Gari Melchers

Gari Melchers was a prominent American painter and muralist of German descent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His painting style was characterized by impressionism, colorism and naturalism. He gained popularity first in the Netherlands and Germany with landscapes and depictions of country life. Melchers later turned to garden paintings and portraits. He established studios in the Netherlands, Virginia, and New York City over the course of his career.

Melchers studied in Düsseldorf at the Academy of Arts and at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1903 he was married to Corinne Mackall (1880-1953), a Baltimore painter. In 1906 Melchers became fine arts advisor to the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Savannah, for which he acquired more than 70 works of art. In 1909 he was appointed Professor of Art at the Grand Ducal Saxony School of Art in Weimar, Germany, but in 1915 he returned to New York. His father Julius Theodore Melchers (1829-1908) was a German-born American sculptor and art teacher.

Gari Melchers was appointed Officer of the Legion of Honor and Officer of the Prussian Order of the Red Eagle. In 1932 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Fencing Master, sometimes simply called The Fencer, was exhibited in 1932 hors concours. There are two versions of this motif plus preliminary studies in oil. They belonged to a small number of life-size representations of men in their professional roles. However, they were intended to be genre paintings rather than portraits. The composition of the painting was more important than the identity of the model, here the French painter Ernest Noir (1864-1931). At the Olympic exhibition, the version exhibited was probably with the fencer looking straight at the viewer. It is kept in the Detroit Institute of Art, from where it was already lent at that time. Melchers painted the 206.4 x 100.3 cm size oil painting already about 1895.