehn’s work is in the collections of the Corcoran, the National Academy, the Memorial Art Gallery (Rochester), the Pennsylvania Academy, the Cleveland Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Phillips Collection, and the Santa Barbara Museum, among others.

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