Frederick Melville DuMond was a little-known figure and landscape painter at the turn of the century. Sometimes confused with his more famous brother, Frank Vincent DuMond (1865-1951), Frederick DuMond studied architectural and machine drawing at the Mechanics Institute, Rochester, from 1885 to 1888 and worked as a surveyor. He later traveled to Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian and may have also studied with Fernand Cormon (1854-1924). He spent two decades in France as an expatriate, exhibiting annually at the Paris Salon from 1889 to 1908, obtaining an honorable mention in 1893 for a scene from the life of Christopher Columbus and a third-class medal in 1899 for The Theater of Nero (both unlocated). His work produced during the 1890s was on historical and religious themes. Art historian Sadakichi Hartmann discussed his taste for brutal animal scenes and categorized him as the only American adherent of the genre féroce, comparing his scenes of animals battling, such as To the Tigers (location unknown), to the work of Evariste Luminais (1822-1896) and Cormon. In search of the exotic, DuMond visited India in 1900. By 1905 he had written Mes Chasses en Afrique and Les Giraffers du Lac Rodolph. In the early 1900s he exhibited portraits.
When he returned to the United States in 1909 he settled in the Southwest and began specializing in desert scenes. In 1908 he was commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad to paint a landscape of the Grand Canyon. In 1913 he homesteaded in the Mojave Desert and also established a residence in Monrovia, California. During these years he occasionally taught and exhibited in Los Angeles. As a specialist in landscapes of the American desert he became noted for his high-keyed hues.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Artists’ Year Book, ed. A. N. Hosking (Chicago: Art League Publishing Association, 1905), pp. 55-56 § Sadakichi Hartmann, A History of American Art (rev. ed., 1901; reprint, New York, Tudor, 1934), pt. 2: 192-93 § Obituary, Art News 25 (June 4, 1927): 9 § Moure with Smith 1975, p. 74, biographical note inaccurately attributes some of his brother’s activities to him, with bibliography.
