Frederick Melville DuMond

Frederick Melville DuMond (July 16, 1867 - May 24, 1927) was an American fine-art painter trained in Paris who worked in a range of themes and styles popular in his time and was seen as both traditional and modern.

[2] He and his first wife, Louise Adele Kerr DuMond—also a painter whom he met at the Académie Julian and who died in her twentieth year—had a son, Jesse William DuMond (1892–1976), who went on to have a distinguished career in physics.

[3] Relocating from France to the United States in 1908, DuMond lived and worked in New York City but struggled to make sufficient income from his art.

[4] By 1910 DuMond had relocated to Monrovia, California, later building an artist's home there that he called Le Château des Rêves, recently restored by its present owners.

[7] DuMond is best known for his work of this period, in part due to his own extensive efforts to promote the 1912 show of 34 of his paintings at the American Museum of Natural History.

Frederick Melville DuMond worked in a number of popular art styles, sometimes quoting from others' works—notably, his academy teacher Fernand Corman and American painter William Merritt Chase.

[13] In work for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway and other enterprises, he engaged in tourism promotion, evoking themes of scientific and archeological exploration and celebration of the vanishing west.

The artist proposed to do a panorama of the Grand Canyon and to build a hotel in the Los Angeles hills modeled on ancient Indian ruins[17] In late 1924 and early 1925, seeking new inspiration after his years in the American West, Frederick Melville DuMond decided to relocate to France or Italy.