Bentz, John Fitzhenry (1858-1950)
Born in Dublin, OH, Bentz grew up in Columbus and eventually moved to New York. As a teenager, he worked in his uncle’s photograph gallery and his talents were such that he was encouraged to attend art school—first at the Columbus Art School, then later at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Students League in New York. He studied with Herman F. Deigendesch, Kenyon Cox, William Merritt Chase, and Thomas Pollock Anshutz. Bentz was a sought-after portrait painter, especially in miniatures on ivory, whose clients included many wealthy families: the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, and the Morgans. Later Bentz was a well-regarded restorer of paintings, including those of Rembrandt, Goya, and Benjamin West. At New York City Hall in 1946 he restored 25 paintings that had been in storage during World War II, including John Trumbull’s portrait of George Washington (New York Daily News 20 Jan. 1946: 102). Between 1914 and 1930 he was a portrait photographer in New York and Leonia, NJ. Bentz worked at the National Academy of Design and, according to a pupil named Alice Dibble, at the Brooklyn Museum. There is a tantalizing reference to Bentz having painted murals, “putting in one building alone six paintings each fifteen by twenty-five feet in size” (Hackensack, NJ Record 10 Sept. 1926: 6). 1 more image at FAP.
Works in the New Deal Collection at GVCA by John Fitzhenry Bentz:
