Dunn Class, 1936-1941

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Harvey Dunn, student of the great American illustrator, Howard Pyle, became one of the most influential teachers for illustrators in the early to mid century.  The list of his students is a Who's Who from the Golden Age of American Illustration: Dean Cornwell, Harold Von Schmidt, Saul Tepper, Mead Schaeffer, Steven R. Kidd, and Tom Lovell to name but a few. Andres wanted to study with Dunn from the beginning, but Dunn said he was not ready.  After studying with with Charles S. Chapman, Frank Riley and George Bridgman, Andres was finally admitted to Harvey Dunn's class at the Grand Central School of Art, where he remained for four years. Dunn had a profound influence on Andres and became for him a father figure.  Andres said Dunn's goal as a teacher was the same as that of his own teacher, Howard Pyle, namely "to quicken our souls to render the majesty of simple things."  Andres' memoir of Dunn was published in Walt Reed's Harvey Dunn: Illustrator and Painter of the Pioneer West. For more information on the Dunn Class, refer to the memoir and notes on other pages of this site.

Harvey Dunn, like many art teachers, reworked his students' paintings to demonstrate how to unify and strengthen their pictorial ideas. This resulted in some canvases that are by both Dunn and Andres.  Although most of Dunn's students would paint over these hybrids, (or "bastards" as one Dunn student called them) Andres lived with these paintings into his old age, explaining: "I sure as hell was not going to keep working on a painting after Dunn made it look so great."  They remained a precious reminder of the times the two men spent together.

Each reworking was a lesson: in Romeo and Juliet, Dunn told Andres, "even the candles should be weeping."  The Portrait of a Woman began as a rather fussy painting, prompting Dunn to completely rework it with a palette knife to demonstrate how tonality could trump detail.