Interview of Dennis Akin for the Elizabeth V. and George F. Gardner Digital Library Memory Bank. Akin discusses his early life growing up in Iowa as well as his Naval Service in the Korean War, and his career as a professor of Art at Dickinson College. Akin also discusses his views on art and some of the artistic works he has created over the years.
John Braught was born in North Middleton Township in 1867. His father died of a farm accident when he was two years old. He spent his early years working on the family farm consisting of a “brick house and a log barn.” In his late teens or early twenties he started working as an artist.
Son of artist, John D. Braught, Ross was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and graduated from Carlisle High School. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where colleague, Thomas Hart Benton, called Ross “the greatest living American draftsman”.
Francis Cezeron an itinerant portrait artist was born in Virginia in 1747 and died in Kentucky in 1828. He passed through Western Pennsylvania painting portraits in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He appeared in Lancaster in 1806 as a teacher of dance and French. There he also painted profiles and knew painter, Jacob Eicholtz. In 1806 Cezeron placed ads in the Carlisle Herald stating that he was reopening his Schools for Dance and French. Ads appeared again in 1807 for the school.
Clarence I. Lewis, a decorating painter, was born in St. Clair, Pennsylvania. He left high school his sophomore year to apprentice as decorating painter. In 1917 he joined the military as an insignia painter where he would later he paint equipment.
Williams came to Carlisle in 1841 and opened a studio in Beetem's Hotel. The October 27, 1841 edition of the Carlisle Weekly Herald extolled his talent for representing faces on ivory and canvas and urged people to visit his studio. Painting portraits was not Williams' only talent.